I wrestled with whether to include “smoke” earlier.  We  included “manflesh”.  Your comments are welcome as to whether I ought to include the things mentioned here:

[04.024] For goblins eat horses and ponies and donkeys (and other much more dreadful things), and they are always hungry.

This line from 03.006 uses the copula as the perfect modal auxiliary verb, a perfectly common form in Early Middle English.  Little touches like this keep our reading attention subtly in the past.

What I mean to say by quoting it:  I have scanned through to the end of Chapter 3 for food words which we do not yet have in our concordance.  I will be grateful to anyone who can find such words that are not yet in our Concordance – thank you!

Alden, L. F. S. “High Register: How and Why in Early Fantasy.” Student Showcase. Signum University. Web.

Görlach, Manfred. Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print.

I feel it my duty to Richard Blackwelder to notice a phrase “of great beauty” as he urged us to find:

[02.022] baggages, packages, parcels, and paraphernalia.

As I scan for food words, I am taking advantage of our current leisurely pace to adjust the length of the phrases in our concordance.  One or two words is often not quite enough to find the phrase in the text.  On my first pass a year ago, I managed to wrestle too-long phrases down in size, as they were visually easy to spot in the spreadsheet.  Now we have time to buff up the too-small parts, too.

Word Fans, I believe there is almost a famine from paragraph 01.070 to 01.140 – the time of dwarven song and history and the triumph of Bilbo’s Tookishness.  We have “grocer” in there, already accounted for as it is uncommon.  Otherwise… Bilbo’s attention and ours are turned away from Hobbity Register to Adventure!

Chapter 14 contains the lovely words “hotfoot” and “lightfooted”, their only appearance in the entire book.  I was struck by this and imagine that it is not coincidence, but rather that these sections were written close to one another temporally and Tolkien was taken with a particular kind of word or sound or set of memories which evoked the words together.

“Hotfoot” is used of Bard the Bowman and by the OED means “hastily”.

[14.009] There was once more a tremendous excitement and enthusiasm.  But the grim-voiced fellow ran hotfoot to the Master.  ‘The dragon is coming or I am a fool!’ he cried. ‘Cut the bridges!  To arms!  To arms!’

“Lightfoot” in comparison means “lightly, as of little weight”

[14.042] But the king, when he received the prayers of Bard, had pity, for he was the lord of a good and kindly people; so turning his march, which had at first been direct towards the Mountain, he hastened now down the river to the Long Lake.  He had not boats or rafts enough for his host, and they were forced to go the slower way by foot; but great store of goods he sent ahead by water. Still elves are lightfooted, and though they were not in these days much used to the marches and the treacherous lands between the Forest and the Lake, their going was swift.

“hotfoot, adv. and adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2015. Web. 18 February 2016.

“light-footed, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2015. Web. 18 February 2016.

I had written a note to myself to check on the word “itch“.  It’s obvious to me that that’s a common word, yet it showed up when I filtered out The Ten Thousand most common words.  If that went incorrectly, there could be a huge problem with the whole filtering process.  But no!  “Itch” is around word 38,000 and “itching”, the word which is actually in the book at 12.076 comes in around 40,000.

One of my little jobs hanging over my head has been to find all instances of the family name “Took” which were filtered out and put them rightfully in the “Took” concordance entry.  Task checked off!  Scholars investigating the Took family, rejoice!

Today’s treat has been making a few “brief” entries less brief and checking the Concordance page for duplicates.  None left.