Glass

“Glass” occurs only as a food word – a drinking vessel in The Hobbit except  as a compound word “looking-glass“.  The looking-glass is absent and, indeed, all the glasses in the book are too fragile to leave the safety of Chapter 1.

  • 01.058 and glasses and plates and spoons
  • 01.060 the plates and glasses.
  • 01.064 Chip the glasses and crack the plates!

Knife

Pocket-knife has its own entry.

  • 01.058 and dishes and knives and forks
  • 01.059 and before he could say knife
  • 01.064 Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
  • 02.086 and they took out their knives.
  • 02.114 and Bilbo took a knife
  • 05.071 Knife!’ he said at last.
  • 07.093 and platters and knives and wooden spoons,
  • 07.095 and few save the knives were made of metal at all.
  • 08.111 and cutting at the threads with their knives.
  • 08.115 Some of the dwarves had knives,
  • 09.002 their small knives,
  • 10.025 their knives had been taken from them by the wood-elves,

Bottle

“Bottle” seems to be a diminutive of “butt”, a cask for wine or ale.

  • 01.058 By the time he had got all the bottles
  • 01.063 each with a bottle on the top,
  • 01.064 Smash the bottles and burn the corks!
  • 09.063 and a leather bottle of wine
  • 09.063 but the bottle helped him to do that,

“bottle, n.2.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2016. Web. 25 March 2016.

Salad

It goes so well with pork-pie!  OED defines a salad thus:

1. a. A cold dish of herbs or vegetables (e.g. lettuce, endive), usually uncooked and chopped up or sliced, to which is often added sliced hard-boiled egg, cold meat, fish, etc., the whole being seasoned with salt, pepper, oil, and vinegar.

The word ultimately comes from the Latin for “salt”.

  • 01.055 and salad,’ said Bombur.

“salad, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2016. Web. 25 March 2016.

Wine

Most of the wine, bless it, is in Mirkwood.  Wine-barrel, of course, has its own uncommon entry.

  • 01.051 A little red wine,
  • 01.065 Splash the wine on every door!
  • 01.090 all praise to his wine
  • 09.018 were very fond of wine,
  • 09.018 The wine,
  • 09.019 he learned how the wine
  • 09.023 and taste the new wine that has just come in.
  • 09.025 It must be potent wine to make a wood-elf drowsy;
  • 09.025 but this wine,
  • 09.035 The wine of Dorwinion brings deep
  • 09.048 and his best wine
  • 09.063 and a leather bottle of wine
  • 18.048 I have drunk much of your wine

Coffee

The word “coffee” probably comes to us from Turkish, but before that the origins of the word are obscured in Arabic or Ethiopian origin.  Caffeea arabica is native to the Arabian peninsula and Ethiopia.

Tolkien does not refer to coffee outside of chapter 1, nor in The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, or even in The Father Christmas Letters.  I assume that he enjoyed coffee from reading Letter 332 to his son Michael describing a flat that Merton College of Oxford provided him:

(7) The use of 2 beautiful common-rooms (at a distance of 100 yards) with free writing paper, free newspapers, and mid-morning coffee. It all sounds too good to be true (Kindle Locations 8842-8843)

To be honest, this mention of coffee – made from a tropics-loving plant which probably couldn’t grow in the Shire – I count as more evidence that Tolkien told this tale to his children (at least the beginning chapters) right off the cuff.  Dwarf names he already knew and which didn’t match the world the story later turned out to inhabit, coffee which he might have wanted as a guest at supper but which didn’t match the botany of that land.  “Papa, tell us another story.”  Yes, little ones.  I will always tell you another story and dredge it up out of any word-hoard that my young-parent-tired brain can access.  Pass the coffee, please.

  • 01.046 and one for coffee,
  • 01.047 A big jug of coffee had just been set
  • 01.056 and coffee,

“coffee, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2016. Web. 25 March 2016.