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:
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.
Every word, name, and concept in Shire English (which Tolkien uses to represent Shire Westron, of which he provides only a very small number of words) is associated with a history that is unique to the Shire. You won’t find that history in England no matter how deeply you dig. It never happened, except in Tolkien’s history. We quickly learn that Tolkien created mythologies for his Elvish languages, but too seldom do we observe the mythologies he devised for his English dialects.
A mythology explains things. It attempts to answer questions such as “how did we come to be here?”, “why are trees covered with leaves?”, and “why would anyone want to live in this place?” In Letter 131, Tolkien wrote: “…I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in [the telling of tales]”. In Letter 180, Tolkien observed that “the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and less on its content than people realize”.
But what did he mean by “the … aesthetic of its language”? Was he referring to the way words are formed, or the way they sound, or both? Words, after all, were very important to Tolkien. History worked best for him when it enlightened him about words and names. Which finally brings us to the point. The Shire English we have consists in part of names: Hobbit names, most of which are “borrowed”, and place-names. The place-names are more English than many of the Hobbit names. And it is the place-names which reveal something of the Shire’s past and mythology.
In looking at the map of the Shire, one must conclude there are many stories there, perhaps waiting to be told, perhaps having rushed through Tolkien’s mind as he jotted down names (and in some cases changed them). Tolkien’s place-names for Middle-earth, even the silly-Hobbited Shire, are always meaningful. They convey something of a forgotten past, or a past which began to take shape in Tolkien’s mind though he had no time to document it.
The Anglo-Saxon nomenclature of Rohan has been examined by Professor Tom Shippey in his books The Road to Middle-earth and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Shippey notes that “emnet” is an actual place-name from Norfolk, and it means “steppe” or “plains”. A quick glance at the map of Rohan tells us that both the East Emnet and the West Emnet are large, grassy, steppe lands. Another example Shippey cites is the Anglo-Saxon name for Rohan: the Mark, which is an ancient Germanic word for a borderland.
The Rohirrim had more than two grassy areas, though, and they named their southernmost one the Wolde, which, though derived from the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) word for forest, weald, means “an unforested, rolling plain; a moor”. Moors are (often high) open lands, poorly drained, covered with patches of heath, various evergreen shrubs found in Europe and South Africa.
Whereas Rohan’s place-names are (mostly) given in Anglo-Saxon form (“fords of Isen” is a notable hybridization), Shire nomenclature is given in modern English, although it’s a very specialized form of modern English which Tolkien identifies as English toponymy — the place-names of England itself (or names contrived to sound very much like, and possess meanings very similar to, modern English place-names). The linguistic fiction Tolkien utilizes is that modern English translates the Westron language, the Common Tongue of Middle-earth. Westron was descended from Adunaic, and ancient Northern language. Anglo-Saxon translates true Rohirric, which is related to but not derived directly from Westron. It broke off from Adunaic thousands of years previously. Hence, the modern English toponymy translates the Hobbit Westron toponymy of the “real” Shire.
There are other languages in the book which are related to Westron (and Hobbit Westron), including the language of Dale and Laketown, represented by a few Norse names for Dwarves and Mannish kings, and the language of the Stoors of the Gladden Fields, represented by at least two names: Smeagol and Deagol (and perhaps a few words like “mathom”). Tolkien implies that their language was only a dialect of the same language spoken by the ancestors of the Rohirrim, and he represented that language by Anglo-Saxon (Mercian, or Midland, Anglo-Saxon at that, according to some people more knowledgeable than I in such matters).
The Anglo-Saxon names are not very historical in context. They do not convey tales about themselves. They imply little or nothing about why people settled in those locations. For example, two villages, Upbourn and Underharrow, are mentioned in “The Muster of Rohan”. These place-names only convey geographical significance (“Upbourn” referring to the river Snowbourn, beside which it lay, and “Underharrow”, meaning “under the hill”, “at the foot of Dunharrow” — Tolkien translated “harrow” as “on the hillside” — see below).
Aldburg, found only in Unfinished Tales, is the name of the town or fortress where Eomer lived as Third Marshal of the Mark. It means “old fortress” or “old fortified town”, and we are told that it served as Eorl’s home. Edoras, the city where Theoden lived, was built after Eorl died. Was Aldburg an old outpost of Gondor, or was the name given after Edoras was built, implying that it was the first city established by the Eotheod in their new land? They had had a fortified city in the north, Framsburg, where (apparently) Eorl’s forefathers had ruled their people. So the idea of building a fortified settlement was nothing new to the Eotheod when Eorl led them to Calenardhon.
