The Hobbit Companion

by David Day

  Banks appears to be a Stoorish name for Hobbits who liked to live on river banks. Other names like Cotton, Cottar, and Cotman may originally have been Stoorish names in origin because they all mean “Cottager;” and the Stoors were the first Hobbits to emerge from their holes and live in houses.

  Three breeds or tribes of Hobbits:

  HARFOOTS~FALLOHIDES~STOORS

  Each race was allied with another people:

  DWARVES~ELVES~MEN

  Linguistically each borrowed from men:

  NORSEMEN~CELTS~ROMANS

  Each breed was allied with an English tribe:

  SAXONS~ANGLES~JUTES

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  (* Old English Mearh evolved into the Modern English Mare. On Middle-earth, Mearh was Tolkien’s source of inspiration for the Mearas, that race of white horses of the Riders of the Mark or the March~meaning Borderland.)

  VI. ANCESTORS & Founding Fathers

  After the founders of the Shire, Marcho and Blanco, the earliest recorded Hobbit was Bucca of the Marish. By general acclaim, Bucca of the Marish was the first Thain of the Shire* and commander of the Hobbitry-at-Arms. The title was hereditary, and for nearly four centuries all subsequent Thains were directly descended from Bucca of the Marish.

  Bucca of the Marish was also the founder of the first great Hobbit family dynasty, the Oldbucks. Indeed, the Oldbucks were the first Hobbits to use surnames or family names at all.

  The name Oldbuck came about simply enough. As Bucca lived into considerable old age, he became affectionately known as Old Buck. In time, the names Old Buck and Thain were so often used interchangeably that Old Buck became as much a title as Thain. In generations to follow, all Bucca’s descendants used the term Oldbuck to honour both him and the ruling Thain of the day.

  THAIN Bucca Old Bucca Old Buck Oldbuck THAIN

  However, Hobbit humour being what it is, a linguistic joke had to be built into this tale of Old Buck’s descendants. It is quite logical that the oldest and most gentrified Hobbit family became known as the Oldbucks. After all, it is common knowledge that established gentry in most societies are inevitably known as Old Money; that is, Old Money meaning Old Dollars meaning Old Bucks.

  OLDBUCKS Old Money Old Dollars Old Bucks OLDBUCKS

  While Bucca of the Marish was the source the name Oldbuck, or Zaragamba (in original Hobbitish), it would eventually evolve into the even more famous family name Brandybuck, or Brandagamba (in original Hobbitish).

  OLDBUCK (translated Hobbitish)

  Zaragamba (original Hobbitish) Zara(old) + Gamba (buck)

  BRANDYBUCK (translated Hobbitish)

  Brandagamba (original Hobbitish) Branda (border) + Gamba (buck)

  How did this happen?

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  (* In early English history, the title and position of Thane was an almost exact parallel to Thain of the Hobbits. Similarly, the Thane was ranked in a class of gentry between ordinary freemen and hereditary nobles.)

  VII. Buckland & BRANDYHALL

  Seven centuries after the Shire’s founding, the Twelfth Thain of the Shire, Gorhendad* Oldbuck, abandoned his title and the Oldbuck folklands of the Marish. He led his people east of the Shire across the Brandywine River (“border river”) to pioneer and settle in a new, fertile land. Gorhendad Oldbuck soon established the new folkland and named it Buckland~ or “Bucca’s land”~after the family’s eponymous ancestor.

  On Buck Hill on the banks of the Brandywine River, Gorhendad Oldbuck had the new family mansion built. This became known as Brandy Hall and Gorhendad was soon known as the Master of Buckland. He was also the founder of a new dynasty; for after the establishment of Buckland, the Oldbuck (or Zaragamba in Hobbitish) family name was changed to Brandybuck (or Brandagamba in Hobbitish).

  BRANDYBUCK FAMILY

  The name of Brandybuck shaped the character of the family to a considerable degree. The Brandybucks were, on the one hand, admired for their leadership qualities, high spirits, and strong wills; on the other hand, they were criticized by (less bold) Hobbits for what was considered their rather wild and reckless nature.

  BRANDY~Strong Spirit; from “firebrand”

  BUCK~Stag as in the leader of a herd of deer; but also Stag as in wild young man, or “young blood”

  There is no doubt of the Buckish nature of the Brandybucks. They are just the sort of high-spirited Hobbits who might order a few drams of brandy during an evening of hobnobbing.

