As the Masters Tournament begins, remember that hobbits invented golf

The Masters Tournament, the emerald jewel in the crown of professional golf, begins this week. That’s a statement I’m reasonably confident about, but not totally, because I know almost nothing about professional golf. But not completely nothing. I know that in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, it was invented by hobbits. 

Oh, you may be thinking, is the connection between hobbits and golf some kind of oblique reference to one line deep in an appendix, or perhaps a silly inference one could make from movie dialogue? But, no, it’s nothing of the sort. 

Tolkien just… says it in the first chapter of The Hobbit. 

It comes in a moment when Gandalf — who has taken into his head that it would be good for Bilbo (constitutionally) and Gandalf’s dwarven allies (logistically) if the meek hobbit were to embark on the dwarves’ expedition to the Lonely Mountain. He insists to Thorin and co. that though Bilbo may seem fussy and faint-hearted, he is “as fierce as a dragon in a pinch.” 

Tolkien immediately follows this by mentioning that this statement could never apply to any hobbit except by “poetical exaggeration” — not even to the fiercest hobbit who ever lived. That is, to Bilbo’s great-great-grand-uncle Bandobras “Bullroarer” Took, “who was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse,” Tolkien writes. “He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.” 

(A mere hundred yards is not particularly impressive for a golf swing, but then, most modern golfers have almost 2 feet on Bullroarer, and are merely hitting a small ball that isn’t even attached to the tee — not beheading a goblin via blunt force.)

The human sport of golf was named after the death of a goblin named Golfimbul? you may be thinking. That’s a little sillier than I expect from Middle-earth lore. And you’d be right. 

The secret of The Hobbit is that when Tolkien wrote it, it wasn’t set in Middle-earth. To him, his personal epic saga of elven and human dynasties, The Silmarillion, was an entirely separate project intended for an adult audience, while The Hobbit was just a publishable version of the kind of ongoing bedtime stories he habitually invented for his children. It wasn’t until JRRT started writing a sequel to The Hobbit that he realized he could retrofit Bilbo’s story into his Middle-earth project. About halfway through writing what was eventually published as The Fellowship of the Ring, he renamed his Hobbit sequel The Lord of the Rings, and the rest is history. 

There’s some evidence that Tolkien may have intended to remove the “invention of golf” story from The Hobbit in a new revision of the book that he worked on in the 1960s. John D. Rateliff’s The History of the Hobbit describes an incomplete draft that shows Tolkien planned, at least at that time, to change Golfimbul’s name to Gulfimbul, thus eliminating the “golf” pun. But the revision was never finished, and the change was never implemented. 

And so all of The Hobbit’s more irreverent and anachronistic trappings — the Shire’s tea times and dressing gowns and house keys and sets of The Good Silverware — still exist alongside Middle-earth’s wider world of guttering torches, wizard towers, elven cloaks, and kingly speech. And I, for one, think the story is the stronger for it. It’s certainly the stranger for it, but also, dare I say, more human, more handmade, and more personal. Middle-earth isn’t a perfect work, even to its own creator, but who cares about perfection, anyway? 

P.S. I asked Polygon’s resident sports gamer, Samit Sarkar, to tell me some things about the Masters Tournament, and it seems to have a number of parallels to The Lord of the Rings, what with an all-male group of heroes battling to win a precious, worn object that has known many bearers over its long history. Honestly, that all sounds very tiring — maybe someone should just cast it into a fire.