u/roacsonofcarc

Quite recently, people here have been talking about the building and maintenance of roads and bridges in Middle-earth. Since my grandfather was a highway engineer – he laid out the famous road up Haleakala Crater on the island of Maui in Hawaii – I have mor to say on the subject than would fit comfortably in an existing thread. So I am starting my own.

Bridges: The most famous bridge in Middle-earth, at least after Gandalf broke the one at Khazad-dûm, was rthe Brandywine Bridge, otherwise known as the Bridge of Stonebows. In case you have ever wondered what a stonebow is, the OED has the answer:”An arch of stone. Obsolete except as the name of one of the gates of Lincoln.” So much for that. The word in Old Engish is stanboga. It can also mean a natural stone arch, not one built by humans. As in this passage from Beowulf, describing the entrance to the barrow where Beowulf fought the dragon:

>þonne hnitan féðan/stódan stánbogan, stréam út þonan/recan of beorge· wæs þaére burnan wælm/heaðofýrum hát·

This (lines 2545-47) is the only quote for stanboga in the OED. Compare the description in The Hobbit of the Front Gate of Erebor.:

>They did not dare to follow the river much further towards the Gate; but they went on beyond the end of the southern spur, until lying hidden behind a rock they could look out and see the dark cavernous opening in a great cliff-wall between the arms of the Mountain. Out of it the waters of the Running River sprang; and out of it too there came a steam and a dark smoke

In the pictures that Tolkien drew of this scene, the arach at the entrance can be clearly seen.

Roads and Streets: In The Road to Middle-earth – still for my money the best book about Tolkien though originally published more than 40 years ago – Tom Shippeys showed that the description of the arrival of Gandalf and his companions at Meduseld is closely modeled on Beowulf's coming to Heorot. But he didn't exhaust the subject:. Here's a detail he3 didn't have room for: At Edoras Gandalf et al. “found a broad path, paved with hewn stones.” Tolkien surely included this because in the poem, when Beowulf;s men marched from the sea to the hall, Straét wæs stánfáh· stíg wísode/gumum ætgædere. Meaning “The street was paved with stones, the path guided/the men together” (lines 320-21).

“Street” is an interesting word, with a history that surfaces in LotR. It is not Germanic. The Romans, who invented the paved road, called it a via strata. Wherever their armies went, they built roads to a standard pattern, to enable the legions to reach quickly anyplace where the locals might be questioning the benefits of civilization. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain, they found a network of such roads; not having seen such a thing before, they borrowed the Latin word for it, as straét. (Germanic peoples on the Continent did likewise.)

The best-known of the Roman roads is known as Watling Street; it runs from Kent in the southeast to the borders of Wales, crossing the Thames at London. The sophistication of these Roman roads deeply impressed the invaders. Compare the description of the road south through Ithilien:

>The handiwork of Men of old could still be seen in its straight sure flight and level course: now and again it cut its way through hillside slopes, or leaped over a stream upon a wide shapely arch of enduring masonry; but at last all signs of stonework faded, save for a broken pillar here and there, peering out of bushes at the side, or old paving-stones still lurking amid weeds and moss. Heather and trees and bracken scrambled down and overhung the banks, or sprawled out over the surface. It dwindled at last to a country cart-road little used; but it did not wind: it held on its own sure course and guided them by the swiftest way.

“Road” on the other hand is a native English word (rád). It is from the same Germanic root as the verb “to ride.” Today, when we go everywhere on wheels, we expect thoroughfares to be paved. But in Tolkien's youth there were way more horses than cars, and horses don't like pavement; it hurts their feet. Which is why the way south from Minas Tirith, as Beregond showed Pippin in Book V ch. I, was in built to acc9modate both kinds of traffic: “it was wide and well-paved, and along its eastern edge ran a broad green riding-track.”)

But the old distinction between paved streets and unpaved roads surfaces in TT. As Théoden and his Riders approach Isengard: “After they had ridden for some miles, the highway became a wide street, paved with great flat stones, squared and laid with skill.”

While participating in a recent discussion about Faramir's role in the government of Gondor after the fall of Sauron, I was rereading the following sentence from Tolkien's Letter 244 – for maybe the fiftieth time:

>But it was made clear that there was much fighting, and in the earlier years of A.'s reign expeditions against enemies in the East. The chief commanders, under the King, would be Faramir and Imrahil; and one of these would normally remain [a] military commander at home in the King's absence.

