While an omen can be for good or ill, only ill-omened things are ominous. I am declaring that only high and adventurous things are important enough to be ominous.
“omen, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 11 May 2015.
“ominous, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 11 May 2015.
Apparently only dragons nap in Middle Earth.
Tolkien uses “merry” in its present uses – amusing; jolly – and in a number of its obsolete ones, as musically pleasing, or enjoyable, or boisterous. I imagine that drawing the line between shades of meaning for the OED must be a complex and very artistic profession. “Merry” does not appear in Chapters 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16. It’s distributed evenly on both sides of Chapter 10. I notice that most of the second half “merries” begin here:
[18.019] ‘There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!’
I think this is what Richard Blackwelder meant by passages “of great beauty”. I regard “merry” as a healing word: it’s used by Thorin to heal the rift between himself and Bilbo; it fills the farewells as Bilbo leaves behind his war experience; elves welcome him back to the west with “Merry.”
Update 2015.07.09: we discovered further on that “merry” may very well be a not-quite-perfect elf-detector.
Blackwelder, Richard E. Tolkien Phraseology: A Companion to A Tolkien Thesaurus Tolkien Archives Fund, Marquette University, 1990. Print.
“merry, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 11 May 2015.
This word has a perfectly delicious definition:
Used as a negative particle of intention or purpose, introducing a clause expressive of something to be prevented or guarded against;
It comes from Old English by a fairly common route of dropping sounds and syllables until it has become one clear syllable. Original meaning: “whereby less”
The use of “lest” peaked in the second half of the seventeenth century and dropped off after 1850, thanks Google Ngram Viewer. While OED does not call it archaic, it has a high sound to me.
“lest, conj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 11 May 2015.
Our current use of the word is for our near relations, not for the sense of ancestral stock as it is generally used in The Hobbit. “Kin” comes up more in the book as we get closer to the war for gold, to reasons to divide into “us” and “them”.
“kin, n.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 11 May 2015.
Beautiful jewels seem to be scattered evenly throughout the work.
In our text, “incline” is always in the adjectival form and always describes characters’ personality traits, not the relative levelness or plumb of tunnels or mountains.
While “hood” itself is not a terribly funny word, the dwarves are all introduced with them in their many colors and over time they become tattered and draggled, they poke out of webs, and they wave ridiculously before their knees to Beorn. We associate the hoods with silliness or maybe parochial quaintness by the time we get past the Chapter 10 inflection point. They contrast with bright helms in Chapter 13, and then! A hood disguises Gandalf and he dramatically casts it aside to reveal himself. At the end of the mentions of hoods, Thorin has cast his own aside to reveal a kingly, heroic figure ready for grim battle. Hoods are softeners, disguises. I’m going to label them as “funny” until we see a pattern of such words and come up with a better tag.
The current sense of “glimpse” – a passing view – blends with the archaic meaning of “a flash” as Tolkien uses it in The Hobbit. Glimpses of treasure – was that the twinkle? or the dwarves’ view of the twinkle? I am, as ever, delighted.
“glimpse, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 11 May 2015.
Just a little flash of light. Tolkien does not use the obsolete meaning in The Hobbit, but I’m delighted to note it here: a flash of eyes.
“glimmer, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 11 May 2015.
words that you were saying 