  They were also thought to be reckless because they lived beyond the borders of polite Shire society. They fearlessly crossed the “border-waters” of the Brandywine River and settled in the wild “borderlands” of Buckland.

  BUCKLAND AND BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

  There are etymological connections between Hobbitish Buckland and England’s historic and geographic Buckinghamshire:

  BUCKLAND in the Shire

  BUCKINGHAMSHIRE in England

  Bucca was the early Hobbit founder of Buckland in the Shire; Bucca was the Anglo-Saxon founder of Buckinghamshire.

  BUCCA was an Old Hobbitish name

  meaning stag or ram

  BUCCA was an Old English surname

  meaning stag or ram

  Bucca is a name that appears in various permu-tations in the histories of Britain and the Hobbit lands of the Shire. Bucca it has proved to be an appropriate name for the leader of a tribe, as a stag is the leader of a herd of deer, and a ram is the leader of a flock of sheep.

  The Hobbitish Bucca of the Marish has left his name scattered across the Shire: Buckland, Buck Hill, Brandybuck Hall, Bucklebury, etc. Similarly, there are scores of Old English place names that relate back to the eponymous Anglo-Saxon chieftain, Bucca: Buckingham meaning a river meadow of Bucca’s followers; Buckminster meaning Bucca’s church; Bucknall meaning Bucca’s nook; Bucknill meaning Bucca’s hill; and Buckton meaning Bucca’s farm.

  BUCKLAND AND BOOKLAND

  Curiously, although the historic Buckinghamshire has a similar background to the Hobbitish Buckland, the historic English name Buckland does not have anything to do with any old Anglo-Saxon chieftain named Bucca.

  Boc (Old English) Buck

  (Middle English) Book

  In the real historic and geographic Britain, “Buckland” usually means Bookland; that is, Book-land or “land held by charter” to the church or the royal family. There are over two dozen Bucklands in England (mostly in the south), all of which are lands of the Book. None is concerned with any man named Bucca, nor any Buck meaning stag or ram.

  BUCKLAND BOOKLAND CHARTERLAND

  “Buckland” usually means Bookland; that is Book-land or “land held by charter” from the church or the royal family.

  BUCKLAND AND FANTASYLAND

  However, Buckland and the whole of the Shire were Booklands in that they were occupied by Hobbits through a charter granted to them by the High Kings of the North.

  Also, in another sense, Buckland and the Shire and all of Middle-earth are Booklands, in that they are fictional lands created entirely by J. R. R. Tolkien in his books.

  BUCKLAND BOOKLAND FANTASYLAND

  BRANDY HALL

  The first Master of Buckland, Gorhendad Brandybuck, was also known as Master of the Hall because he was the architect of Brandy Hall, the single most impressive single residence in Buckland.

  This Hobbit mansion had three massive front doors and twenty lesser doors in the many-levelled escarpment gouged out of the ridge of Buck Hill above the Brandywine River. It was the home of more than two hundred members of the Brandybuck family.

  Travellers to the Shire who took the ferry across the Brandywine River at dusk were sometimes startled by the sight of the dark west face of Buck Hill suddenly being transformed into a mass of gold. In fact, this shimmer-ing gold wall above the river was the setting sun reflecting in the hundred round windows of Brandy Hall.

  Although the Master of Buckland lived at Brandy Hall, this was not the exact site of
the principal town of Bucklebury. Brandy Hall was excavated out of the west face of Buck Hill above the river. The shops and houses of Bucklebury were actually on the flank of Buck Hill, just to the east of Brandy Hall. There were other towns in Buckland, such as Newbury, Standelf, and Haysend, but Bucklebury was the largest.

  BRANDYWINE RIVER

  In English the name of the river can be translated as Golden Brown River or Border River or Brandywine River. However, its origin is in the Elvish.

  BARANDUIN RIVER~Elvish baran, meaning golden brown +duin, meaning large. (Simple description of a large golden brown river.)

  BRANDA-NIN~Hobbitish branda, meaning border + nin, meaning water (Hobbit misreading of Elvish changed meaning to border-river or river that marks the border of the Shire.)

