Hobbit Vocabulary

[suncrafter]

I've recently re-read "The Hobbit" (it's one of my favorite books).
Every once in a while I came to a word that I did not know the meaning.

Here is my list of words from "The Hobbit" that I did not know:

Prosy
- Dull; commonplace - arousing no interest, attention, curiosity or excitement.

Porter
- A dark beer resembling light stout, made from malt browned or charred by drying at a high temperature.

Bewuthered
- Appears to be a word unique to "The Hobbit". It's context would suggest it is synonymous with "Bewildered".

Palpitating
- To pulsate with unusual rapidity from exertion, emotion, disease, etc.; flutter: His heart palpitated wildly.

Flummoxed
- Confused; Perplexed

Bracken
- Type of fern or an area overgrown with ferns and shrubs.

Eyrie
- The nest of a bird, such as an eagle, built on a cliff or other high place.

Tuppence
- A very small amount.

Attercop
- A type of spider or a peevish, ill-natured person.

Tomnoddy
- A fool or a dunce.

Slowcoach
- Someone who moves slowly; a "slowpoke"

Turnkey
- A person who has charge of the keys of a prison; jailer.

Solemnities
- State or character of being solemn; earnestness; gravity; impressiveness: the solemnity of a state funeral.

Mattocks
- A digging tool with a flat blade set at right angles to the handle that can also be used as a weapon.

[RickZarber]

I just read this earlier this week and thought it relevant:

"The Hobbit delights in using odd, archaic words, intermixing them with the neologisms of Tolkien's own invention, so that only a scholor familiar with the O[xford] E[nglish] D[ictionary] and various dialectiacal dictionaries [...] could tell which was which: bewildered and bewuthered, upsettled, flummoxed, confusticate and bebother, cob, tomnoddy and attercop, hobbit."

~The History of the Hobbit, p56, John D Rateliff

If the Hobbit is one of your favorite books, and you're interested in that sort of scholastic study of such things, I highly recommend the History books (Mr. Baggins and Return to Bag-End), just published this year.

[Magus]

I learned a long time ago to just look at the context to find out the general meaning of a word. As for those specifically, I'd never heard of the term "prosy" but when I read it it probably didn't matter that much and was easy to figure out what in the heck they were talking about. Some of them are slang terms, anyway. Slowcoach, turnkey, tomnoddy, etc.

[RickZarber]

Found another relevant passage.

"The word 'flummuxed' (or flummoxed) is old slang for confused or perplexed or bewildered. Probably of dialectical origin (Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Cheshire, Sheffield), it seems to have come into vogue in early Victorian times (the OED's earliest citation is from Dickens' Pickwick Papers [1837]) and largely faded from use after mid-century (only one OED citation postdates 1857, and that is from 1892, the year of Tolkien's birth)."

History of the Hobbit p163, text note 10

[Fifthfiend]

Project for Group Participation:

Create a rhyming slang made up entirely of terms taken from Hobbitsian dialect.

[greed]

Originally Posted by RickZarber

Found another relevant passage.

"The word 'flummuxed' (or flummoxed) is old slang for confused or perplexed or bewildered. Probably of dialectical origin (Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Cheshire, Sheffield), it seems to have come into vogue in early Victorian times (the OED's earliest citation is from Dickens' Pickwick Papers [1837]) and largely faded from use after mid-century (only one OED citation postdates 1857, and that is from 1892, the year of Tolkien's birth)."

History of the Hobbit p163, text note 10

Weirdly flummoxed is in use down in Australia pretty regularly(or at least Perth can't say about the East coast). Whether that's Tolkien influencing the language or our tendency to preserve words(particularly slang) that disappeared from England shortly after the convicts left I don't know.

[RickZarber]

Originally Posted by greed

Weirdly flummoxed is in use down in Australia pretty regularly(or at least Perth can't say about the East coast). Whether that's Tolkien influencing the language or our tendency to preserve words(particularly slang) that disappeared from England shortly after the convicts left I don't know.

Is it weird that I find that rather fascinating?