Dwell

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The meaning of “Dwell” has wandered in a tricksy manner from “deceive and lead astray” in Old English through “hinder and delay” to “linger” and finally to “make a home” by the year 1300.  Now your “dwelling” is less likely to be your homemaking than the house in which you make your home.

  • 08.131 They dwelt most often by the edges of the woods,
  • 10.007 who still dared to dwell here
  • 10.003 when dwarves dwelt
  • 14.040 that dwelt on the borders of the Desolation of the Dragon.
  • 15.002 and these are birds that dwell always
  • 15.009 in their dwellings.
  • 15.020 that once dwelt here,
  • 15.048 the dwellings of the men of Esgaroth,
  • 15.021 and dwells nearest to this place.
  • 18.031 May it bring good fortune to all his folk that dwell here after!’

Bob

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Bobbing – it’s undignified, but sometimes it’s your only option.  Bilbo tries to bow graciously and misses, it come out as bobbing on the mat.  Fili or Kili in a spider’s web bob like a toy on a wire.  Barrels bob in water, and it is the natural walking gait of elderly ravens.

  • 01.095 bobbing and puffing on the mat
  • 01.096 As for little fellow bobbing on the mat
  • 08.106 bobbing on a wire.
  • 09.020 bobbing along,
  • 09.050 and bobbing away down the current.
  • 09.056 of a bobbing
  • 09.057 Some of those that bobbed along by him
  • 15.013 and bobbed towards Thorin.

Haste

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Gollum says only one word outside of The Ten Thousand (contrast his mouth-and-throat noises and his sibilance), and that is “hasty”.  I am amused to note that each person who hears it then says it to someone else, if only for a short run.

  • 05.081 We can’t go up the tunnels so hasty. (Gollum to Bilbo)
  • 16.033 Don’t be so hasty! (Bilbo to Bard)
  • 17.029 Not so hasty! (Bard to Thorin)

“Haste” in all of its forms presents itself more and more frequently as the action of the book increases pace, culminating in seven occurrences in Chapter 17.  It signifies the intensification of action, so I have tagged it “high’.

  • 05.050 haste!’ said Gollum,
  • 05.082 We can’t go up the tunnels so hasty.
  • 05.118 and make haste.
  • 05.118 Make haste!’
  • 08.102 run hastily backwards
  • 09.003 The king had ordered them to make haste.
  • 09.061 in haste from the king’s great doors.
  • 10.027 Now make haste
  • 13.047 From here it hastens to the Gate.
  • 14.042 he hastened now down the river to the Long Lake.
  • 15.021 Bid him hasten!’
  • 15.040 Come haste! Come haste! across the waste!
  • 15.040 Come haste! Come haste! across the waste!
  • 16.005 and snow is hastening behind them.
  • 16.033 Don’t be so hasty!
  • 17.028 but if you do not hasten,
  • 17.029 Not so hasty!
  • 17.031 and was now hastening to Dale.
  • 17.033 We are hastening to our kinsmen
  • 17.035 and they hastened back
  • 17.044 and they hastened night after night through the mountains,

Gollum’s idiolect

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Gollum utters quite a few words which have common headwords, but did not get filtered out for three reasons:

S: Gollum either hisses or adds the S sound to 67 words.  Six times, “Precious” is spelled with two Ss on the end; twice there are three Ss, and once there are four Ss.  “Goblinses”, “eggses”, “losst”, “yess”, “uss”, “iss”, “quesstion”, and “nassty” all get an elongated sibilance.  He even adds Ss where there were previously none at all.

  • 05.022 and chats with it a bitsy,
  • 05.115 but it’s tricksy.
  • 05.117 and he’ll come creepsy

Onomatopoeia: Gollum does articulate that “horrible swallowing noise in his throat” (05.015) as well as several hisses.

Contraction: like one of the trolls, Gollum contracts “perhaps” to “praps”

  • 05.022 Praps ye sits here
  • 05.022 praps it does,

Attercop!

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This good Old and Middle English word was used from the mid 1930s onward, which is a bit like being handed one’s own silver platter for collateral.  But!  We learn from Google’s Ngram viewer that it was also used from the mid 1800s right up to before publication of The Hobbit.  Most of those references seem to be dictionaries – philological attempts to gather rustic spoken words as the Grimms did, but also in the occasional written work.  The word survives as a fragment “cob” in “cobweb”

  • 08.096 Attercop! Attercop!
  • 08.097 Attercop! Attercop!
  • 08.098 no spider has ever liked being called Attercop,
  • 08.119 and ‘Attercop’ from among the trees away on the right.
  • 08.119 ‘Attercop’ made them so angry

Update 2015.06.08: since no spider has ever liked being called it, I am considering it an insult and tagging it “low”.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Annotated Hobbit.  Revised and expanded edition annotated by Douglas A. Anderson. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. Print.

On the movement of language

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I have expressed poorly that older forms of language hang on in more rural places.  No language changes from its Middle to its Modern form in a day or even a decade.

Elizabeth Mary Wright has said with elegance what I have only grunted.

many a delightful old word which ran away from a public career a century or two ago, and left no address, may thus be discovered in its country retreat, hale and hearty yet, though hoary with age.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Annotated Hobbit.  Revised and expanded edition annotated by Douglas A. Anderson. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. Print. p 211.

Astonish

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I am pleased to learn that “astonish” does not derive from a word meaning “turn to stone”, but from extonare (Latin), to be thunderstruck.

  • 03.009 Bilbo was astonished.
  • 03.020 “Most astonishing wonderful!”
  • 04.048 in their astonished eyes.
  • 06.014 Gandalf was as astonished as any of them,
  • 08.118 and to the great astonishment of the dwarves he vanished.
  • 08.121 and charged into the astonished spiders
  • 10.018 Their astonishment was enormous
  • 10.037 amid scenes of astonishing enthusiasm.

Harper, Douglas. “Astonish”. Online Etymology Dictionary. Web.