  BRALDA-HIM~Hobbitish bralda, meaning heady +him, meaning ale (Hobbit joke: pun on border, which becomes a river of brandy because of its frothy brown colour.)

  Brandy Hall, the residence of the Master of Buckland and the Brandybuck family on Buck Hill on the west bank of the Brandywine River

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  (*Gorhendad: As he was the First of the Brandybucks and First Master of Buckland, the name Gorhendad seems appropriate. It means “great-grandfather” in Welsh (literally “gor-hen-dad” or “over-old-father”). Among Hobbits, it may actually have been a title rather than a proper name, meaning Forefather of the Brandybucks.)

  VIII. TOOKLAND & the Great Smials

  After the migration of the Oldbucks east of the Brandywine River, and the founding of Buckland, a forceful new leader appeared among the Hobbits of the Shire. His name was Isumbras Took. Appropriately, Isumbras is an Old English name meaning Iron Arm (isen~iron, bras~arm). He was soon acclaimed Isumbras I, the Thirteenth Thain of the Shire, and the First Thain of the Took line. With the transfer of the Thainship to the Took family, the Fallohidish Tooks became the most important family in the Shire. For centuries thereafter, the Thainship became synonymous with the head of the Took clan. Hobbits used the terms Thain and Old Took interchangeably.

  Great Smials Tuckborough Tookland Took Tuk Tuck TUCCA

  BUCCA

  Buck Oldbuck Brandybuck

  Buckland Bucklebury Brandy Hall

  ORIGIN OF THE TOOKS

  Tolkien does not give us the name of the founder of Tookland and the progenitor of the Took family. However, if one looks at the genealogy of Bucca as the progenitor of the Oldbucks and Brandybucks, we can do a little linguistic detective work and soon discover the answer.

  Tolkien gives us clues. We are told that the Great Smials of Tuckborough in Tookland were the seat of the Took family and that an earlier version was Tûk. If we compare this to Brandy Hall of Bucklebury in Buckland as the seat of the Brandybuck family, and the earlier name Oldbuck, we can see that there is a parallel development. Just as the founder of the Brandybuck/ Oldbuck family was Buck or Bucca, so the founder of the Took/Tûk family must be Tuck or Tucca.

  Indeed, it seems quite logical that the eponymous progenitors of these dynasties were originally brothers: Bucca and Tucca of the Marish, after whom Buckland and Tookland were named.

  FAMILY OF TOOKS

  The Hobbit name of Tucca/Tûk/ Tuck/Took itself has contributed much to the characteristics of a family notable for its bold Fallohidish nature and larger-than-life personalities. If we look at the descendants of Old Tucca it becomes clear that the characteristics came with the Took name.

  As English surname, Took and Tuck stem from Old Norse names suggestive of Thunder. They are both diminutive forms of the rather ferocious Old Norse Thorkil or Thurkettle. The English word took, as the past tense of take, is also suitably bold and direct. It, too, comes from an Old Norse source: taka meaning to seize, but came to modern English through the Old English tucian, meaning to disturb, afflict.

  TOOK AND TUCK:

  English surnames of Old Norse origin

  ~Diminutive of THORKIL~

  THOR’S HILL or THUNDER HILL,

  that is, the thunder god’s hill

  ~Diminutive of Thurkettle~

  THOR’S KETTLE or THUNDER CAULDRON

  that is, the thunder god’s sacrificial cauldron

  However, Tucca/Tûk/Tuck/Took also has its softer side. The names Took and Tuck have a more homely, Hobbitish nature built into them as well. Just as we discovered that Baggins meant “substantial snack, afternoon tea,” we find a similar meaning for the Took/Tuck family. (They were, after all, related; and the Tooks and Bagginses would often “tuck into a tea” together.) Tuck is defined as “food, eatables; especially cakes and sweets.” Thus we have tucker, which is Australian slang for food in general; and tuck shop, meaning a sweet or cake shop on school premises.

  This meaning of the name Tuck is the probable reasoning behind the name of that famous fat character, known as Friar Tuck, in the legend of Robin Hood. Indeed, with his cheerful manner, rotund shape, and large appetite, Friar Tuck would have made an admirable Tookish Hobbit had he been about half his actual height. Added to every-thing else, both the Friar and the Took Hobbits were noted as crack shots with a bow and arrow.

