Sack

In The Hobbit, sacks are either empty or full of dwarves.  They do not appear after chapter 8 except as a particle in Sackville-Baggins.

  • 02.072 and “a sack,
  • 02.072 a sack was over his head,
  • 02.075 pop! went a nasty smelly sack over his head,
  • 02.080 and popped a sack right over Thorin’s head
  • 02.075 With sacks
  • 02.077 sticking out of sacks to tell him
  • 02.078 in the bushes with sacks,” said he.
  • 02.080 in sacks,
  • 02.092 until at last they decided to sit on the sacks
  • 02.108 to untie the sacks
  • 06.046 and my stomach is wagging like an empty sack.’
  • 08.050 and hoist their empty sacks

Racket

Both dwarves and river-elves cause rackets of the loud noise variety in The Hobbit.  OED gives it as possibily imitative

  • 02.042 at what he called “all this dwarvish racket,”
  • 09.029 Drat this dwarvish racket!’
  • 09.064 and there was a merry racket down by the river.

“racket, n.2.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 8 June 2015.

Quaff

The Oxford English Dictionary gives for the etymology “origin unknown, perhaps imitative.”  Imitative of what?

  • 04.021 While Goblins quaff, and Goblins laugh,

“quaff, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 9 May 2015.

Oar

“Oar” now occurs less frequently, though not by much, than its plural per the Google Ngram Viewer.  Before the mid-eighteenth century, this was not the case.  Predecessors of the word seem to come from Scandinavian tongues.

  • 08.027 There aren’t any oars.
  • 10.009 and oars were pulled,
  • 10.045 The white oars dipped

“oar, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 9 May 2015.

Laburnum

“Laburnum” is a genus for two small trees in the pea family.  The flowers are bright yellow on long hanging stalks with many flowers together.  Both species are sometimes called “golden chain tree”.  Gandalf’s fireworks, to be described that way, must have been long, swooping successions of gold starbursts.

  • 01.017 and laburnums of fire

Wikipedia contributors. “Laburnum.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 21 Apr. 2015. Web. 9 May. 2015.