Lout is another Troll-only word. Its meaning of clown or bumpkin seems to come from a Middle English verb louten, to bow down, and is related to “lurk” and “little”.
“lout, n.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 9 May 2015.
Cop – to grab, from Germanic roots to do with stealing or buying – is only said by a troll:
Please note that it’s a different root from “attercop“!
Update 2015.10.05 – or is it? OED and Merriam Webster dictionary seem to be in conversation about whether a “cobweb” is a “grab-web” and which came first, “cobweb” or “cob”. I’ll update you when I know more, Word Fans!
Booby, which comes not only from the gannet family of ungainly seabirds but from a Latin root meaning “to stammer” (and therefore presumed dull-witted), is used only by our trolls.
Harper, Douglas. “Booby”. Online Etymology Dictionary. Web.
Only the Trolls use the word “blight”. Both times, William refers to Bilbo as “blighter”, a chiefly British derogatory term for “fellow” from the negative connotation of a disease.
02.064 “Poor little blighter,” said William.
02.064 “Poor little blighter!
Harper, Douglas. “Blight”. Online Etymology Dictionary. Web.
Blink, to shine briefly or to briefly close one’s eyes (as though something just shone in them) occurs a handful of times in the work. It may come through Old English blican. Yet there is a different meaning. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains that Tom the Troll’s use of “blinking” in Chapter 2 “as a euphemism for a stronger word” is attested by 1914.
Harper, Douglas. “Blinking”. Online Etymology Dictionary. Web.
Bless is a complicated word indeed – Bilbo, Thorin, Gollum, Balin, the narrator himself, and even Gandalf and Smaug use it as an interjection, blessing themselves in a folksy manner. Gandalf is being disingenuous with Beorn in 07.081 and putting off the dwarves in a teasing manner in 07.116. “Bless me” (or in Gollum’s case, “us”) sounds like a verbal habit of a slightly superstitious, perhaps parochial dialect.
But whence the superstition? What is blessing? In the more solemn sense of spiritual gift, the word is used three times. In chapter 12, Bilbo wordlessly blesses the luck of his ring and Balin lifts up the importance of knowing about Smaug’s bare patch. In chapter 18, Thranduil names Bilbo “elf-friend and blessed.” Although Tolkien had not planned Bilbo’s future trajectory as he wrote that, we certainly see this blessing play out in Bilbo’s story going forward.
What do we make of it? Two uses of bless. Do we chart them differently? I propose that when characters bless themselves, we think of it as a parochial saying and when characters bless others that it is a word of high register. Well, bless us and splash us.
Wag appears eight times, mostly before chapter ten, but the last time in Chapter 11. Beards and heads wag (which sounds funny to me!) and in Chapter 7 in Beorn’s home, dwarves are bowing and scraping so comically that the big man laughs and enjoins them to “stop wagging” their whole bodies.
Please note that here we find “a-wagging”, the only one of the a-gerunds uncommon enough to make it into our list.
I had best not go past “grim” without taking care of “grime”, lest it be lost between ‘grim-voiced’ and ‘grimly’. It’s a humble word, but notice?
It’s a verb.
“Grime” as a verb fell out of use in the 15th century, replaced by ‘begrime’ – we know exactly what it means, even though we’ve probably never seen or heard or used it. Creating archaic flavor without losing meaning: one of Tolkien’s genius gifts.
“Grime” (the noun) is attested in Middle English and probably of Proto-German origins, having cognates in Flemish and Dutch. In fact the Dutch form has connotations of “mask”, like the Old English word for mask. Grima. Yes, indeed. In another work, Tolkien named a certain character “filthy spy”.
Harper, Douglas. “Grime”. Online Etymology Dictionary. Web.
It is possible that I got into this entire business because of my curiosity about the word “grim”. It’s an uncommon word. It’s a humble, one-syllable word. It evokes in me a sense of the color grey although I find only one close pairing of those words: 09.053 shadow grey and grim! I wondered who was described as grim, and had a vague sense that it was related in Tolkien’s usage to kingship. Here’s our little table of who and what are described as grim in The Hobbit.
Not all the grim folk are kings, but all the kings are grim.
Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that it’s an Old English word meaning fierce and severe, adding the connotation of ‘gloomy’ in the 12th century. Its Proto-Indo-European root may be related to “thunder”, and I’ve certainly known more than one person of grim countenance to be described in stormy terms.
Harper, Douglas. “Grim”. Online Etymology Dictionary. Web.
I am fascinated to find that despair, the lack of hope, does not occur in the war chapters, or even after Thorin has shown more than long-distance glimmers of dragon-sickness.
words that you were saying 