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Riding in Carts With Hobbits - Page 4

© Michael Martinez

In fact, the Bree-folk all have names which fit into popular Celtic motifs (Appledore, Heathertoes, etc.). That is, they are "nature-names". Whether rightly or wrongly, people have -- since the late 18th century -- increasingly associated the Celts and the Druids with nature worship and a sort of anti-city pastoralism. In reality, the Celts were very active city-builders. But we remember them mostly for their hill-forts and their migrations, and for their mysterious Druids. Tolkien's Celtic identification for the Dunlendings and their relatives is established mostly through his place-names for the Bree-land: Bree is a British word for "hill", and Archet, Coombe, and Staddle are all derived from ancient British (Celtic) names. The animosity between the Dunlendings -- driven from their homeland by the Rohirrim -- and the Rohirrim also resonates with the Arthurian tales of Celt versus Saxon. But Tolkien himself suggested the Celtic connection in Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings:

The names of the Bucklanders were different from those of the rest of the Shire. The folk of the Marish and their offshoot across the Brandywine were in many ways peculiar, as has been told. It was from the former language of the southern Stoors, no doubt, that they inherited many of their very odd names. These I have usually left unaltered, for if queer now, they were queer in their own day. They had a style that we should perhaps feel vaguely to be Celtic elements in England. I have sometimes imitated the latter in my translation. Thus Bree, Combe (Coomb), Archet, and Chetwood are modelled on relics of British nomenclature, chosen according to sense: bree hill, chet "wood*. But only one personal name has been altered in this way. Meriadoc was chosen to fit the fact that this character's shortened name. Kali, meant in the Westron 'jolly, gay', though it was actually an abbreviation of the now unmeaning Buckland name Kalimac.

We can speak of four periods of Hobbit migration within the histories established by Tolkien: A) their original migration into the Vales of Anduin, which the "Dwarves and Men" essay in The Peoples of Middle-earth implies took place in the early Third Age; B) their migrations into Eriador, which Appendix B to The Lord of the Rings says occurred in the 11th and 12th centuries of the Third Age; C) their migrations west to Arthedain or eastward, back to the Vales of Anduin; D) their migrations to the Shire.

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