Letters 2023 458. On this fifty-first reading, I noticed that the sentence makes much better sense if the “a” in square brackets is replaced by “as.”

Various explanations are possible. One is that I don't understand what Tolkien meant, and that he wrote “a” instead of “as.” I doubt it.

Another would be that whoever transcribed the letter had trouble with Tolkien's handwriting, and misread “as” as “a.” I doubt this too, because I tend to think that when the title page says that Letters was “edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien,” part of the assistance provided by Christoper was reading his father's handwriting when it got hard. If you have looked at some of the facsimiles in the HoME series you know that Christopher was uniquely qualified for this task, and even he gave up sometimes.

I think it is much more likely that Tolkien wrote "as,' that the typescript prepared by or for Christopher said “as,” that the printer made a mistake, and that whoever read the proofs (did Christopher read them?) simply missed it. Christopher was a meticulous scholar, but NOBODY is a perfect proofreader. I spent 40 years as a lawyer, a profession in which proofreading is an absolutely essential skill, and I know. There are surely errors in this post. I always go back and reread what I write here after I post it, several times. and I always find errors, which I fix. (Even if the post is months old and dead as a doornail. God sees it.)

So anyway, what I really want to say is that there ought to be a designated custodian for each of Tolkien's published texts. In fact, there must be (Douglas Anderson? Hammond and Scull? Somebody employed by the Estate whose name I don't know?). But the point is that there should be a digital suggestion box for each text, so that when somebody like me spots a possible error, they can write a digital note and slip it through the digital slot for due consideration. Instead of sitting down at two in the moring to write a post like this that will take up valuable Reddit bandwidth. (And if in fact there is, it ought to be better publicized. In the case of LotR, the address should be printed in the "Note on the Text.")

Thank you, as I used to say in the last paragraph of letters I wrote, for your consideration. Whoever you are.

Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin that his people were taught to speak by the Elves:

>Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learning their tree-talk. They always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did. But then the Great Darkness came, and they passed away over the Sea, or fled into far valleys, and hid themselves, and made songs about days that would never come again.

Though they knew Sindarin, Tolkien says in Letters 168 that the Ents preferred Quenya (called “High-Elven” in the letter).. All four of the Elvish passages spoken by Ents are in that language.

Treebeard says of Lórien: *Laurelinórenan lindelorendor malinorélion ornemalin.*Tolkien translated this in Letters 230:

>The elements are laure, gold, not the metal but the colour, what we should call golden light; ndor, nor, land, country; lin, lind-, a musical sound; malina, yellow; orne, tree; lor, dream; nan, nand-, valley. So that roughly he means: 'The valley where the trees in a golden light sing musically, a land of music and dreams; there are yellow trees there, it is a tree-yellow land.'

Talking of his own forest, Treebeard says Taurelióméa-tumbalemorna Tumbaletauréa Lóméanor

This Tolkien addressed in Appendix F – it “may be rendered ‘Forestmanyshadowed-deepvalleyblack Deepvalleyforested Gloomyland’, and by which Treebeard meant, more or less: ‘there is a black shadow in the deep dales of the forest.’"

The names of Quickbeam's murdered rowan trees are also Quenya. Tolkien translated these in Letters 168: “Orofarne, lassemista, carnemírie is High-elven (the language preferred by Ents) for 'mountain-dwelling, leaf-grey, with adornment of red jewels'.”

Finally, at their last meeting Treebeard salutes Celeborn and Galadriel with A vanimar, vanimálion nostari! Which is also translated in Letters 230: 'O beautiful ones, parents of beautiful children.'

But the Elvish names of the Ents we hear about – Fangorn, Finglas, Fladrif, Bregalad, Fimbrethil – are all Sindarin. (Note that Quickbeam says that it was the other Ents who gave him his name, which he describes as a nickname).

A question I have, being not as familiar as I should be with the history of the Elder Days, is whether it is possible to form a hypothesis as to which Elves met the Ents and taught them to talk? And where, and when?

A further observation: While Tolkien uses verbs in his translations of Treebeard's speeches, there does not seem to be anything like a verb in the actual Quenya texts. Is it conceivable that the Entish language did not use verbs at all? That would certainly go a long way to account for the length of their conversations.

