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

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Originally Posted by Alfirin

Pompus names remind me what about "Sackville-Baggins". Isn't there a real Engish surname "Sackville-bagg" (or "Bagge")?

I've never seen that particular surname, but both Sackville and Bagge turn up in The Oxford Names Companion and a compound of the two names isn't unlikely. These days it's becoming more common for married couples to combine their surnames and adopt the new compound, but in Tolkien's day this was mostly done if the bride's maiden name was more prestigious than her husband's surname, so as to emphasise the family's social connections. The Bagginses are a family of high social standing, so it would make sense for the Sackvilles to have engaged in a spot of onomastic one-upmanship. In England, this sort of thing is considered the hallmark of a socially aspirant middle class, so a double-barrelled surname carries distinct overtones of bourgeois pretension (one seldom encounters such surnames among the higher aristocracy and never among the working class). More damning yet from a Tolkienian perspective is that Sackville is a Norman habitation name (from Saquenville in Eure) and the Normans were the annoying social climbers par excellence: the great-grandsons of Vikings, sporting recent French names and styles for their borrowed cachet and speaking a debased form of French.

Tolkien's antagonism towards the Normans in particular and the French language in general is well documented. In 1910 he addressed the King Edward's School debating society in support of the motion 'This house deplores the occurrence of the Norman conquest'; and according to one of his former students, he once commented in a lecture to cadets: "You see... English was a language that could move easily in abstract ideas when French was still a vulgar Norman patois". I can only imagine that he was speaking of Norman French, which was the English court language from 1066 until Edward III began using English in his official documents more than two centuries later.

Regarding Hobbit names, they seem to have been given, as names are in England today, with no regard for their meaning. Clearly Tolkien enjoyed a joke at the expense of his characters in giving them names with appropriate meanings of which their owners were unaware. Apart from Peregrine, an obvious example would be Frodo, which is related to a Norse word meaning 'wise' and the personal name Froði (ð is always anglicised as d).

The anachronism of Brandywine can be explained by Tolkien's translator conceit. His special note on this name at the end of Appendix F to LR suggests that Brandywine is his own attempt to translate a pun in Westron in terms that would be understood by his English-speaking contemporaries. This doesn't cause the same problems for me as his simile in A Long-Expected Party: "The dragon passed like an express train...", since I don't think that anything in the pre-industrial world is comparable to a steam-powered express. Perhaps in Middle-earth itself the only thing like a dragon passing low overhead is the thing itself.

[EDIT] The names of Gerontius Took's "three remarkable daughters" are all Italian. As mentioned earlier, Belladonna means "beautiful woman", Donnamira means "Remarkable woman" and Mirabella means "Remarkably beautiful". It's interesting that Bilbo's mother is the only one of the three sisters not to have a "remarkable" name.