Kentuckian Hobbits

[axordil]

Mith--
Ah, but who introduced JRRT to pipes? If it turns out to be the guy from KY, a permanent mental association may have been born.

[Parmamaite]

I found this in a Tobacco Timeline on tobacco.org:

During Charles' reign (1660-1685), the growing of tobacco in England, except for small lots in physic gardens, is forbidden so as to preserve the taxes coming in from Virginian imports..

1911: Tobacco -growing is allowed in England for the first time in more than 250 years.


As for Bilbo, I think a more plausible source of the name would be:
bil·bo2 n. Archai. pl. bil·boes A sword, especially one having a well-tempered blade. (from American Heritage Dictionary)

Either that or it's just a random coincidence.


It's interesting that there's a Brandywine River in Delaware, I've never heard about that before. Tolkien probably knew it given his vast knowledge of History.

[MithLuin]

The Battle of the Brandywine:
wikipedia

Important to American history, of course....but I don't know if the Brits care . They did win, though, for what its worth.

Brandywine River:
wikipedia

I knew about that river before I ever read his books, and of course I've been there . The DuPont chemical company started out as a gunpowder company before the War of 1812, and their mill was on the Brandywine.

[Parmamaite]

Lightfoots (is that a hobbit name?)

Yes, albeit rather obscure. In the Bolger family tree that didn't make it into the appedices but is published in HoME 12 we find a Nina Lightfoot married to Theobald Bolger (they're the parents of the Wilibald Bolger who married Bilbo's 2nd cousin Prisca Baggins)

[Old_Tom_Bombadil]

While we’re talking about rivers, Tom Shippey wrote in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century that the real Withywindle is:

…the one that flows into the Thames at Oxford, is the Cherwell...I think he derived the name from Old English *cier-welle, the first element coming from cierran, ‘to turn’: so, ‘the turning stream, the winding stream’, which is what the Cherwell is…Finally, ‘withy’ is simply the old word for ‘willow’, frequent in English place-names, like the Warwickshire Withybrook. The Withywindle is a combination of the Cherwell itself, and words for its two main features, its willows and its slowly twisting course.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

As for Bilbo, I think a more plausible source of the name would be:
bil·bo2 n. Archai. pl. bil·boes A sword, especially one having a well-tempered blade. (from American Heritage Dictionary)

In his wonderful Annotated Hobbit, Douglas Anderson points this out too:

According to Thomas Wright's Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English (1857), a bilbo was "a Spanish sword, so named from Bilbao, where choice swords were made. A swordsman was sometimes termed a bilboman." However, there is no evidence that Tolkien derived the name from this word.

As for the name "Baggins", he points out that:

In The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey notes that baggins probably comes from bagging, a term that the Oxford English Dictionary says is "used in the northern counties of England for food eaten between regular meals; now, especially in Lancaster, an afternoon meal, 'afternoon tea' in substantial form." It is therefore an appropriate name to be found among hobbits, who we are told have dinner twice a day, and for Bilbo, who later in Chapter 1 sits down to his second breakfast. In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien notes that hobbits were fond of "six meals a day (when they could get them)."

Shippey states that "the OED prefers the 'politer' form bogging,but Tolkien knew that people who used words like that were almost certain to drop the terminal -g" (p.66). The word also appears in a phonetically spelled form as baggin in Walter E. Haigh's A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District (1928), to which Tolkien wrote an appreciative foreword. Haigh defines baggin as "a meal, now usually 'tea,' but formerly any meal; a bagging. Provably so called because workers generally carried their meals to work in a bag of some kind."

Huddersfield was probably the most isolated part of the south of Yorkshire through the end of the eighteenth century, and in its dialect there survivied many words that died out elsewhere. Tolkien's foreword shows how Haigh's work sheds light on some obscure words and phrases in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Tolkien came to know Haigh in 1923, when he joined the Yorkshire Dialect Society. Walter Edward Haigh (1856-1930) was a native of the Huddersfield district and, at the time of the publication of his glossary, Emeritus Lecturer in English at the Huddersfield Technical College.

