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Tip-toe Through the Toponymy - Page 10

© Michael Martinez

But many of the Shire Hobbits could have come from lands adjacent to Bree, and those families with the most Celtic personal or place-names associated with them may have dwelt in Bree itself, whereas those families with the most Anglo-Saxon personal or place-names associated with them may have dwelt closer to Staddle and the Chetwood (both of which were to the east of Bree, although Archet stood on the edge of the Chetwood itself somewhere to the north of Staddle). Combe, the fourth town of the Bree-land (and bearing a Celtic name) also lay north of Staddle, but west of Archet. One of the Celtic family names was Bolger. The word comes from an ancient Gaelic word for "bag". The Bolger family was, of course, related to the Baggins family. Tolkien said that Budgeford was "the main residence of the Bolger family", and that the name was probably a corruption of "bolge, bolger". Another variation on the root word was "bolg", and one thinks quickly of "Bolg of the North", son of Azog. He, like Golfimbul of Mount Gram, bore a rather non-Orcish name. Fredegar (Fatty) Bolger led a band of outlaws from the Brockenborings (badger holes) in the hills by Scary and Quarry. A "brock" is a badger, and badgers are very social creatures who happen to dig underground tunnels and live in large communities called clans. Some Hobbits took the name "brock" for their family names, as in Brockhouse. Badgers don't figure prominently in the Shire, but "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" has a badger family abduct Tom, and Frodo slips on the One Ring in Bombadil's house as old Tom tells a story about badgers. There seems to be an affinity between Hobbits and badgers, and Tolkien may have been providing his readers with subtle clues about the inspiration for some Hobbit traits. There is another animal associated with the Shire: the frog. Tolkien gave the meaning of "Frogmorton" as "Frog + moor + town", the town of Frog Moor. Frogmorton lay close to the Water, which Tolkien said was the chief river of the Shire. Since a moor is a highland (as well as open land), Frogmorton was presumably an older community with plenty of tunnels. But there must have been enough water in the region in the form of ponds to support a population of frogs. While there is no real basis for concluding that Tolkien consciously followed specific rules of nomenclature for either the Shire or Rohan, rules which drew upon selected elements from non-English sources, his work does suggest there was more than just a loose fictional identification between the real languages he used (modern English, Old English, Gothic, and Norse) and the imaginary languages (rustic Westron, Rohirric, ancient northern Mannish, and Dalish). The shared convention of naming towns in Icelandic or Norwegion fashion, in the form of adjective + geographic feature, strengthens the fictional linguistic bonds Tolkien stipulated. That is, such naming conventions, if found in the Shire and Rohan, probably survived in Dale, Laketown, and northern Mirkwood.

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