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Tip-toe Through the Toponymy - Page 6

© Michael Martinez

Tolkien explained some of the Shire place-names in notes he compiled for translators. He was bothered by the disregard some foreign translators had demonstrated for his carefully thought-out naming conventions. In Letter 190, Tolkien complained that "the [Dutch] Translator has (on internal evidence) glanced at but not used the Appendices. He seems incidentally quite unaware of difficulties he is creating for himself later. The 'Anglo-Saxon' of the Rohirrim is not much like Dutch. In fact he is pulling to bits with very clumsy fingers a web that he has made only a slight attempt to understand...." The German translations have received similar criticism from Tolkien's readers. But though Tolkien did attempt to explain some of the names in the book, he did not explain them all. Nor did he provide much context for the translators to work with. A full explanation would have required a tremendous amount of work. One example of the names Tolkien omitted from his notes is Girdley Island. Andreas Moehn supposes the name ends with the English -ey suffix meaning "isle" in a redundant phrase ("Gird + ey/isle + island"), but that does not have to be the case. The Old English (Anglo-Saxon) root for "Girdley" must be Gyrdan, "girdle". The island is indeed girdled (wrapped on both sides) by the Brandywine river. The name could be a corruption of "girdled island" and therefore not redundant after all. It would be characteristic of the Hobbits to call the thing what it was, although they certainly engaged in some cross-dialectal redundancies (such as "Sackville-Baggins"). "Nobottle" is another curious name. Tolkien didn't explain it (except to translate "bottle" as "dwelling" in Appendix F), but David Salo proposed in 1998 that it may mean "New Dwelling". Of course, if Salo is correct about the meaning of "Nobottle", where is the Oldbottle? And whose bottles were they? Was Nobottle a clan-based community, as Brandy Hall was, or just a community of Hobbit families like Hobbiton? Most likely, "Nobottle" was an exceptional first-generation community name celebrating the Hobbits' colonization of the Shire. Tolkien says that "Hardbottle" was built in the rocky North Farthing, and that it means "dwelling excavated in hard stone". The Bracegirdles (Lobelia Sackville-Baggins' family) lived there. "Bracegirdle" is an interesting name. Tolkien wrote that it had "reference to the hobbit tendency to be fat and so to strain their belts". Still, the first element, "brace-", is derived from French and by itself means "two arms". The name could be translated as, "the two arms of Girdley (island)" or "the embrace of Girdley (island)". Might Tolkien have envisioned the Bracegirdles originally living close to Girdley Island (as a light-hearted joke)?

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