Tolkien and the 'other' N-word ;)

[Angry Hill Troll]

A few years ago, near where I live, there was a rather amusing political flap. Someone, in a speech or interview, used the word "niggard". Apparently one of the people listening, not recognizing the word or knowing its meaning, assumed the speaker had used a different N-word (a racial epithet which I shall not repeat here ). Anyway, this made the local media and became a big flap before someone provided a definition of what the word meant (a miser).

Well, to my point, I had known what the word meant previous to this "incident", having learned it from Tolkien!

'No niggard are you, Éomer,' said Aragorn, 'to give thus to Gondor the fairest thing in your realm.'

ROTK VI, 6

(I do remember doing a bit of a double-take when I first read the book and read that line, then figuring out the meaning from the context, being too lazy to look it up in a dictionary )

Does anyone have any words they learned from Tolkien? It seems actually quite a good and fun way to build up one's vocabulary.