🧌Troll Names

[Goldilocks Gamgee]

While reading the Hobbit to my second-to-youngest brother, I found it really interesting that while orcs, hobbits, elves, dwarves, etc. have creative names, the three trolls are named Bert, William and Tom - basic English names. Why do y'all think this is so, and is this significant?

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Tolkien wrote the trolls as comic, "lower-class" types, in speech and actions, and gave them names typical of "that sort of person". I can picture him reading (or telling) this part of the story to his children, during the "winter readings", and doing the voices in dialect, to their great delight.

BTW, y'all ain't from the South, are yuh? 😄

 

[HALETH✒🗡]

I really like @Squint-eyed Southerner 's explanation.
What about Sam, by the way? He is a simple (in a good sense, unlike trolls) gardener and his name is simple. When Sam creates a poem, he uses basic names such as Tom and Tim too.

Up came Tom with his big boots on.
Said he to Troll: 'Pray, what is yon?
For it looks like the shin o' my nuncle Tim.
As should be a-lyin' in the graveyard.
Caveyard! Paveyard!

Does your brother enjoy the book, @Goldilocks Gamgee ?

 

[Goldilocks Gamgee]

Does your brother enjoy the book, @Goldilocks Gamgee?

He does - especially Bilbo's poems about the spiders. He has them memorized and he goes around singing them to himself all day.

BTW, y'all ain't from the South, are yuh? 😄

I'm just too lazy to write out "you all" 😂

 

[HALETH✒🗡]

He does - especially Bilbo's poems about the spiders. He has them memorized and he goes around singing them to himself all day.

Great! A new tolkienist is growing up!

In addition, I've found out that the name Tom means "simplicity", William means "strong helmet" and Bert means "bright". The first meaning describes the trolls very well and the second one may have some connections with the characters too.

 

[Elthir]

JRRT, from draft Letter 153: "I might not (if The Hobbit had been more carefully written, and my world so much thought about 20 years ago) have used the expression "poor little blighter", just as I should not have called the troll William."

Yet these Troll names survive in revision, including the 1960 (never finished) Hobbit. That noted,
in general, Tolkien would put much thought into names/translations for The Lord of the Rings. For example . . .

"I have not used names of Hebraic or similar origin in my transpositions. Nothing in Hobbit-names corresponds to this element in our names. Short names such as Sam, Tom, Tim, Mat were common as abbreviations of actual Hobbit-names, such as Tomba, Tolma, Matta, and the like. But Sam and his father Ham were really called Ban and Ran. These were shortenings of Banazîr and Ranugad, originally nicknames, meaning "halfwise, simple" and "stay-at-home"; but being words that had fallen out of colloquial use they remained as traditional names in certain families."

JRRT Appendix F, On Translation

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

I'll just add that the "Troll Song" long predates LOTR, the original having been written by Tolkien in 1926, as "Pero & Podex" ("Boot and Bottom"). The next version, "The Root of the Boot", was published in a pamphlet in 1936. There are several other versions, including of course the one given to Sam -- although Tolkien first thought of giving it to Frodo at Bree, before opting for "The Cat and the Fiddle" -- which has its own convoluted history.

It was intended to be sung to the tune of a traditional English folk song, "The Fox Went Out". Here's a version of that song:

Although I don't know if that follows the English version -- apparently the tune underwent some changes after coming to America.

I recently mentioned my eccentric tentative steps to reading Tolkien; in fact, the first thing I read of his was the collection of poems The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, where "The Stone Troll" is No. 7. The context made me assume the "Tom" in that poem was Tom Bombadil. Whether Tolkien intended that or not, I don't know.

 

[Annatar]

Many very good explanations have already been provided here.
To address it again in a comprehensive manner:

Tolkien's proper names are to a certain extent translations from the "Red Book of Westmarch".
Westron as the language of the Hobbits (and others) was completely translated into English. Proper names of the Hobbits, which are not 100% Westron, have also been translated into analogous language cognates. Before coming to Eriador, the Hobbits used to speak the language of the people of Rhovanion, some of whose descendants are the Rohirrim. This ancient language, however, is related to Westron, just as the people of Rhovanion are related to the people who became the Dunedain and thus strongly influenced Westron (to summarize briefly).
For this reason, Tolkien rendered the language of the Rohirrim with Old English and the language of the people of Rhovanion, ancestors of the Rohirrim, with Gothic terms.
Thus Tolkien places the languages Westron <- language of Rohan <- languages from Rhovanion in a similar naturally evolved, language-related context as modern English <- Old English <- Old Germanic languages such as Gothic. Something similar is also evident, for example, in the (human) names of the dwarves from the Hobbit, which are borrowed from Norse (see the Edda), since the people of Dale and the surrounding area were strongly related to the people of Rhovanion, much as the Scandinavians were to the Germanic tribes on the European continent.

So you always have to keep in mind if the names and words are the actual language of Arda, or a kind of translation by Tolkien to show language affinities, which was Tolkien's real purpose behind all those stories!

In my opinion, this is a very complex topic, and one should definitely meditate on the explanations about it in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings as a basis. Since the subject (languages and proper names) was enormously important to Tolkien, you should definitely read up on it, even if you might not be so focused on languages.

So you always have to look at the names on at least two levels. Are they the original ones, or are they translations or adaptations? With the Elven languages, on the other hand, you can be sure that they are the "original".
(But it has to be said that Sindarin was influenced by Welsh and Quenya by Finnish and Latin. )

In that "language translation chain" Tolkien was also not completely consistent: The proper names from the Adunaic, that is the language of the Numenorians, seem to be reproduced in their original, although the Adunaic is very close to the Westron.
But that may also have something to do with the fact that Adunaic also contains many elements from Elvish languages.
In addition, the Numenoreans and Dunedain generally named their place names and often also personal names in "Elvish".

Incidentally, Tolkien apparently also attached importance to the fact that this process was continued in many translations from English into the respective national language. For example, the typical English place names were also analogously adapted to many European place names, with the goal of making them seem as common and ordinary as possible, so that the reader would immediately feel somehow at home in the Shire, no matter where he came from.
As far as I know, Tolkien, for example, was also relatively good at German (although more of its linguistic precursors) and contributed to the corresponding translations of the place names or at least validated them. (And the proper names of the Rohirrim didn't necessarily have to be adapted further here, as Old English shares many similarities with Old High German words.) I suspect, however, that this was not carried out so consistently in every language...

But to return to the troll names: The Hobbit should perhaps additionally be looked at again as a particularly filtered retelling from the Red Book, namely in its translation as a book for children, although perhaps Bilbo originally described it in a much more realistic and factual way? Who knows, but perhaps Bilbo already had fun recording his experiences rather in fairy tale form? Anyway, the names of the trolls were "in truth" probably not known.
It is also possible that the trolls could only converse in a primitive form of Westron and therefore gave each other very common Westron names. (And these have been translated into our languages accordingly.)
In any case, these should just be typical village idiot names.

Tolkien language experts on the forum, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong somewhere. I may be advanced on the subject, but not an expert yet.


Edit: To someone who has only seen the movies so far, this probably all sounds completely idiotic. But it isn't, on the contrary! 😜
Tolkien was a linguist, and all of his motivation stemmed from that in origin.
Also, you can be sure that EVERY personal name, place name, and "fictional" language is carefully thought out and makes sense one way or another. Because his love of language is at the heart of it all.

By the way, my various nicknames have already been identified as "trolls" in various internet forums. (Weird.) I've never really understood what that means though. 😇
But the bottom line is: Any name can be a troll name today! YOURS TOO!

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

To someone who has only seen the movies so far

You mean the Hobbit movie trolls?