Whew! That was a lot more then I had originally intended to quote. Anyone who does not own Anderson's Annotated Hobbit is missing out on a fantastic resource.

[vison]

I can't quite imagine why it would take a Kentuckian to "teach" Tolkien to smoke tobacco.

People always said they went to Oxford to be "smoked at", that's how they absorbed their education. Smoking pipes was as common as could be, cigarettes were not so common.

[MithLuin]

Yeah, I think the man merely claimed to have introduced him to a particular brand of tobacco. That I can believe....

[axordil]

That's fair, yeah.

[Old_Tom_Bombadil]

Yeah, I think the man merely claimed to have introduced him to a particular brand of tobacco. That I can believe....

Old Toby, Longbottom Leaf, or was it perhaps Southern Star?

[MithLuin]

Kentucky Searches

I just picked out a random sample of the names, all had hits.


Boffin
Brandybuck
Barefoot
Took
Gamgee
Sandyfoot
Bracegirdle
Goodbody
Hornblower
Sackville
Maggot
Bolger
Baggins

BrianIs AtYou

It occured to me that Baggins isn't really a surname - it was a name invented by Tolkien (afaik). So, I was surprised to see that there were 2 actual Bagginses from KY. BUT....they were both named Bilbo So, Brian, either someone was having fun with your source, or someone had their name legally changed to Bilbo Baggins, or something....very strange.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It occured to me that Baggins isn't really a surname - it was a name invented by Tolkien (afaik).

See my long quote from Douglas Anderson's Annotated Hobbit, above.

[MithLuin]

Well, yes, that was what I was refering to....but I mean, are there really people in England named Baggins? The 1901 census seems to have turned up a few, according to Parma...so maybe its just a rare name, not a non-existant one.

[Parmamaite]

Voronwë's explanation of Baggins is quite convincing, but wether Tolkien invented the name of Baggins from Lancastrian dialect or not, it was an actual surname before his time. In the 1901 census we have:

french polisher David Baggins 54 years old and his wife Martha, living in Buckingham county. And (presumeably) their children Lizzie, Ernest and Maud.

And cattleman William J. Baggins with his wife Jane B. of Evenly parish

And waggoner Walther & Emma Baggins of Derbyshire with their son John A. Baggins

And plate layer Henry Baggins of Northampton county.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

It occured to me that Baggins isn't really a surname - it was a name invented by Tolkien (afaik). So, I was surprised to see that there were 2 actual Bagginses from KY. BUT....they were both named Bilbo So, Brian, either someone was having fun with your source, or someone had their name legally changed to Bilbo Baggins, or something....very strange.

That is why I put the result for Baggins last. I assumed that people would look at it and say someone is pulling my leg.

With regard to Voronwë's quote on Baggins, it is also worth noting that Tolkien milked this connection for all it was worth.

Bilbo Baggins lived at Bag End. "Bag End" is an Englished version of cul-de-sac.

In Bilbo's dialogue with Smaug, he says "I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me."

On TORC, laryndil notes (in the Latin LOTR thread: A great work has begun! Or: LotR in Latin):

'bag' didn't appear in my vocab lists, but I'm assuming it's 'pera'. One of the cool things about translations is that they replicate much more than the original meaning. 'Perans' (being the present participle of a verb 'pero') will mean 'bagging' I think. I was just wondering if there was a better word but I'll check my dictionary and get back to you. 'Bilbo Perans' somehow doesn't have the same ring to it.

Gil-estel added:

For a different option to translate bag, have you considered saccus 'bag' or sacculus 'small bag'. These derive from the Greek sákkos. It means i. 'coarse haircloth, sackcloth' and ii. anything made of such cloth and specifically 'sack, bag'.

Pera is from the Greek píra (the vowel should be eta, not iota but I can't do it here). This means 'leathern pouch, wallet'.