Something else which is notable but seldom (if ever) noted is that some of the Rohirric place-names, though composed of Anglo-Saxon words, are not simply given in Anglo-Saxon form. They are, for lack of a better word, “Icelandic” in form. Anglo-Saxon was a rich language, but England owes its toponymy to a variety of languages: Latin, Celtic, Danish, Norwegian, Anglo-Saxon, French. Many place-names in Iceland follow a pattern of adjective + geographical name. This style, though found in many languages, seems to me to be acute in Iceland, and it establishes a pattern we can easily identify in Tolkien’s nomenclature.
For that reason, I use the term “Icelandic” to describe an intentional pairing of words which convey a very unique meaning based on geography. For example, “East Falls” (Ostfoss) would be an Icelandic style name (many Norwegian place-names also follow this convention). Hence, “Underharrow” is Icelandic in form. Rohan’s “Westfold” is another example of an Icelandic style name (and Tolkien compared it to Norwegian place-names Ostvold and Vestfold). “Upbourn” is English in style, meaning a riverside town far up (from the river mouth). Upbourn lay between Edoras and Underharrow.
The Scandinavian influence in Tolkien is pervasive. There are many examples in Tolkien’s translation of Anglo-Saxon names, and his descriptions of Rohan, where he uses modern English words derived from Norse words, even though modern English equivalents descended from Anglo-Saxon were readily available: Saruman is “man of skill”, not “man of craft”; a dike instead of a ditch defend’s Helm’s Deep in the Deeping Coombe (and Coombe is a Celtic word, probably intended to represent the Dunlendings’ language); the word “nay” occurs frequently in the dialogues. The book almost exclusively uses modern English pronouns — which we inherited from the Vikings who settled in eastern England. Rohan thus blends several nomenclatures and idioms together skillfully (should that be craftily?), and it serves as a guide to what Tolkien did with the Shire.
But there are also limits to Tolkien’s reliance upon Scandinavian words, phreases, and forms. For example, you will not find anything like “Sven’s Farm” in Tolkien’s stories. That is, Farmer Maggot’s farm is not placed on any map, or referred to as a geographical landmark, such as “three miles out from Maggot Farm, we came upon a Black Rider”. Many Viking place-names do combine personal names with descriptive nouns. Tolkien’s place-names seldom follow that pattern (“Tarlang’s Neck” is a rare example). Understanding the limits of the place-names Tolkien used is key to understanding how he viewed Middle-earth.
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)?
“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.
Tolkien does not say exactly what he had in mind with “Bucca”, but his notes on translation mention that “buck” in Oldbuck refers to “animal … either Old English bucc ‘male deer’ (fallow or roe), or bucca ‘he-goat’.” Bucca’s name is significant not only because it served as the root for a great deal of Shire nomenclature, but also because it is one of the earliest examples of Shire personal names. Marcho and Blancho, the Fallohide brothers who founded the Shire, have been compared by some to Hengist and Horsa, since “Marcho” seems to owe something to Germanic “marh/mearha” (horse). “Blancho” probably owes something to the French word for “white”, since “Whitefoot” and “Whitfurrows” occur in Shire nomenclature. Although “Whitfurrows” (white furrows) may refer to the chalky color of the ground in the region, Old Will Whitfoot might be a descendant of Blancho.
Place-names in the Buckland are mostly self-explanatory: Haysend (end of the High Hay in the south), Brandy Hall, Newbury (New Borough, New Town), and Crickhollow (“small depression in the ground” by a creek, although Salo proposes “low place by the hill”). One name which stands out is “Standelf”. The word “stan” is Anglo-Saxon for “stone”, and we’ve seen “delf” in “Dwarrowdelf” (dwarf delving, accoridng to Tolkien). Andreas Moehn and David Salo both translate the name as “stone quarry”.
The large number of Anglo-Saxon roots might be explained by the close relationship between Westron and Rohirric, but Tolkien wrote that the Stoors did bring many strange words with them. “Hobbit” and “mathom” are two words which, supposedly, go way back to the Vales of Anduin. The Stoors were probably more conservative in their language than the Harfoots and Fallowhides who had long dwelt under the rule of the Dunedain.
Which is not to discount Tolkien’s statement that the Stoors brought some “strange words” from Dunland. It is generally accepted that Dunland would have been the source for names like Kalimac (Meriadoc), but Tolkien tells us very little about the nature of the words which the Stoors brought to the Shire.
Tolkien mentioned in his notes for translators that the Shire was “an organized region with a ‘county-town’ (in the case of the hobbits’ Shire this was Michel Delving).” He added at the end of the entry for “Shire” that he had based the “true” name, Suza, on “the Old Norse and modern Icelandic sysla…; hence it was also said (I 14) that it was so named as ‘a district of well-ordered business’.”
This explains why the Mayor of Michel Delving was also the Mayor of the Shire. Michel Delving must, therefore, be the oldest community in the Shire — or one of the oldest. The West Farthing may therefore have been settled along with the other Farthings. And the Mayoralty could have been established as a civil office under the King’s authority even in the day of Marcho and Blancho.
