Another common word joins us today denoting a lonely status:
- 14.033 and orphans?’
Another common word joins us today denoting a lonely status:
At the urging of professor Verlyn Flieger, I have been looking for words evoking exile, outcast status, cultural aloneness.
One of the great pleasures I have taken in joining the ranks of Tolkien scholarship is meeting and working collegially with such wonderful folks as Emily Austin, a scholar and visual artist. Ms. Austin is in the middle of a project considering when Bilbo is called “Mr. Baggins” in the narrative, and I think she has caught on to something.
Ms. Austin, here are all the instances of “Mr. Baggins” (or the possessive form, or “Mister Baggins”) in the work. I think that with the help of the Hobbit Paragraph Index, your instinct is going to pay off. Look to see who is calling him that – is it almost always Gandalf? and not the narrator?
If you’d like the list of “Baggins” with or without “Mister”, or the list of “Bilbos”, I am, dear friend, at your service.
A thank-you to Tom Shippey!
Sometimes it is spelled strung together with no hyphens. Sometimes it is spelled with double Ss and spaces. Twice, however, it is spelled with hyphens, and if I’m trying to be scrupulous about the hyphens, then here we are – Gollum’s signature sound:
Both of these sounds are in the 1937 edition of The Hobbit, for those of you who have been tracking the differences between the elder and younger editions with me.
How did this one escape me? It’s included in “Drip”, of course, but in this behyphenated, reduplicative form, I believe it deserves its own entry – and so it shows up in my hyphen work!
We have no cases of “northeast” or that lot, but look at our capitalizations!