Author: lfsaldenbirch

Inspired by Richard E. Blackwelder

lfsaldenbirch ,

Richard Blackwelder, Tolkien scholar and entomologist (insect-scientist, not etymologist) and relation of my wife,  gave us a copy of his book The Tolkien Thesaurus and some adjunct materials as a wedding gift with wishes for a happy life of book-loving together.  In the introduction to that work, he himself describes it as “a concordance” of The Lord of the Rings (the title Thesaurus baffles me), and he wrote thousands and thousands of lemmatized concordance-style entries with book and page number and enough of a phrase that a reader with just a word or two of a quotation that is tickling their memory can find the full passage easily.

Now we have Kindle and other electronic formats; we can solve in seconds the problem which Blackwelder put so many years into solving in the 1980s.  How can I carry on Blackwelder’s inspiring work?  In his companion work Tolkien Phraseology, he writes:

Among the 40,000 or so passages quoted in the Thesaurus itself there are ones of great beauty and ones that speak only of filth and darkness, ones that bring us victorious action or ones taken from folk-songs, ones representing a wide variety of poetic forms or ones conveying only some slangy command.

We may assume that a reader is following the story and the characters and may sometimes fail to notice the unusual words, phrases, or even passages.  Some appear on re-reading, but the compiler has found that many slip by repeatedly and appear only when the sentences are analyzed and the individual words singled out.

His short list of “unusual words, phrases, and passages” from The Lord of the Rings is only a list, without analysis.  This project was born: we will find the unusual words of The Hobbit and, by learning more about these words and how Tolkien uses them, become better readers of the work.

Blackwelder, Richard E. A Tolkien Thesaurus Garland Publishing, New York, 1990.

Blackwelder, Richard E. Tolkien Phraseology: A Companion to A Tolkien Thesaurus Tolkien Archives Fund, Marquette University, 1990.

So Many Editions! or all the pretty paragraphs

lfsaldenbirch ,

Many, many editions of The Hobbit abound – hooray that this story is dear to millions of readers!  With many editions, using a page number for a quote or idea reference can be problematic.  In my Hobbit-word study, I’ve made an index of the paragraphs of the work and given each paragraph a unique number.  When you see a quotation here or in the concordance which is my goal, you can just zip to the index to help you find it in your own edition to get context.

1951 Hobbit Paragraph Index

In the future, I’ll be exploring the 1937 edition; here’s the paragraph index of 1942 edition’s Chapter V.  This one is identical as far as I know to the 1937, and John Rateliff kindly helped me to locate this from the Children’s Book Club.

You can also find these paragraph index links on the About page.

Bread and Cheese: overlooking the most common words

lfsaldenbirch

While it is possible to write a story without “the be of and a in to have it I”, these top ten most frequently used words and their close neighbors form the “bread and cheese” of the corpus of written work in Modern English.    To examine Tolkien’s special way with words, I wanted to skip past the ten thousand most common words, the words which just anyone might use.  I have in time come to call them The Ten Thousand in my idiolect.

The Hobbit has about 96,000 words.  After eliminating The Ten Thousand common words, which account for all but 2 to 5% of the British National Corpus (depending on whom you ask and how they measure), there remain 7,172.  Less-common words comprise 7.5 per cent of The Hobbit.  Ahem.  Now, over a hundred of those words are “hobbit”.  But only one is “bebother”.

Strap on your goggles, it’s going to be quite an adventure.

Please see the Works Cited page for full information on our sources.

Leech, Rayson, and Wilson. Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English.

Good Morning!

lfsaldenbirch ,

And I mean it!

The Tolkien Professor has suggested that I record the pleasing patterns of wonderful words in The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien.  The story sings because the words dance.  Come dance with them!

On this adventure, we use this edition of the work:

Tolkien, J.R.R. (2012-02-15). The Hobbit: 75th Anniversary Edition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

We begin by saying Thank you:

  • Corey Olsen, president of Signum University and my thesis advisor.
  • Robin Reid, for advice on fair use and assistance with using the text.
  • John Rateliff, for assistance with the 1937 text.
  • Doug Anderson, for advice on paragraph enumeration.
  • Daroc Alden, coder and data-moosher.
  • Grace Alden, my wife.