So it really depends on whether you mean a 'bag' of cloth or leather.

Earendilyon (who is doing the Latin translation) responded:

Thanx for the support and reactions all!!

Pera is indeed a bag; it can be translated as backpack or knapsack. When I "made" the name Perans, I didn't check whether a verb perare exists, but I did now. It doesn't seem so. A pero, though, is a boot.

Gil-estel returned with:

Just for my own interest I decided to check out pi*ra in modern Greek. It currently means 'bag' or 'wallet'.

I like the way you have used pera as the basis for 'Baggins' and saved saccus for 'Sackville'. Nicely done.

So "Pera" is "a bag". Interestingly, Hobbits in Sindarin are Periannath, which may be a clever side joke on Tolkien's part, naming the whole race of Hobbits in a roundabout way after the surname of the prototypical Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins.

Also, the latin saccus vs. Pera reveals a clever connection between Sackville and Baggins, since a sack is a bag. (And Sack brings us back to my cul-de-sac vs. Bag End comment earlier.)

So the Sackville-Bagginses were the Bagtown-Bagginses, in a manner of speaking.

BrianIs AtYou

[Old_Tom_Bombadil]

So the Sackville-Bagginses were the Bagtown-Bagginses, in a manner of speaking.

Wasn't it Gloin who said of Bilbo, "He looks more like a grocer than a burglar!"? It occurs to me that grocers put your groceries in a sack.

[Dân o Nandor on Anduin]

Here is a reply by David Bratman in a recent exchange on the Mythsoc website:

*****

At 03:51 PM 12/1/2006 -0800, Jason Fisher wrote:

>And BTW, there are rumors that some of the surnames of the sort you
>mentioned above may have come from a Kentucky telephone book or something
>like that.

Mis-memory of a statement that's probably not true in the first place. Guy
Davenport, who wrote a couple articles in the 1970s, was the person who
claimed to have found all the hobbit surnames in a pair of Kentucky
telephone books. (He couldn't have in any Kentucky phone directories I've
checked.) This he offered in support of his thesis that hobbits were
inspired by tales of Kentucky country folk that Tolkien heard from his
college aquaintance, Allen Barnett, a Rhodes scholar from Kentucky.

Who can say what ingredients might have gone into the Cauldron of Story,
but Barnett was far less important in Tolkien's life than Davenport (or
Daniel Grotta, following him) assumed, and as for the suggestion that there
actually is anything specifically Kentuckyesque about hobbits, that was
addressed in the title of my paper that Merlin just cited:

At 01:26 AM 12/2/2006 +0000, not_thou wrote:

>Regarding Hobbit last names, David Bratman presented a very
>entertaining paper at Birmingham in 2005 called "Hobbit Names Aren't
>from Kentucky", noting the last names were generally English but
>sometimes used more for sound than for sense, if I recall correctly.
>Has / will that paper be published?

What I said specifically was that Tolkien sometimes chose names more
because of what meaning they suggested to the ear rather than on the basis
of their actual etymology. For instance, as he observes in the
Nomenclature, Chubb sounds like chubby, though it's actually apparently
derived from the name of a fish.

Some hobbit names exist in America, some don't, but none are particularly
associated with Kentucky. There's more evidence, though scanty enough,
that Tolkien chose some names because of the part of England that they're
associated with, e.g. some of the Hobbiton-area names are Midlands names;
names from farther off are from SE England or sometimes Yorkshire.

If there is a Birmingham Proceedings, this paper should be in it. They
have a copy.

David Bratman

*****

I only lurk on that site, but Bratman's specific mention of Grotta made me perk up, especially with his admission that the truth may be hidden in the "Cauldron of Story". Could he be lurking here?

Nevertheless, I will still argue his point that Grotta (maybe not Davenport) made overreaching assumptions justifiably left out by Carpenter and the Tolkien Estate. The former provided some possible factual, relevant, and interesting information, while the latter unjustifiably left Barnett completely out of the picture, not only by omission, but also by legal deletion! So who has the burden of proof?

