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Tip-toe Through the Toponymy - Page 7

© Michael Martinez

"Tuckborough" also merits attention. It is generally supposed that "Tuck" is a corruption of "Took", but that seems unlikely to me. The Shire map shows us that Tookbank is still well-named. The Tooks controlled all or much of the Green Hill Country, so why would they allow Tuckborough to be corrupted from Tookburgh? The head of the Took family lived at Great Smials, which is used interchangeably with Tuckborough. The Tooks probably would not have mispronounced their own name in one context without altering it in another. On the other hand, there is an old English word, "tukken", which could mean (among other things) "to inclose, to put within". Essentially, Tuckborough was located between several hills. It was a "hidden burgh", and might have been established as a refuge against invasion. Great Smials is identified as only part of Tuckborough by Tolkien. The smials were tunnels built into the hills. Moehn's Web site suggests that "Pincup" may mean "hill top" (A-S "penn", "hill", + "coppe", "top"). The problem with that translation is that the map indicates the town or village was located at the base of the hill. It may be that the community was built inside a basin-like enclosure between two arms of the hill. Hence, "pincup" could be a form of "penn('s) cup", "hill's basin". The place-names of the Marish are quite old, since the East Farthing would have been the first part of the Shire that the Hobbits settled. The village of Rushy may once have been "Rush Isle". "Marish" itself is the Anglo-Saxon form of "marsh". But the Marish and its offshoot, the Buckland, contain a mixture of place-names reflecting different linguistic and historical effects upon the peoples of that region. Most of the Hobbits who lived in the Marish and Buckland were descended from Stoors of Dunland who migrated to the Shire just prior to the Great Plague. The first leader to emerge from the Marish was Bucca. He was elected the first Thain of the Shire. Bucca's descendants, the Oldbucks, presumably took their surname from his name. Their successors, the Brandybucks, inherited the "buck" element as well. But whereas the Brandybucks altered their name to reflect their move across the Brandywine river, it's not clear why the Oldbucks called themselves "Old-". Were there Newbucks somewhere else? Bucca's legacy in Shire nomenclature extended to place-names like Bucklebury, "Bucca's Burgh" (according to David Salo). A burg is a fortified settlement, and the "burg" element implies that -- even nearly 1,000 years after Hobbits had entered Eriador -- they were still using some words from their old Mannish language (from the Vales of Anduin), and that they remembered the craft of building fortified settlements.

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