Linguistic puns, riddles, and jokes in LotR, etc.

[Elianna]

Tolkein had a "working knowledge" of Russian, so it's possible that he meant to do those things.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I happened to be reading through The Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research a few weeks ago, and came across an interesting article that seems pertinent to this discussion. The paper, by the Reverend E. Maule Cole, appears in the fourth volume of the journal, which covers the years 1904-5, and would therefore have been available to Tolkien even in his undergraduate years. [1]

At the time of writing, Rev. Cole had been the vicar of Wetwang in the East Riding of Yorkshire for some forty years, and had often been asked to explain the origins of the name. His conclusions would almost certainly have interested Tolkien, and it could be that the interesting dichotomy between the name and nature of the parish might have inspired him to use it in a more appropriate context in The Lord of the Rings.

In Old English, to quote the great Professor W.W. Skeat, "Wet's wet and Wang's a field, and there you are." But Wetwang in Yorkshire, as Rev. Cole points out, is on a chalk ridge, fifty feet above the bottoms of the dales on either side. It is so dry that in a report on the manor made to Lord Bathurst by his steward in the early eighteenth century, which Rev. Cole quotes in his paper, "Water is here much wanted. There is a pond in ye Town supply'd only by rainwater, wch in dry Summers affords none, and then the Inhabitants are obliged to drive their Cattle three miles for water."

However, as Cole points out, in Old Icelandic there is a compound word 'Vœtt-vangr' or 'Vétt-vangr', from 'vætti' ('witness', 'testimony') or 'va'ttr' (a witness), and the compound is a legal term, basically meaning a place to which one was summoned when accused of an offence; 'vettvang' being the area within a bowshot of the place in all directions. According to Cole, then, the Yorkshire place-name derives from a Norse system of trial by one's peers, which may or may not have been the origin of the English and Scottish systems of trial by jury.

I think that the idea of a place, the name of which can be translated as 'Wet field', but which is actually so dry that the well is useless in hot summers, might have appealed to Tolkien. On the other hand, he may never have read this article and the name of the marshes south of the Emyn Muil may simply be derived from the Old English phrase for a wet field. In either case a certain amount of irony is implied, but I like to think that he had come across the article during the course of his studies in Norse literature and put a reference to it into his story for personal amusement.
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[1] Rev. E. Maule Cole, M.A., F.G.S.: 'On the Place-name Wetwang'. Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research IV (1904-5), 102-6

[littlemanpoet]

Thanks for digging that up, Squatter. What a delightful pair of possibilities! Thanks for the link, too. The top of a hill as you speak of it, seems a likely spot for a jury style council. Vetvang.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I picked up a copy of Mark T. Hooker's collection of essays A Tolkienian Mathomium at Oxonmoot this year, and I've very much enjoyed reading it despite the harsh light it threw on my ignorance. Hooker is a professional linguist and gives an interesting insight into the workings of Tolkien's jokes. I'll give some examples from his essays below by way of a taster.

In 'The Linguistic Landscape of Tolkien's Shire', Hooker examines the place-name Dwaling. Now, as any fule kno, -ing in an English place-name usually indicates the home of people descended from a common ancestor: hence Reading (Readingum = 'Settlement of Réada's people'), Nottingham (Snotengaham = 'Settlement of Snot's People'). Hooker suggests that in Dwaling, the first component of the name (the personal name of the tribe's original founder) is a shortened form of Dwalakoneis, which is just the Gothic form of 'Tolkien'. Hence 'Tolkien's people' or 'ancestral home of Tolkien's people'. Looking at a map of the Shire, Dwaling would be some distance north-north-west of Buckland, which in the real world is south-south-west of Evesham in Worcestershire. Tolkien associated his Suffield ancestors with Evesham, and his brother ran a fruit farm there for many years. One of the significant landmarks of this area is Bredon Hill (Bree-dún = 'Hill-hill'), which contains the same element that gave Bree its name.

Hooker devotes an entire essay to explaining the derivation of Carrock. He reveals this to be an anglicised form of Welsh carreg, which means 'stone', 'rock' or 'escarpment'. One famous carreg in the Black Mountains of Carmarthenshire is Carreg Cennen, which has a castle on it that some legends say was founded by one of King Arthur's knights. Hooker takes these two facts (and various topographical similarities between Beorn's Carrock and the Welsh location) and then throws in a good joke. If, following the usual pattern of such words in Welsh, we make a compound out of the Welsh for 'bear' (arth) and the Welsh for 'man' (gwr), we get arthwr.

The very hills are laughing on Tolkien's maps.