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Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc
With my very generic knowledge of the history of Britain with many gaps, I always wondered whether "Little Kingdom" referred to something "real" (as in, that there was actually something called that, by whomever). So I take it that there wasn't, but if you wanted to take it as "real", you could identify it with something?
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I mentioned this in my very first post in this thread. The "Little Kingdom" Tolkien refers to is believed to be a real place:
Frithwuld's Surrey, a 7th century sub-kingdom of Mercia.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc
And that is just as we are told that dogs did not have fancy names. Perhaps not by the standards of the Latin-centric "high culture". But I find it interesting that if we say that Garm is a "barbaric" name, then the cow already is much better - her name being Galathea, which points to the classical Greek mythology (and, in another of Tolkien's linguistic inside-jokes, means "milk-white". Of course you'd name a cow after something that has to do with milk. Now the next level question is, was Giles himself actually so educated that he did this on purpose?
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Well, considering Giles could not decipher anything but the most basic "uncial" letters, and had to have the Parson read everything to him, I would suggest "Galathea" was a name he heard somewhere in a story (like the tales of the great dragon slayer Bellomarius he had loved as a child). It's a Tolkien joke, so let's not ascribe any classical Graeco-Roman learning to our stolid farmer.