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Tip-toe Through the Toponymy

© Michael Martinez

A current rage on the Internet seems to be for everyone to find out what their "hobbit name" is. I guess that's like a Love-o-meter, where you type in two people's names and see if they are compatible. Forget staring into each other's eyes, long walks on the beach, and chasing dogs through the local park. Love (and Hobbitdom) lies just a click away from your fingertips. One of the reasons why Tolkien's character names stand out is that they aren't simply a collection of medieval-sounding names, such as many fantasy authors populate their worlds with. Tolkien's names don't just mean something in some particular language. They mean something in a particular context, a context he provided, and which sometimes existed as part of a greater framework. In Letter 205, Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher, "I like history, and am moved by it, but its finest moments for me are those in which it throws light on words and names!" Further on, he confessed a bit of frustration by writing, "Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real." Tolkien spoke of Elvish, but let us speak of Hobbitish. Tolkien had very little to say about actual Hobbitish. As invented languages go, he seems to have spent relatively little time on that one. After all, he devoted much time to representing Hobbitish with a colloquial English dialect largely of his own imagining. People from certain regions of England recognize the dialect. A few can even tell you which area certain expressions come from. But there is a larger picture that is too seldom considered. The English language in The Lord of the Rings is carefully orchestrated. "I paid great attention," he wrote to Terence Tiller in 1956, "to such linguistic differentiation as was possible: in diction, idiom, and so on...." In fact, the differentiation is easily picked out. The Hobbits, for example, often say "goblin" when other characters say "Orc". And one can hardly imagine Samwise Gamgee whipping out a potato and crying, "Hamfast of Greenwich! I am Samwise, son of Hamfast Gamgee and am called Sam, Stout Hobbit, Gardener, the Heir of Holman Greenhand of Hobbiton. Here is tonight's supper and tomorrow's trail bread! Will you eat with me or starve? Choose swiftly!" Picking the right words is as important for the critical Tolkien reader as it was for Tolkien himself. In 1965, Dick Plotz of the Tolkien Society of America wrote to Tolkien, describing the organization to the author. As part of his lengthy reply, Tolkien noted:

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