Not to waste words: The letter is about Walt Disney. It is described on the Tolkien Collectors Guide website as "TCG Letter #563." It is dated 15 July 1964. The TCG entry links to a page from a Sotheby's auction catalogue:

https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2001/english-literature-history-childrens-and-illustrated-books-and-drawings-l01317/lot.224.html

While the page is still there, parts of it have apparently been taken down. The page does quote the following paragraph form the letter:

>...I recognize [Disney's] talent, but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted. Though in most of the 'pictures' proceding [sic] from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea...

(The same paragraph is quoted in the 2002 edition of Douglas Anderson's Annotated Hobbit, at pp. 24-25 n. 20. If the misspelling of"proceeding" was in the letter, instead of being a typo by the auction house, Anderson silently corrected the error. Anderson had access to the full name of Tolkien's correspondent, Jane Louise Curry. In the catalogue she is "Miss j.L. Curry.)

The Sotheby's catalogue presumably included the date of the auction, but it seems to be gone (from internal evidence it took place while the Jackson movies were in production, but before the release of FotR). More crucially, the page originally included a photographic facsimile of at least one page of the letter. It's gone. Instead there is a block saying IMAGE NOT AVAILABLE.

Is there any way by which the facsimile might be retrieved? I would ask the custodians of the Letters Project directly, but I don't see how. One of them used to post here as u/philthehippy.

(This is subsidiary to a larger inquiry I am contemplating about Tolkien's knowledge of the movies. I will be posting soon about a more significant mystery in this regard.)

[ADDED: I had never heard of Jane Louise Curry, but it turns out that she is a prolific author of novels for children and teenagers.. She is still alive, aged 93. Her letter to Tolkien was written three years before her first published book came out: Sotheby's says she was associated with Stanford University. She was 27 when she wrote it, so most likely she was a faculty member or grad student, not an undergraduate. Wikipedia doesn't say.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane\_Louise\_Curry\]

Since my post explaining why the name "Quickbeam" is a pun seems to have gone over pretty well, here's another one. When the ringbearers and the other hobbits leave Edoras on their way to Rivendell:

>At the last before the guests set out Éomer and Éowyn came to Merry, and they said: ‘Farewell now, Meriadoc of the Shire and Holdwine of the Mark! Ride to good fortune, and ride back soon to our welcome!

And Merry went down in the annals of Rohan under that name:

>For it is said in the songs of the Mark that in this deed Éowyn had the aid of Théoden’s esquire, and that he also was not a Man but a Halfling out of a far country, though Éomer gave him honour in the Mark and the name of Holdwine.

Many readers – most readers? – no doubt assume that Merry acquired the name “Holdwine' because of his capacity for strong drink. Perhaps some envision a gigantic drinking bout at Meduseld, at the end of which Merry tiptoed around covering Éomer, Elfhelm, and the other snoring lords of the Rohirrim with blankets. (A remarkable feat, since he was about one-eighth their body weight.) A pretty picture indeed. But remember that the Rohirrim spoke Old English. Here is what the online Bosworth-Toller dictionary of OE has to say about “Holdwine”:

>Hold, adj.: Kind, friendly, pleasant, favourable, gracious [of a prince to his subject], faithful, loyal, devoted, liege [of a subject to his prince]

>Wine, es; m.: A friend.

So Merry's name in Rohan was actually non-alcoholic; it meant “Faithful friend.”

I don't have much to say about hold, except that it has a German cognate with the same spelling and the same meaning. I know because in the 1791 Mozart opera The Magic Flute, Prince Tamino is guided on his quest to save Pamina by Drei Knäbchen, jung, schön, hold und weise, Whether the word is in common use today, I do not know, but there are plenty here who can tell us.

Wine is more interesting. In the first place, prior to the Great Vowel Shift, an “-e” in final position is never just a marker of length for the vowel that precedes it.* It is pronounced as a separate syllable. So wine was pronounced “wee-neh,” and "Holdwine" had three syllables. Éomer's sword was called “Guthwinë,” meaning “Battle-friend.” The sword which Beowulf borrowed from Unferth for his fight against Grendel's mother was named Hrunting; but in line 1810, the poet uses gúðwine as an epithet or kenning for it. Note that Tolkien put a diaeresis (the two dots) over the “-e,” to make sure that readers pronounced it correctly (Though most probably still did not, until they were instructed in what the diaeresis means. I didn't, for one.) None of the other personal names ending in “-wine,” which are listed below, have the diaeresis. If Tolkien had used it in “Holdwine,” it would have spoiled the joke.

