return

1492 the return of the king
names of flowers or jewels. To their man-children they usually
gave names that had no meaning at all in their daily language;
and some of their women’s names were similar. Of this kind are
Bilbo, Bungo, Polo, Lotho, Tanta, Nina, and so on. There are
many inevitable but accidental resemblances to names we now
have or know: for instance Otho, Odo, Drogo, Dora, Cora, and
the like. These names I have retained, though I have usually
anglicized them by altering their endings, since in Hobbit-names
a was a masculine ending, and o and e were feminine.
In some old families, especially those of Fallohide origin such
as the Tooks and the Bolgers, it was, however, the custom to
give high-sounding first-names. Since most of these seem to
have been drawn from legends of the past, of Men as well as of
Hobbits, and many while now meaningless to Hobbits closely
resembled the names of Men in the Vale of Anduin, or in Dale,
or in the Mark, I have turned them into those old names, largely
of Frankish and Gothic origin, that are still used by us or are
met in our histories. I have thus at any rate preserved the often
comic contrast between the first-names and surnames, of which
the Hobbits themselves were well aware. Names of classical
origin have rarely been used; for the nearest equivalents to Latin
and Greek in Shire-lore were the Elvish tongues, and these the
Hobbits seldom used in nomenclature. Few of them at any time
knew the ‘languages of the kings’, as they called them.
The names of the Bucklanders were different from those of
the rest of the Shire. The folk of the Marish and their offshoot
across the Brandywine were in many ways peculiar, as has been
told. It was from the former language of the southern Stoors, no
doubt, that they inherited many of their very odd names. These
I have usually left unaltered, for if queer now, they were queer
in their own day. They had a style that we should perhaps feel
vaguely to be ‘Celtic’.
Since the survival of traces of the older language of the Stoors
and the Bree-men resembled the survival of Celtic elements in
England, I have sometimes imitated the latter in my translation.
Thus Bree, Combe (Coomb), Archet, and Chetwood are modelled
on relics of British nomenclature, chosen according to
sense: bree ‘hill’ chet ‘wood’. But only one personal name has
been altered in this way. Meriadoc was chosen to fit the fact that