  GREAT SMIALS OF TUCKBOROUGH

  At the end of the first millennium, after the Shire’s founding, Isengrim II, the Twenty-second Thain, and the Tenth Thain of the Took line, began the Took clan’s excavations beneath the Green Hills of Tookland.

  These excavations, known as the Great Smials, were dug deep into the high and undulating escarpment of the Green Hills. Below the Smials, along the base of the massive tunnel-riddled rampart, is the rest of Tuckborough, the largest settlement in the Shire.

  Isengrim, meaning Fierce Iron (isen~iron, plus grim~fierce) was an appropriate name for the chief architect of the Great Smials of Tuckborough. It is possible that Isengrim II spent too much time hobnobbing with Dwarves, for his imagination appears to have been inflamed by ambitions that were far beyond what was right and proper for a sensible Hobbit.

  Perhaps it was the Took name itself that inspired Isengrim. These Great Smials of Tuckborough might well be described as a Tookish “thunder god’s cauldron” built into the cliff face of a Tookish “thunder god’s hill.”

  The Great Smials are certainly the closest that Hobbits ever came to monumental architecture. They constitute the primary home of the Took clan, and the Tooks are certainly the largest, wealthiest, and most ostentatious Hobbit family in the Shire.

  Great Smials of Tuckborough

  IX. HOBBITS & the Land

  Hobbits are the SPIRITUS MUNDI of England. They are meant by Tolkien to be the Anglo-Saxon earth spirits who are most in touch with the land itself. They literally live in the earth, and in so many ways are meant to define the essential elements of Englishness.

  Hobbits are, after all, the holbytla (hole-builders and hole-dwellers), so it is logical that their first instinct is to work on the land. From their ground- level existence Hobbits have a profound under-standing of plant and animal life. They can grow almost anything on farms and in orchards and gardens under conditions that humans would not even attempt to grapple with.

  It is not surprising, then, that one of the most famous figures in Hobbit history was a horticult-urist. The year SR 1070 is one date in their history that all Hobbits know, for it was in this year that the famous Hobbit farmer, Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom, succeeded in perfecting the cultivation and curing of sweet galenas.

  The galena is a smoking herb akin to the modern nicotiana or tobacco plant, but apparently devoid of the unwholesome and poisonous aspects of modern tobacco. Popularly known as pipeweed, Old Toby Hornblower’s discovery was the beginning of an industry and tradition of which the Hobbits were proud inventors and most dedicated practitioners.

  After Old Buck and Old Took, Old Toby is the most famous ancestral Hobbit in their early history. The name, of course, is a typical Tolkien jest: he is suggesting that our word tobacco originated in the name Old Toby, the Hobbit who originated the practice of smoking.

 
; Old Toby, or Tobold Hornblower

  TOBACCO

  Other aspects of his name also suggest his fame and occupation. Tobold comes from the original name Theobold, meaning Bold Person; or literally it suggests “Too-bold,” a character larger than life. His second name suggests something similar about a vain and famous person, but Hornblower was actually an English occupational name for the foreman of a crew of workers who blew a horn to start and end the workday. Furthermore, there is a logical compression of someone using a hornpipe to blow smoke rings that might suggest a name like Hornblower for the inventor of pipe smoking.

  TOBACCO AND TEA HOBBITS AND BROWNIES

  One very curious thing about Hobbits is that the care Tolkien takes in making them the sprites of Old England (in the sense of being authentically Anglo-Saxon) is often thrown away with anachronisms that are characteristic of Victorian or Edwardian England. Nothing could be more typically nineteenth-and twentieth-century English than tobacco and tea~and nothing could be less Old English. One is from America and the other from India; regions totally unknown to Anglo-Saxons, but both familiar parts of the Victorians’ world.

  Tolkien’s Hobbit culture is a distillation of all that is fundamentally English regardless of era. The anachronisms are intentional and meant to be humorous, but at the same time they show how Hobbits are spiritus mundi of the tamed landscape of England, not the wild original lands of Britain. That is why Tolkien’s Hobbits are derived from the English Hobs and Hobmen, but are linguistically distinct from those older British sprites, the Brownies.

  In many obvious ways Hobbits are modelled on these ancient hill people of Britain. Brownies are diminutive, earth-dwelling, elusive, and usually helpful creatures. However, Brownies are essentially Celtic in spirit, while the Hobbits are absolutely English.