(What is the Old English word for “Wine”? It's wín, which is a loan word from Latin vinum. Wine is grammatically masculine, vín is neuter. Make of that what you will.)

Another name that ends in “-wine” is Déorwine, who replaced Háma as Captain of the King's Guard, and held the post for twelve days before dying at the Pelennor Fields. The meaning of the name is ambiguous: In OE déor meant an animal (any quadruped; the word did not become attached specifically to the family Cervidae until the fourteenth century). Déore meant “dear.” As an element in Germanic names, Wikipedia's article on the subject says, “déor” in a name can have either meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_name

It seems likely that Tolkien preferred the meaning “Dear friend” to “Animal friend.” But there is no way of knowing what was in his mind.

Another name ending in “-wine” is found in the text; this is Gléowine, Théoden's minstrel, who wrote the song sung by his riders at the King's funeral, and “made no other song after.” The name means “Music friend.” In addition, three of the kings of Rohan have names that end in “-wine”: Fréawine (2594–2680); Goldwine (2619–99), and Folcwine (2830–2903). These names mean “Strong friend,” “Goldfriend,” and “Friend of the people,” respectively. Fréawine and Goldwine are both standard epithets meaning a king or lord, and both are found in Beowulf as well as in the dictionary. Tolkien seems to have coined Folcwine.

Tolkien makes much of the fact that individual Ents have affinities with different kinds of trees:

>The Ents were as different from one another as trees from trees: some as different as one tree is from another of the same name but quite different growth and history; and some as different as one tree-kind from another, as birch from beech, oak from fir.

Fladrif/Skinbark is like a birch. The martyred Beechbone is surely like a beech. Treebeard himself seems to be akin to the oak. And who can tell the class what tree Quickbeam is like? [VOICE FROM THE BACK OF THE ROOM: “A rowan, teacher!”]

Very good.

In fact, Tolkien AFAIK invented the names of all the other Ents. But “Quickbeam” is a genuine English word with an entry in the OED. And here is what it means: “Any of several trees of (or formerly included in) the genus Sorbus, esp. the European rowan (S. acuparia).” The word was used in some places to mean the rowan tree into the 20^(th) century.

In Old English the name is spelled cwicbeam. “Quick” originally meant “alive” As in the phrase “the quick and the dead.” As in the other phrase “cut to the quick” – which means to cut through the fingernail, which is dead, and into the flesh underneath, which is alive. The word was applied to the rowan because it is exceptionally hard to kill. (Or so it is said – I have never tried to kill one.) Animals that are alive tend to move, dead things don't, so “quick” passed through the meaning “moving” to the current meaning “moving fast, or suddenly.” So Tolkien is making a pun: We are told, by Quickbeam himself, that he was given the name because he was always in a hurry, by Ent standards, but really that is his name because it is his name. (His Sindarin name “Bregalad” reinforces the pun, as it means “Fast-moving tree.”)

(I was very proud of myself when I stumbled across this, but it turned out I just hadn't read enough. Tolkien let us in on the joke in the guide he wrote for translators of names.)

As for beam. it was just the ordinary Old English word for “tree” (spelled the same, but pronounced differently). The German cognate Baum still is. In English, it came to mean a tree that has been cut down and used as a horizontal structural member in a building. The Dutch cognate is boom; it came into English as a nautical term, meaning a tree that has been cut down and used to extend a sail horizontally. If you took away all the Dutch words that were borrowed for parts of a ship, the ship would sink.

I have never seen any discussion of the names of the kings who ruled Dale after the destruction of Smaug: Bard the Dragon-slayer, Bain, Brand, and Bard II. Here are my thoughts.

Most Tolkienists know that Tolkien took the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit from the Old Norse poem called Völuspá, the "Prophecy of the Seeress); this was a scholarly joke. But it had large consequences for the linguistic structure of Middle-earth. As a professional linguist, he instinctively felt that in LotR, the Old Norse names needed to be explained. The explanation occurred to him while he was working on the early chapters of TT:

>Language of Shire = modern English

>Language of Dale = Norse (used by Dwarves of the region)

>Language of Rohan = Old English

>Modern English is lingua franca spoken by all people (except a few isolated folk like Lórien) – but little and ill by orcs

The document quoted is published in HoME XII, which deals with the Appendices, at p.70 -- though Christopher Tolkien says that it was written in February of 1942. Of course, none of these languages, as Appendix F explains, was “really” spoken in Middle-earth; the idea is that the “real” languages had the same relationships to one another that modern English, Old English, and Old Norse had in the historical past.

