…and hobbits, interestingly enough. These and many more come from a list of names for ghosts, fairies etc collected by a C19 antiquarian. It seems pretty likely that Tolkien would have read the list, being something of an antiquarian himself.
Anyhow, I’m sure our lives would be enriched if we used these words as often as possible. Can we think of anybody who could be described as a chittifaced clabbernapper?
You can read more on Denham Tracts on Wikipedia, and also find a link to complete texts.
A thrummycap, earlier today.
A magnificent list, Mike, you old Jack in the Wads! May the whingies, gringes and wirrikows stay away from your door!
I’ll swear I found a brown-man keeping an overnight watch in my downstairs loo this morning, so, beware, they are still about. Thinking more on it, he was a tad chittifaced too.
Was his name Mr Log?
I think it was the captain’s
This appeared in my twitter timeline a while ago; apologies for the lack of hat-tip, I can’t remember who tweeted it.
Most of the jobs are Three More From Them Later. . .
They really are. Any prog band looking for a name need look no further!
Turnip Shepherd and the Fishbenders have just dropped their new album: Examiner of Underclothing.
And tomorrow night, a session from the Electric Bath Attendants, playing all three tracks from their debut album, Fifty-Two Years an Imbecile.
Beef Twister and the Cow Banger’s infamous debut album ‘Count as Female’ is only available in the most squalid and disreputable corners of the Invisible Net. Don’t go looking for it. No, really – don’t.
Let’s see if imgur wants to play today.
Another from my twitter feed – reasons for incarceration in a Lunatic Asylum.
How long before Kim Jong Un starts using these as insults to Trump?
Communists are brilliant at using random verbs as insults. Hyenas… running dogs… revisionist stoats (alright, that one was from Lenin of the Rovers)
Noticed this on the 29th, Mike but was away and unable to reply till now. The consensus in the world of Tolkien scholarship is that JRR was almost certainly not aware of the Denham Tracts – he was indeed interested in this sort of thing, but their circulation was deeply obscure and limited. Tolkien himself was happy to try to get to the bottom of where the word ‘hobbit’ came from, even writting a letter to a newspaper in the late 30s to state that he himself couldn’t put his finger on it, but denying it had anything to do with rabbits or an earlier book about a Mr Babbit. I’ve read a paper recently that looked into the word as an old North Wales dialect term of measurement for something or other. I can’t recall the details of it, but Tolkien was very enamoured of Welsh as a language (along with Finnish). Who knows, he may have heard the word once in his youth on a holiday in Wales, which is not impossible, and it entered his subconscious.
Happily, and seemingly by utter coincidence and convenience (unless his subconscious had been operating at a much deeper level all along), he was able to create a very suitable false etymology for the word ‘hobbit’ within his imagined universe, when he has someone from the people of Rohan (modelled by Tolkien on the Anglo Saxons, linguistically and in culture, save for the horses) in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ use the compound word ‘holbytla’ – meaning ‘hole builders’. The parts of ‘holbytla’ are pure Old English – a word that COULD have genuinely existed in real-world Old English let alone Rohirric, although the compound itself is not recorded in any surviving Old English text.
Bear in mind that the ‘LOTR’ was written in the 1940s and not published until 1954-55, while ‘The Hobbit’ – introducing these hole-dwelling fellows – was published in the mid 1930s. Tolkien effectively created his own, very elegant solution as to the origin of the word 10+ years after inventing it.
‘Ent’, incidentally, is a genuine (but rare) Old English word – mentioned once or twice in OE texts in relation to ‘Entish ruins’ – supposedly the work of ancient giants, now disappeared (in truth, Roman ruins as seen by Anglo Saxons 200+ years after). Tolkien always stated that the Ents in his Middle Earth creation simply walked into the story of their own volition, without planning. His subconscious, then, creating a whole race from a tantalising single word.
Thanks for that, @colin-h. Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, was a huge and controversial bestseller in the 20s, so it’s quite likely the word was rattling around in his subconscious.
Now we have Fobbit, a word from the Iraq war meaning someone who never leaves the safetly (relative, I presume) of a Forward Operating Base.
Very illuminating comment, Colin.
There is a rich treasury of ancient British words just waiting to be dipped into.
I am currently reading Tom Bullough’s Addlands, a novel about a farming family in Radnordhire on the Welsh borders. He is a poet and takes great delight in his use of ancient words from the region. A wonderful book that will be a real bugger to translate.