Danne skrev:
Det var väl mitt sätt att (ännu en gång) säga att jag inte direkt tycker att det är den viktigaste faktorn... Men jag vill gärna höra dig uttala dig i frågan, Monsieur Chameau!
Jag har nog inte riktigt bestämt mig än, faktiskt. Jag vill gärna se och begrunda alla de olika faktorerna ett tag innan jag börjar rangordna dem. Men jag tror att jag tycker att allitterationen är lite viktigare än vad du gör i alla fall!
Jag kom förresten på en faktor till att ta hänsyn till, nämligen det faktum att "Baggins" enligt Tom Shippey är ett utbrett slanguttryck för "mellanmål". Detta tror jag definitivt var avsiktligt från Tolkiens sida, med tanke på vilken ära han tycks ha satt i att hitta hobbitnamn som går att koppla ihop med mat. Jag har uppdaterat min lista ovan och lagt till en sjunde punkt.
Det avsnitt ur "The Road to Middle-earth" där Shippey säger bl a detta är så intressant att jag klipper in ett löjligt långt stycke till beskådan. Rekommenderad läsning!
T. A. Shippey: The Road to Middle-earth (ss. 65-67) skrev:
But there is one very evident obstacle to recreating the ancient world of heroic legend for modern readers, and that lies in the nature of heroes. These are not acceptable any more, and tend very strongly to be treated with irony: the modern view of Beowulf is John Gardner's novel Grendel (1971). Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism, a character whose initial role at least is very strongly that of mediator. He represents and often voices modern opinions, modern incapacities: he has no impulses towards revenge or self-conscious heroism, cannot 'hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl' as the dwarves suggest, knows almost nothing about Wilderland and cannot even skin a rabbit, being used to having his meat 'delivered by the butcher ready to cook'. Yet he has a place in the ancient world too, and there is a hint that (just like us) all his efforts cannot keep him entirely separate from the past.
His name, thus, is Baggins, and he lives in Bag End. This latter name had personal and homely associations for Tolkien (see Biography, p. 176). But it is also a literal translation of the phrase one sees often yet stuck up at the end of little English roads: cul-de-sac. Cul-de-sacs are at once funny and infuriating. They belong to no language, since the French call such a thing an impasse and the English a 'dead-end'. The word has its origins in snobbery, the faint residual feeling that English words, ever since the Norman Conquest, have been 'low' and that French ones, or even Frenchified ones, would be better. Cul-de-sac is accordingly a peculiarly ridiculous piece of English class-feeling - and Bag End a defiantly English reaction to it. As for Mr Baggins, one thing he is more partial to than another is his tea, which he has at four o'clock. But over much of the country 'tea', indeed anything eaten between meals but especially afternoon tea 'in a substantial form' as the OED says, is called 'baggins'. The OED prefers the 'politer' form 'bagging', but Tolkien knew that people who used words like that were almost certain to drop the terminal -g (another post-Conquest confusion anyway). He would have found the term glossed under bæggin, bægginz in W. E. Haigh's Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District (London: Oxford University Press), for which he had written an appreciative prologue in 1928. Mr Baggins, then, is at the start of The Hobbit full of nonsense, like modern English society as perceived by Tolkien: he takes pride in being 'prosy', pooh-poohs anything out of the ordinary, and is almost aggressively middle middle-class in being more respectable than the Tooks though rather 'well-to-do' than 'rich'. If he went much further in this direction he would end up like his cousins the 'Sackville-Bagginses' - they, of course, have severed their connection with Bag End by calling it cul-de-sac(k) and tagging on the French suffix -ville! Yet Bilbo's heart is in the right place (also like modern English society as perceived by Tolkien). He likes flowers; he is proud of his ancestor the Bullroarer; if not quite 'as fierce as a dragon in a pinch' he is at any rate no coward; and like his name he is ample, generous, substantial, if undeniably plain and old-fashioned. He has therefore not entirely lost his passport into the ancient world, and can function in it as our representative, without heroic pretensions but also without cynical ironies. He is admittedly a bourgeois. That is why Gandalf turns him into a Burglar. Both words come from the same root (burh = 'town' or 'stockaded house'), and while they are eternal opposites they are opposites on the same level. By the end of The Hobbit, though, Bilbo as burglar has progressed so far as to rub shoulders with heroes, even to be (just) considerable as one himself.*
* I do not know the origin of the personal name 'Bilbo', but can record that on one occasion I found myself using Ordnance Survey map no. 161, of S. Herefordshire, to locate churches of similar date to Ancrene Wisse and preserving fragments of the early Anglo-Norse style of stonework. As I did this my eye moved west from Kilpeck to Wormbridge to Abbey Dore to a hill called 'Great Bilbo'. The Place-Name Survey has not done Herefordshire yet, and I have no explanation for the name; maybe Tolkien had one of his own.
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) Martinus argument. Hur viktig jag tycker att allitterationen är jämfört med övriga faktorer har jag ännu inte uttalat mig om.
Mycket välkommet initiativ detta, Kamelen! Och tack för utdraget ur Shippeys bok som jag inte har själv. Själv hade jag tänkt försöka väcka en diskussion om den hittills föga avhandlade namnändelsen. Jag säger som Danne: Varför måste alla förslag sluta på -er? Jag hoppas att vi kan komma även till detta. Fast detta upplägg var förstås än mera ambitiöst.