Perhaps by accident, the name “Dale” fits into this scheme. While the word dæl occurs inOld English, it is in the parts of England that were under Scandinavian rule that “dale” is common in place names, due to the prevalence of the Norse cognate dalr.

Thus one would expect the names of the Kings of Dale as given by Glóin to be Old Norse as well. And indeed "Brand" and "Bard" are plausibly explained as Anglicizations of the Norse names Brandr and Barðr. Both of these were in common use in medieval Iceland. In a list of several hundred personal names found in the Landnámábók, the "Book of Settlements," Branðr is the 21^(st) most common and Barðr the 24th. Here is a link to the list (which looks as if it was compiled by a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, notorious sticklers for accuracy):

https://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/norse/landnamabok.html:

(Why do the Norse names end in -r? The explanation is below.)

"Bain" is more difficult. The vowel combination “ai” is not a diphthong in Old Norse, so the name if it were Norse would be pronounced as two syllables, like “Náin” and “Thráin”: “BA-een.” But the name Beinir or Beiner is also found in the Icelandic manuscripts, though it is less common – two occurrences in Landnámábók, against 20 for Branðr and 19 for Barðr. But the vowel combination “ei” is a diphthong in ON, and it has the same sound as the “ai” in English “rain.” So it is plausible that in Anglicizing Beinir, Tolkien changed the spelling to “Bain” so that English-speaking readers would pronounce it correctly.

The name "Bard" BTW has no connection with "bard" meaning a poet, which is a Celtic word. The OE equivalent was scop; Tolkien evidently thought most people would not know that word, so he used the French-derived “minstrel” instead in writing about both Rohan and Gondor.

(The question arises as to why Bard's ancestor Girion had what looks like a Sindarin name. The answer is that the name long predated the decision to represent the language of Dale by Old Norse. Others are invited to construct an in-universe explanation; I can get along fine without one.)

Why the “-r” at the end of these Norse names? Because Old Norse (like Old English) was an inflected language; meaning that words took on different endings according to their function in a sentence. Most ON nouns of masculine gender acquired an “-r'” at the end if the person or object named was the subject of a sentence; this is the nominative case. If the person or object was the direct object of the sentence, the word would be in the accusative case, and the “-r” would be dropped. Modern English has lost most of its inflections, so that meaning depends entirely on word order.

Thus in order to say in ON that Bard killed a dragon, one would write Barðr drap orm. But if a dragon killed Bard, the sentence would be Ormr drap Barð. In either case, the word order could be changed without changing the meaning. In translating names to English, the convention is to omit the case ending, so Gandalf is not “Gandalfr” in LotR.

In going through and cleaning out my old files, and found another one that was never finished and posted. It might be of some interest:

Tolkien as we know was an extremely careful and intentional writer. (“Hardly a word in [LotR's] 600,000 or more has been unconsidered” – Letters 131). But of course he did not thinking onlly about singler words, sentences and paragraphs in isolation, but also about their connection to others he had written earlier. Here for example is part of the description of the arrival of Gandalf and Pippin in Minas Tirith:

>In every street they passed some great house or court over whose doors and arched gates were carved many fair letters of strange and ancient shapes: names Pippin guessed of great men and kindreds that had once dwelt there; and yet now they were silent, and no footsteps rang on their wide pavements, nor voice was heard in their halls, nor any face looked out from door or empty window.

And here is the paragraph that sums up Aragorn's reign, immediately after his coronation:

>In his time the City was made more fair than it had ever been, even in the days of its first glory; and it was filled with trees and with fountains, and its gates were wrought of mithril and steel, and its streets were paved with white marble; and the Folk of the Mountain laboured in it, and the Folk of the Wood rejoiced to come there; and all was healed and made good, and the houses were filled with men and women and the laughter of children, and no window was blind nor any courtyard empty; and after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and the glory of the years that were gone.

More than 200 pages separate these two sentences, but it is quite clear that Tolkien had the first one in mind when he wrote the second; most likely he had it open on his desk

(The second of these, which has a paragraph to itself, is the longest sentence in LotR (as confirmed for me when I first started here by a redditor who wrote a program to check). Both these sentences are long because Tolkien liked, as a feature of his most”elevated” style, to link a number of statements with conjunctions like “and” or nor.” The Greek name for this rhetorical device is “polysyndeton.”)

