For today’s Friday Feature, I am delighted to share with you one of the nerdiest Tolkien projects I know about. The Tolkien Concordance is Sparrow Alden’s brainchild, where she uses lexinomic data analysis to look for trends within Tolkien’s usage of words in The Hobbit. In particular, she has created 1,534 entries of uncommon words in The Hobbit–specifically, words outside the 10,000 most common words on Project Gutenberg. I know! That’s an amazing number of entries! I have been interested in how to play with Tolkien’s legendarium for a while, and am excited to see where this will go in the future. I will leave you to explore the hundreds of entries, and find little treasures like graphs, games, contests, and onomatopoetic findings.
Sparrow did this project as part of her MA Thesis at Signum University, and has created a powerful tool that can be used by researchers, but can also be expanded and taken in new directions in the spirit of Digital Humanities scholarship. She presented some of her research in the 2015 Signum marathon fundraising day, which I’ve included here.
In comparing the hyphenated words, I have reached the elf compounds. OED attests all of the words below. Only “elf-fire” and “elf-friend” overlap with the elf compounds of The Hobbit!
I am particularly intrigued by words of elven persons. OED has the compound with folk, girl, kingdom, lady, queen, and woman, while The Hobbit has guard, host, king, lord, maiden, and prince.
Now… you know me, Word Fans. I dug a little deeper. “Elven” is a noun, obviously, meaning a female elf, like fox/fixin and monk/minchin. In its second meanning, however, it is a combining appositive or attributive form:
2. Comb. (referring to a kind of imaginary being in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien).
and Elf-king is attested therein.
To be thorough, “elvish” is the OED’s adjective for elf, also spelled “elfish”. Not “elven”. That’s pure JRRT.
elf-arrow
elf-bolt
elf-bore
elf-castle
elf-child
elf-craft
View original post 135 more words
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
I’m delighted to be included in your line-up of fellow scholars on the internet, and flattered that you enjoyed my work. You have confirmed that I am reaching my goal: creating a *useful resource* for all of us to share. While anyone can search through their kindle edition to find where a word is used, I hope that I’m adding value to the word entries with notes on etymology, usage, OED tidbits, and my own observations (entries tagged “brief” are simply the concordance data).
My heart would sing if you and our colleagues comment on different words with links to their own work on that particular concept. Have a great weekend, Word Fans!
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I’m surprised you found a Tolkien blog. It’s really hard to find Tolkien blogs on WordPress.
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It might be interesting to extend the comparison to Bosworth & Toller (available online in some form, or forms). I just checked Henry Sweet’s The Student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (NY: Macmillan, 1897), which I happen to have to hand, and found (with ‘aelf’ beginning with an aesc, and a thorn for ‘th’ in the last two):
aelf~adl nightmare
aelf~cynn race of elves
aelf~sciene elf-sheen, beautiful as a fairy
aelf~siden(n) nightmare
aelf~sogotha hiccup
aelf~thone nightshade (plant)
aelf itself is defined as fairy, elf, incubus
Hmm… Hair appeared while Tolkien was alive, and so did lots of recordings of “Good Morning Starshine”, with Oliver’s making it number 6 on the UK charts in October 1969, but I can’t find any evidence that anyone thought to write a filk variant as “Good Morning Elfsheen”.
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