If Parmamaite, or whoever it was that wanted to include the 'ladies drawers' unpublished letter, did so - that would help display a little of Barnett's influence (deemed deletable material) on the young Tolkien in 1913-14.

I don't necessarily disagree with Bratman's analysis of names and phonebooks (or others here), but have a problem when an obvious cover-up (that's really what it is) is not even mentioned when one is trying to put forth a serious side of the debate.

[MithLuin]

Yes. Hobbits smoke (because Tolkien and his friends smoked pipes) and hobbits have good English names and live in good English countryside. Nothing (particularly) Kentuckian about any of that. Kentucky is more like Rohan than the Shire, anyway, landscape-wise . The only connection I see is the growing of tobacco, which is common in Kentucky and uncommon in England....but even there, it is grown in a part of the Shire we never visit, so there is still a 'distance' to it.

BUT, Tolkien did know a young man from Kentucky, and was apparently friends with him (knew him well enough to write a letter, anyway). If this man later claimed that Tolkien was interested in the names of people from Kentucky and enquired after that....well, this is likely true! Tolkien was interested in language and how it changed with time and place, and so probably would be curious about what had "happened" to English names over there in Kentucky.

But that doesn't mean he used any of that in his books. It would be difficult to establish a connection unless this prof from Kentucky had an uncle Bilbo or something .

As for "censoring" the letter.... Carpenter mentions that most of the cuts from Letters are for length or privacy, not, well, suitability. This letter is likely the only one that was passed over because it wasn't thought appropriate. (Of course, I haven't read it, so I have no idea how racy it is.) I don't mind them choosing not to include something that may have embarrassed the author years later, but I do agree that it seems odd that the recipient was not even mentioned in the Biography as an acquaintance. After all, the only mention of Tolkien meeting an American in Letters is the young engineer on the train during WWII, and he was very disparaging about the man. It would have been judicious to mention something that mitigates that reaction (even if, in general, JRRT was not overly fond of Americans). You'd think it would be in their interest not to hide this! Unless I'm missing something?

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

(Of course, I haven't read it, so I have no idea how racy it is.)

Here is the text of the "ribald" joke from the Tolkien letter?

A young man wished to buy a birthday gift for a lady friend. After much
meditation and consideration he decided on a pair of gloves as being
appropriate. As his sister had some shopping to do, he accompanied her to a
ladies wearing apparel shop. While he was selecting the gloves, his sister made
a purchase of a pair of drawers for
herself. In delivering the parcels that afternoon, by mistake the drawers were
left at his sweetheart's door with a note as follows:-

Dear Velma,
This little token is to remind you that I haven't forgotten your birthday. I
didn't choose it because I thought you needed them, or because you haven't been
in the habit of wearing them, or because we go out evenings. Had it not been for
my sister, I would have gotten long ones, but she said they are wearing the
short ones- with one button. They are a very delicate color, I know, but the
lady clerk showed me a pair she had worn for three weeks, and they were scarcely
soiled at all. How I wish I could put them on you for the first time! no doubt
many other gentlemen's hands will touch them before I get a chance to see you
again, but I hope you will think of me every time you put them on. I had the
lady clerk try them on and they looked very neat on her. I did not know the
exact size, but I should be capable of judging nearer than anyone else. When you
put them on for the first time, put a little powder in them and they will slip
on easier. When you remove them, blow on them a little as they will naturally be
a little damp from wearing. Hoping that you will accept them in the same spirit
in which they are given, and that you will wear them to the dance Friday night,
I remain,

Lovingly Yours,
John

P.S. Note the number of times I will kiss the back of them in the coming year!

This is available online in numerous places:

e.g.

http://cslewis.drzeus.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3341

A google search on tolkien dear velma gives numerous hits.

BrianIs AtYou

[Parmamaite]