The Language of Tolkien

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is David calling in from San Antonio.

I had a question about Tolkien’s use of language in The Hobbit.

Oh, great. We’re big Hobbit fans.

Yeah, sure. Big Tolkien fans here.

What are you thinking? Are you reading that now?

Yes, yeah. I’m a teacher, and I’m working with a class of sixth graders, and we’re working our way through it.

And we were reading the section on flies and spiders, and there’s this great scene where Bilbo’s taunting the giant spiders as he’s trying to rescue the dwarves from their webs.

And he starts shouting out these taunts in a sing-song fashion.

There’s a couple words, adder cop and tom-knotty, that he’s using as insults for the spiders.

And we were wondering, my class and me, where those words come from and what they mean, because we couldn’t find them in the dictionary.

Adder cop, adder cop, down you drop, old tom-knotty, all big body.

Am I remembering it correctly?

Yeah, you are.

Yeah, old tom-knotty, all big body, old tom-knotty, can’t find me.

Got it.

One of the things that Tolkien did, you know, he worked for a time with the Oxford English Dictionary working on etymologies.

So throughout his books, even though it seems like a really fantastical world, he has tried to ground a lot of the language in true language, in true linguistic history, connecting it to older forms of English and Norse and the Germanic languages and so forth.

And so adderkop actually was at one point a word in English.

If you look in a larger dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find an entry for adderkop, also for tom, noddy, and a bunch of the other words that they use.

Addercop is basically just an old-fashioned way of saying spider.

I think it means something like poison head.

Yeah.

This cop.

Martha is probably going ding, ding, ding in her mind.

Cop is related to the words for head.

Yes, and it’s also related to the word cobweb.

Cobweb, there we go.

And so they’re all in there.

And I want to refer you to a couple resources, not just for those words, but for all of the language that he uses.

First, there’s a really great article on the Oxford University Press website.

It’s called, Why Did Tolkien Use Archaic Language?

And so they just talk about this.

They talk about him personally and his academic career, what he contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary, and then how that played out in his books.

And you can just Google that title, Why Did Tolkien Use Archaic Language, and you’ll find it at OxfordDictionaries.com.

But probably more significantly, there’s two books that I would recommend you find.

One of them is called The Ring of Words.

It’s by three fellows.

One of them is Peter Jelliver, whom I know.

And what they’ve done is not only have they researched Tolkien’s history with the Oxford English Dictionary, they found his actual files.

They found the stuff that he worked with when he was working in language.

And they’ve gone into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary and kind of like explained it all and tried to connect it again and again to the books and to the language that he uses there.

It’s really academic stuff, but I still think you could probably make it palatable for a class of sixth graders.

And then the other one is online and it’s free.

It’s by a fellow named Oliver Liu, L-O-O, and it’s TolkienEnglishGlossary.com.

TolkienEnglishGlossary.com.

Now, he also made a book of this, but a lot of this is available on his website.

He’s got an A to Z reference, a lot of front matter and a lot of explanation and stuff, and he just goes into it and talks about all the different words that you might encounter and wonder about.

So adderkop is literally poison head for spider, and what was the other one?

Tom Noddy.

Tom Noddy.

Tom Naughty is a foolish or stupid person connected to the word naughty, which was also a fool or stupid person going back as far as the 1500s.

Okay, so just like the name Tom.

Yeah, Tom, which is often used in a variety of combinations.

Yeah.

So, David, what are your students saying about all these strange words that they’re encountering?

Well, they’re really enjoying it.

They were asking specifically about those when they came up because in the text it even says, and nobody likes being called a Tom Naughty.

So we were wondering what they were.

But they’re especially loving the poetry and the songs.

We memorized the Dwarvish song at the start of the book.

You memorized it?

In Dwarvish?

A real treat for them.

Yeah, the ten verses of the Far Over the Misty Mountain.

Oh, I see.

Good Lord.

Wow.

And are they performing this for somebody?

Yeah, well, at our school, it’s a classical charter school.

We have poetry wars where the different classes memorize poems with a certain theatrical quality to them, and then we go and we invade their classrooms and perform them for one another.

You invade their classrooms.

This does sound sort of Tolkien-esque.

We march in in the middle of class.

With, like, beards and axes?

Say again?

You march in with beards and axes and take over the classroom?

No beards and axes yet.

Maybe next year, but just with our voices and our poems.

Okay, little hairy feet.

That’s outstanding.

That’s wonderful.

Well, David, congratulations.

It sounds like you’re doing great work there.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Okay.

Bye.

Bye.

Tom Noddy.

Battercop, battercop down, you drop.

So in the scene, he’s in the Mirkwood, this dark, evil forest fighting off spiders.

Mirkwood.

I love that.

And trying to save his dwarvish friends from being eaten.

Well, don’t be a Tom Noddy.

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