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Tip-toe Through the Toponymy - Page 2

© Michael Martinez

I quite understand the amusement to be got in such a society out of special names for members associated with the story, and of course I see that things are still undecided....I think it would be more appropriate and amusing to give members the title of 'Member for Some-place-in-the-Shire', or in Bree....There are only about 30 suitable place names in the small section of the Shire printed, there are more in my map, and if a proper map of the whole Shire was drawn up there could be quite a large number of places entered. The names already entered, even those that seem unlikely (as Nobottle), are in fact devised according to the style, origins, and mode of formation of English (especially Midland) place-names....(Letter 276)

Elsewhere, Tolkien points out that "...Yet actually in an imaginary country and period, as this one, coherently made, the nomenclature is a more important element than in an 'historical' novel....'The Shire' is based on rural England and not any other country in the world" (Letter 190). Further on, he notes, "The toponymy of The Shire...is a 'parody' of that of rural England, in much the same sense as are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to." But one must ask if that is truly all there is to the Shire toponymy. In Letter 165, Tolkien told the Houghton Mifflin Company that "the invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows...." While Tolkien spoke of the Elvish languages in particular, there were other languages -- or dialects -- which he developed in the course of writing The Lord of the Rings. I speak of the peculiar English dialects he imposed upon his characters, dialects which sound familiar enough to knowledgeable readers, but which are nonetheless unique to Tolkien's world. Tolkien constructed new English dialects which suited his needs. Much like the artificial language Basic English, Tolkien's dialects sound very familiar to the native English (language) reader. Tolkien's dialects employ a subset of modern (and archaic) English vocabulary and idiom. But what makes them unique is the other element Tolkien contrived for them: history. Shire Hobbits don't have a Mathom House just because Tolkien liked the sound of the Anglo-Saxon word "mathom"; they have a Mathom House because it is part of their history. They brought the word out of antiquity and used it in their own way.

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