Goblin poetry: can’t help but laugh and shake in your shoes!
- 04.020 Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!
onomatopoeia
Flap
Sometimes a motion, sometimes the sound associated with that motion against a flat surface – and when Gollum flaps, it seems to be both motion and sound in one image.
- 04.018 keeping time with the flap of their flat feet on the stone,
- 04.044 Soon they could hear even the flap of the goblin feet,
- 05.056 He flapped into the water
- 05.089 and flapped back to his boat,
- 08.005 Bilbo tried flapping his hand
- 08.006 flapping and whirring round their ears.
- 15.013 slowly flapped his wings,
Fizzle
The torch definitely threatens danger, earning a “high” tag.
- 06.077 Shrivel and scorch! A fizzling torch
Drone
The lulling sound of bees and the name of most of the lullers at Beorn’s apiaries.
- 07.025 and a droning
- 07.027 The drones were bigger than your thumb,
Drip
“Drip” is not an imitative word, according to the OED. It does not mean any sound except as a slang or naval term for complaining. Yet we all understand Tolkien perfectly well in 02.034:
They moved to a clump of trees, and though it was drier under them, the wind shook the rain off the leaves, and the drip, drip, was most annoying.
The fact that the sound is annoying has earned it the “low” tag.
- 02.029 his hood was dripping into his eyes,
- 02.034 and the drip, drip,
- 02.034 and the drip, drip,
- 04.046 with the sweat dripping
- 05.010 drops drip-drip-dripping from an unseen roof into the water below;
- 08.046 and there the drip of it
- 08.046 and waiting for a chance drip to fall
- 09.062 and that appealed to him with his dripping
- 09.063 and the trail of drippings that he left wherever he went or sat;
- 09.064 He was no longer dripping but he felt cold all over.
Update: Our commenter Sarah Hartman has generously provided us with a link to her thesis on such words!
“drip, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
“drip, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
Crunchable
“Crunchable” is a proper adjective with its own proper entry and a quotation from H. G. Wells to attest it. Its root word “crunch” may be a “more subdued and less obtrusive” word for that crushed-by-teeth noise. Gollum, more subdued. I am caught speechless.
- 05.048 Is it scrumptiously crunchable?
“crunch, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
“crunchable, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
Croak
The OED uses frogs and ravens as the only exemplars of beings which make this sound in the first definition of “croak the noun” and “croak, the verb”. Intrigued, I read onward. Obsolete second meaning includes “forbode evil (like the raven)”, without note or explanation about this anthropomorphization, just one example to make the hair rise:
1609 Shakespeare Troilus & Cressida v. ii. 193 Would I could meete that roague Diomed I would croke like a Rauen, I would bode, I would bode.
Goblins’ singing is so laughable as to be called croaking, but crow and bird croaks are eerie – and perhaps the sounds of Roäc are truly ominous!
- 04.018 The goblins began to sing, or croak,
- 04.036 croaking, jibbering and jabbering;
- 11.008 and again the harsh croak of a bird.
- 11.011 followed ever by croaking crows above them,
- 15.014 he croaked
- 15.022 croaked Roäc,
“croak, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
Creak
Ominous wind through the trees, funny dwarven racket, creak of a gate into an unknown household, thin creaking, funny voices of very scary spiders. The register of creaking depends entirely on context, but tends toward the scary, adventurous, and high.
- 01.123 and the pine-trees on the Mountain creaking
- 02.039 and creaking
- 07.032 and the hobbit pushed open the heavy creaking gate
- 07.097 The great door had creaked
- 08.081 Their voices were a sort of thin creaking
- 09.056 He heard the creak of the water-gate being hauled up,
- 09.065 creaked and fretted.
- 12.027 and blowing while the ropes creaked,
Crackle
In the first case, the dwarves are making a racket which is amusing to us readers and in the second case the crackling fire is dangerous.
- 02.039 and crackling and creaking
- 06.084 in crackling fire.
Cough
In contrast with the dwarves who are strutting about in Laketown in the previous paragraph, Bilbo
sneezed and coughed, and he could not go out, and even after that his speeches at banquets were limited to ‘Thag you very buch.’
while some coughs are deadly serious, these are funny and “low”.
- 10.039 and coughed,
words that you were saying 