The conversation on The Language Log has turned to feminine pronouns and how many there are in which books.

Here are our Hobbit feminine pronoun references by paragraph number:

[01.005] after she became Mrs. Bungo Baggins.
[01.005] built the most luxurious hobbit-hole for her
[01.005] (and partly with her money)
[01.005] her only son,

[19.011] And bright are the windows of Night in her tower.

There are no occurrences of the word “hers”.

Update 2015.10.18: the chapter 19 reference.  I find upon cursory search that neither Quenya nor Sindarin have “feminine” and “masculine” nouns, so we can take the Night reference as anthropomorphization or perhaps a reference to a nature deity form (in the manner that hobbits call the sun “she”).

Have you heard of the Text Encoding Initiative?  It’s a collegial group of scholars defining and communicating the standards for digital text coding, tagging, and so much more!  I’m excited to learn about it, and to browse all the resources, conferences, and workshops.  The Women Writers Project (which I believe is based at Northeastern University) has an introductory seminar coming up in November.  Scroll down to their resources pages – much to learn.

After my exciting project inventing the wheel, I love learning that scholars from all over are committed to creating a portable and robust wheel!