“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.
Wikipedia contributors. “Laburnum.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 21 Apr. 2015. Web. 9 May. 2015.
And here’s the partner-word to the one just posted.
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”
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.
The Oxford English Dictionary has man-flesh (hyphenated so) as a word attested since the seventeenth century. Tolkien does not hyphenate it and only Tom the troll says it. More on hyphenated words hereafter. I merely observe my own little shudder to learn that the trolls have a word for this particular variety of meat.
Update 2015.06.08: I’m adding the tag “high” to this word to be consistent with later use of the tag – indications of danger are adventurous and thereby earn this tag.
“man, n.1 (and int.).” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 9 May 2015.
Quoits, that ageless game of throwing something round (and sometimes heavy) for distance and/or accuracy, appears but once in our text. In the middle of the spider attack in Mirkwood when the dwarves are endangered and Bilbo reaches for a stone to throw, our narrator interrupts his narrative. He takes a moment during this scene of high tension to list Bilbo’s childhood and adulthood pastimes.
“Quoits” helps break the tension of the scene into child-sized portions – the game itself is relaxing and fun. Quoits was played in the Shire at the end of the Third Age and Quoits Associations can be found in Britain and North America in the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era. Since it is a game of antiquity, I believe that it contributes to the old-fashioned or even parochial setting of the Shire. Finally, say it aloud. “Quoits” is a very funny word.
I thought I had made a grievous error. In scanning through the Os to find words to eliminate, I found “orcs” but not “orc”. Baffled that “orc” would be in The Ten Thousand, I checked that list and found “force” and “divorce” but not “orc” by itself. Frantic that I had mistaken “force” for “orc” at some point and eliminated them all, I raced to my backup copies of words and found the same thing. The text confirms. “Orcs” is used twice in the entire text and “orc” none at all, except in the compound word “Orcrist”. The monsters in the mountains of this work are “goblins”.
Orcs (the word is as far as I am concerned actually derived from Old English orc ‘demon’, but only because of its phonetic suitability) are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be ‘corruptions’. They are not based on direct experience of mine; but owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition (goblin is used as a translation in The Hobbit, where orc only occurs once, I think), especially as it appears in George MacDonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in. The name has the form orch (pl. yrch) in Sindarin and uruk in the Black Speech.
The OED says that “orc” is more likely derived from ogre and cites a phrase in Beowulf – “elves and orcs”. OED credits Tolkien with reviving an obsolete word. Because of Tolkien, the word is neither obsolete nor archaic. Since he revived it, however, I am giving this word those tags.
05.133 the orcs of the mountains
07.151 and orcs of the worst description.
“orc, n.2.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 9 May 2015.
Tolkien, J.R.R. (2014-02-21). The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Kindle Locations 3759-3765). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
words that you were saying 