Rowling's Goblins = Tolkien's Dwarves?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Estelyn Telcontar

The name Bagshot shows up in both works. In Hobbit/LotR, it's Bagshot Row, Bilbo's home address. In HP, it's the surname of the witch who wrote the school textbook on the history of magic. In real life, it's the name of a village in Surrey, as well as of Bagshot Park on Bagshot Heath, a royal residence. (Thanks, Google and Wikipedia, for the quick infos! Interestingly, the list of occurrences of the name includes the HP character but not Tolkien's road name.)

Both writers play off English place names. From several other threads/posts here on the Downs, we've been shown a letter where Tolkien comments on Miss Honeybourne's name, apparently saying he would add such a nameplace to the map of The Shire. Yet Honeybourne is already a real place name in the UK.

Then of course Rowling gives us the village of Budleigh Babberton, where Dumbledore and Harry find Horace Slughorn, the potions master from Hogwarts, squatting while hiding out after a year on the run from He Who Must Not Be Named. In Devon, on the mouth of the Otter River and across from Torquay, where a very infamous Towers establishment exists or existed, lies the real life Budleigh Salterton, a picturesque town on England's Jurassic Coast. (Yes, it has one!) I wonder if Ms Rowling or anyone else knows of anyone hiding out in the real Budleigh Salterton, who might be quite a bit of a babbler?

I wonder how much more fun it must be to read both authors if one is intimately familiar with the English map and place names? I know of Upper and Lower Slaughter, but neither author to my knowledge has engaged in any wordplay with those villages.