(The second longest sentence in LotR is in "The Road to Isengard." I invite anyone with a lot of time to kill to hunt it down.)

And here, since it was in the same document, is the result of an unrelated inquiry suggested by the occurrence of the word “kindreds” in the first of these paragraphs. One of Tolkien's ways of emphasizing the difference between the Shire and the heroic world outside it is the use of a different vocabulary. Distances in the Shire are measured in miles; outsie it, in leagues. In Gondor and Rohan there are both horses and steeds (more horses than steeds, in fact), but in the Shire there are no steeds. Hobbits eat lunch and dinner; in Minas they eat a nuncheon and a daymeal. And so on. This is another example.

Tolkien says that “great men and kindreds” used to live in Minas Tirith's empty houses. where a modern writer describing a city residence of the nobility would surely write “families.” The word “family” occurs 19 times in LotR, and with one exception, only by or about hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, and Númenorean Men say “kindred,” 29 times in all (though most often to refer to a whole race or tribe).

The exception with regard to “kindred” occurs when Frodo tells Faramir that the other members of the Fellowship “were my kindred and my friends.” But Tolkien stresses in Appendix F that Frodo had an exceptional ability to adapt to other modes of speech. On the other hand, Legolas tells Gimli that “one family of busy dwarves with hammer and chisel” might damage the Caves of Aglarond. But just before he said teis, he advised Gimli “do not tell all your kindred.”

In discussing Éowyn's plight with Aragorn and Éomer in the Houses of Healing, Gandalf says: “But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild

thing in?”

Tolkien discusses the sleeping arrangements st Meduseld in Letters 210: “In such a time private 'chambers' played no pan. Théoden probably had none, unless he had a sleeping 'bower' in a separate small 'outhouse'.” It is clear from Beowulf, and from the Norse sagas as well, that the retinue of a king or lord all slept in his great hall. Each man had a space assigned to him on the benches, and when it was time for bed he unrolled his bedding and lay down there. (If you learned your Old Norse from the introductory volume by Tolkien's colleague E.V. Gordon, you foound this oth early, from an extract from Hrolf Kraki's saga that Gordon used as a text.) Your sleeping place was called your “rum,” and that word came to be applied in English to any enclosed space. But in modern Iceland rum still means a bed; the word for what we call a room is herbergi.

(As the quote from Letters shows, Tolkien doubted whethr even Théoden slept in a separate room from his retinue. As far as I know there is no evidence about the sleeping arrangements for a lord's womenfolk. But no doubt Tolkien's Victorian sensibilities would not let him epicture a nobelwomen slleping in the same space as all those hairy men.)

To return to “bower:: In Old English bur just meant a place to live, from a root meaning “to dwell.” In later literature, especially poetry, it came to be applied specifically to a woman's private bedroom, akin to “boudoir.” As such it took on strong sexual overtones; to be admitted to a lady's bower implied admission to other things as well. It seems not to have registered with Tolkien, familiar as he was with the history of the word, that it might give the wrong impression as applied to Éowyn, who was the last person to lie around in a frilly negligeé, eating chocoolates and dreaming of her destined lover.

Bur is also the source of the word “neighbour,” which means a person who dwells nigh to you. (“Nigh” was equivalent to “near” in modern usage; “near” was the comarative form, originally “nigher”; and ”next” was the superlative “nighest.”)

(The word “bower” also occurs three times in FotR, but it is used there in a separate sense: “A place closed in or overarched with branches of trees, shrubs, or other plants; a shady recess, leafy covert, arbour” (OED) In Lórien, the hobbits (and presumablyother members of the Fellowship) sleep in this kind of bower.)

I believe that today, a Catholic priest hearing confession pronounces the formula of Absolution in the vernacular -- in English, "I absolve you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." But was this true during Tolkien's early life, or would the priest have spoken the formula in its Latin form (Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris +, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti)? If there was a change during Tolkien's lifetime, was it due to the Second Vatican Council. and when did it take effect?

Yes, this is about Tolkien; I am tinkering with my thesis that Boromir's dying speech to Aragorn enacts the elements of a valid Confession.

(I left the "+" in the Latin formula as printed in the service book, because I figured out what it means, and frankly, I feel smug about it. It tells the priest to cross himself at that point.)