J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Tom Shippey

but names are a lot closer to things than are other classes of word. If a name exists it offers a kind of a guarantee that what it labels must also exist. Names, especially names which are not strictly necessary, weight a narrative with the suggestion of reality. This may of course be just a device – a good example is the little elegy on Théoden King’s horse in The Return of the King, which goes:

      Faithful servant yet master’s bane,

      Lightfoot’s foal, swift Snowmane.

      Clearly we do not need to know the name of the father, or mother, of Snowmane, or indeed of Snowmane, a very incidental character. But giving both names, one completely extraneous to the story, is a sort of re-assurance. As said on p. 15 above, there are not many real names in The Hobbit, apart from those of the dwarves, and some of those listed there were added in later editions, but The Lord of the Rings is completely different. It is loaded down with names, personal names and place-names, the latter often transferred on to a map. They say a good deal about the way in which Tolkien began to work.

      A sidelight on his methods and interests at this stage is cast by Tolkien’s short story Farmer Giles of Ham. This was not published till 1949, but we know (see Bibliography) that it was heavily rewritten at about this time, and read to an Oxford college literary society in January 1938, a month after Tolkien began The Lord of the Rings. In it one can see Tolkien brooding, not only over nursery-rhyme, but also over the place-names of Oxfordshire and the neighbouring counties. The fictional ‘Ham’ of the title is the real village of Thame. Why should it be called Thame? Why is there an -h- in Thame, as in Thames, which no one ever pronounces? Should it not be Tame, and if so, what does Tame mean? Not far away from Thame is the equally real village of Worminghall, which seems on the face of it to mean ‘the hall of the Wormings’. But what are Wormings? If ‘worm’ means dragon (as it often does in Old English), then might Wormings have something to do with a dragon – conceivably a tame dragon, since Tame is so close by? From thoughts like this Tolkien constructed his story of the wicked dragon Chrysophylax, who is bested by Farmer Giles with his sword Tailbiter, or Caudimordax, and who enables Farmer Giles to escape from the tyranny of the king of the Middle Kingdom, Augustus Bonifacius Ambrosius Aurelianus Antoninus. The whole story is set in an imaginary past, the past of the ‘Brutus books’ referred to by the author of Sir Gawain (which Tolkien had co-edited thirteen years before), but its geography is perfectly realistic. The villages of Thame and Worminghall, and Oakley, which had its parson eaten, can all still be found close together on the map of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire – Thame is in Oxfordshire, the other two in Buckinghamshire; and the same map will show the small town of Brill in Buckinghamshire, once ^*Bree-hill – it was to be reshaped in The Lord of the Rings as Bree. The capital of the Middle Kingdom is not named, but is said to be ‘twenty leagues’ away, or sixty miles; it must be Tamworth, the ancient capital of Mercia, sixty-eight miles from Thame as the crow flies. The village of Farthingho, where we are told Farmer Giles’s Little Kingdom maintained ‘an outpost against the Middle Kingdom’, is almost exactly on a line between them, one-third of the way measured from Thame. When Farmer Giles grumbles about the strange people who live far away, ‘beyond the Standing Stones and all’, he must mean the inhabitants of Warwickshire as opposed to his own Oxfordshire: the boundary between the two counties runs by the famous Rollright Stones. In Farmer Giles Tolkien was using place-names in a way which he had avoided in The Hobbit, but which he was to rely on in The Lord of the Rings (names like Brill, or Bree, or T(h)ame, or Farthingho, are on the face of it very different from The Hill or The Water, if not always so different historically). He was moreover taking a close interest in locality.

      Tolkien used his new involvement with names in creating ‘the Shire’, with its elaborate map, relatively elaborate social structure, and elaborated history, all explained in the ‘Prologue’ to The Lord of the Rings. The Shire is indeed a brilliant invention, rubbing home the point that hobbits are just English people by its names, often strange-sounding (Nobottle, the Farthings) but usually real (there is a Nobottle in Northamptonshire, and a Farthingstone); and by the very careful, point-for-point resemblance of its history to the traditional history of England, which extends even to both communities being founded by two brothers called ‘Horse’ – Hengest and Horsa for England, Marcho and Blanco for the Shire, but all four names are Old English words for the same animal. It also rationalizes some of Tolkien’s anachronisms in The Hobbit, explaining that ‘pipeweed’ is the hobbits’ only contribution to civilization, but no one knows where they got it from, and that a postal service is one of the few public functions exercised by the hobbits’ minimal government, along with Shirriffs (sheriffs, or as Tolkien knew, ‘shire-reeves’), the Mayor (another ancient office surviving into modern England, and as with sheriffs into America), and the Thain (Old English thegn, king’s servant, now known to most people only from the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth). But none of this solved Tolkien’s underlying problem with story, with getting the story moving. What did was a poem he had published a few years before The Hobbit,