[William Cloud Hicklin]

I think Tolkien the crossword-puzzler was having a lot of fun with "Hilarius and Felix" Part of it was entirely private- I'm sure that as a schoolboy he had realized that by applying th 11-day Julian/Gregorian shift to his birthday, Jan 3, he got his brother's name-day, Jan 14.

More to the point, tho', it was just a setup for a donnish joke. "Ominous names" says Sunny Sam. "Don't like the sound of them." Whereas (as his audience of course knew) Hilarius and Felix literally mean Happy and Lucky.


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I don't know if T was being overtly Catholic so much as just conveying the flavor of the mock-Middle Ages, which were permeated by the Church and by Latin. The feast days were the common folks' effective calendar- they didn't know from January 6, but immediately knew how long 'till Epiphany. The church bells ringing the canonical hours were their daily clock. And of course the use of Latin by the Church was not some 'hegemonic power conspiracy' (ghastly 20th-century concept) so much as the fact that, centuries after the last Caesar, Latin was still 'real' language. The vernacular or vulgar was for those who couldn't handle the Official Language, just as was the case when the legions were around. The Parson is a necessary figure because he's the only character who could read- moreover, in the Middle Ages literacy meant Latin literacy. Traces of this still abounded at Tolkien's Oxford- diplomas and formal orations were still in Latin, and *everybody* there knew it. Until well into the 20th century, you just couldn't claim to be an Educated Person without it.