It is interesting to note the rarity of Viking-style placenames in the Shire. No town names end with “-by”, for example. “Rushey” is an example of a Norse-derived name (“ey”, “oy”, “isle/island”). David Salo proposed “Scary” derives from Norse “Skerig” (a root for Tolkien’s suggested “scar” — “rocky cliff”). But if Norse place-names are rare, the Icelandic method of forming place-names is not. The river name “Shirebourn” follows the Icelandic convention. Overhill, a small town just north of the Hill (where Bag End was located) is a another example. “Bywater” and “Tookbank” are two more examples.
Shire toponymy and personal names are more cosmopolitan than the toponymy and nomenclature of Rohan. There are Frankish, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Latin names scattered across the Shire. The Shire nomenclature represents the Hobbits’ amalgamation of dialects and languages from across the map through a period of at least two thousand years. Some of the idiomatic similarities of the various regions imply the ancient kinship of the dialects and languages to one another. It should have been faily easy for travelers from the Shire to understand people in Dale, Rohan, and Gondor, because although Westron was the Common Tongue for these lands, their native languages were all related to Westron, and undoubtedly each contributed something to Westron.
It might actually be possible to trace an ethnic pattern across the Shire, using place-names and clan-names, and given the fact that the Stoors settled mostly in the Marish. Tolkien divided the Hobbits into three major groups: Harfoots, Fallohides, and Stoors. The Fallohides were absorbed into the other groups, and the Harfoots were more numerous than the Stoors. Still, the Hobbits had been spread across Eriador at one point. The families with the most Celtic names may have been closely associated with either Bree or Dunland prior to colonizing the Shire. The families with Frankish or Anglo-Saxon names may have lived in a different region from the families with Norse or Latin names.
The Bree-land is generally thought of as having only Celtic-style names (Bree, meaning “hill”; Archet, meaning “by the wood” according to David Salo; and Chetwood). “Chetwood” is, in fact, a combination Celtic-English word (and “Chet” means “wood”, according to Tolkien). But Staddle is an English name, which Tolkien said means “‘foundation’, of buildings, sheds, ricks, and so forth”. Hence, the Bree-land represents a mingling of two linguistic traditions, which should not be surprising, given the fact it was a historical crossroads.
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.
But it also becomes apparent that, though Tolkien probably did not draw up lists of Hobbit families and regions of origin, he did seem to envision a mingling of linguistic traditions which he represented with Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Frankish, and Norse words and names. The more Celtic families would have been those which had lived the longest in or near Bree, or in Dunland (both of whose peoples were descended from the Gwathuirim of the Second Age). The families with the most Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Frankish words and names may have been largely descended from Hobbits who had dwelt in eastern Eriador longer than others.
Both the Stoors and the Fallohides entered Eriador about 100 years after the Harfoots. Although the Harfoots were the largest group of Hobbits, since the Fallohides provided many leaders, Fallohide naming conventions may have had an advantage over Harfoot naming conventions. It may therefore be reasonable to conclude that most of the Fallohides stayed in Rhudaur until the first war with Angmar in 1356.
We can also infer that the Hobbits probably were capable of maintaining some sort of armed forces at least until the overthrow of Arnor. If Bucca of the Marish and an early Took leader did establish fortified towns, burghs, the story about the Shire Hobbits sending warriors to help defend Fornost Erain and later to help overthrow Angmar become more credible. In The Peoples of Middle-earth, Tolkien does say that “in their unrecorded past they must have been a primitive, indeed ‘savage’ people” (Cf. “Of Dwarves and Men”). Their savagery would not have been a ferocious savagery, but merely an untutored state — all Edainic men in the Vales of Anduin would have been equally “savage”. Of course, some people might quickly point out that the Shire Hobbits could have reinstuted martial customs in the aftermath of the war with Angmar, for Appendix A in The Lord of the Rings does say that the Shire was overrun, and that the Hobbits fled or went into hiding.
Whatever the case may be, the Shire toponymy raises many interesting questions. The right answers may be more mundane than those we are wont to contrive, but I think Tolkien did indeed see something of the Hobbits’ past, and he used that to guide his choices in making their place-names.
There may have been no intended connection between the Bracegirdles and Girdley Island, but Tolkien was certainly fond of slipping linguistic jokes into the nomenclature every now and then. If for no other reason than that we can see so many things embedded within the names Tolkien used, it is worthwhile to look upon them and ponder, and perhaps to tread lightly in his footsteps across the moors and fens of the Shire, or through the hills and grasslands of Rohan.
This article was originally published on August 28, 2002.
See also:
- What Is the Capital of the Shire?
- What Is the Origin of the Took Family Name?
- Why Does Tolkien Call the Hobbits’ Land the Shire in The Lord of the Rings?
- Are There Frankish Influences on Middle-earth?
