Belladonna Took

[Estelyn Telcontar]

Actually, "Belladonna" fits in quite well with the Hobbit custom of naming girls after flowers - it's common use in English is this:

1 : an Old World poisonous plant (Atropa belladonna) of the nightshade family having purple or green bell-shaped flowers, glossy black berries, and root and leaves that yield atropine -- called also deadly nightshade
2 : a medicinal extract (as atropine) from the belladonna plant
(Merriam-Webster OnLine)

However, that raises a new question - why on earth would Tolkien name the mother of his hero "deadly nightshade"??

There's another interesting cross-lingual connection of which Tolkien may have been aware as a linguist - the German name for the same plant is "Tollkirsche". That begins with the same word as his originally German ancestors' name, "Tollkühn". ("Toll" originally means "mad" or "wild", "Tollkühn" means "daredevil, reckless, foolhardy".) I wonder if JRRT was playing with that reference?