I found an interesting conjunction of Tolkien and the place-name of Stoke-upon-Trent. A review of Mark T. Hooker’s book A Tolkienian Mathomium: A Collection Of Articles On J.R.R. Tolkien And His Legendarium (2008) informed me that…

Hooker devotes an entire [ten page] chapter to the Shire place-name “Stock,” which he connects to English place-names, and eventually (via [the writer] Aelfric) to sacred trees (and St. Boniface and Owen Glendower), concluding that “Stocc would, therefore, appear to be the OE [Old English] name applied in pre-Christian times to a religious site”.

From Stocc comes Stoke. The reviewer demurs on the connection with a pre-Christian sacred grove, although obviously the original Stoke was sited at what is now the Minster where two large streams meet the Trent, and it’s well-attested that such ‘three watercourses meeting’ sites had symbolic meaning to pre-Christians — it would be a natural site to have once had a (sacred) grove serving Penkhull on the hill above. The reviewer adds that we cannot be sure that when Aelfric talked of “stock and stone” he meant ‘enclosed groves’ of trees and ancient standing-stones. The reviewer points to the 19th century uses of the phrase “over stock and stone” in Grimm’s tales [in English as German Popular Stories, 1823, in which the phrase is found translated], Asbjornsen and Moe’s Norwegian folktales [two possible books, 1847 or 1852?], and in later 19th century Swedish and Flemish [1873] poetry.

I find it in an 1837 edition of a Berlin bulletin on foreign literature (Literatur des Auslandes, No. 129), in an article on what appears to have been an English book on “Herne, the hunter”, which would be congruent with hunters who go ‘over stock and stone’ — meaning to traverse open country fast and directly, without reference to roads, tracks or local borders. The hobbits in LoTR do this, you’ll recall — resting in a sheltering wood, trespassing on a fearful farmer’s land, and later fatefully encountering a single standing-stone on the Barrow Downs.

The alliterative Gawain poet has it in Pearl (“We meten so selden by stok other ston”) and Tolkien echoes this in Treebeard’s parting lines “It is long, long since we met, by stock or by stone” (discussed by Shippey, Road to Middle-earth, page 181). Davenport (Art of the Gawain-poet) remarks that the poet evidently uses or alludes here to a “common idiom” of the time, but says nothing more about it. This would mean it was a “common idiom” in north and mid Staffordshire at that time (c. 1379 for Pearl, the phrase probably first encountered by the poet circa the early 1340s in the context of hunting). Here it would indicate liminal points in the open country, sheltered wooden enclosures for newborn white lambs, or high boundary-stones offering far and glittering views — both of these work as fitting allusions for a poem such as the Pearl.

The 1952 Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable does not have it, and nor does the 1905 edition. In early examples I find it in a German collected edition of Goethe (1829), and an 1813 book-length account of the French retreat to the Niemen (title translated) has it, “…if at times there was an alarm at night, then it went [quickly] over stock and stone, and the [French, their torch-bearing scouts?] came close several times”. The first edition of Grimm’s Fairy-tales was 20th December 1812, so the text of this 1813 book could well have been written before encountering Grimm.

It can be found in a Faroes [Norse] ballad of battle between a boy Loki and a giant (Hammershaimb, Faeroiske Kvaeder, edited for the Nordiske Litteratur-Samfund, Copenhagen, 1851)…

[the boy Loki] struck off giant’s other shin.
He struck off the giant’s other shin [note: phrase is deliberately repeated].
And tossed in-between [i.e. between the lower legs] a stock and a stone [‘stokk og stein’]

But this would be presumably humorous, alluding to the vast size of the giant, so big that the distance of “a stock and a stone” could fit between his legs. A later superstitious folk-remedy for hand-pains in the Faroes does assume a small hand-sized stick and stone, true… but a puny stick and stone would not fit with giant’s size in the boy-Loki ballad.

The alternative un-poetic idea from the linguists is that stocc was simply a ‘wooden stick or post’ or perhaps even a mere ‘large log or stump’. Or simply just ‘a place’. Yet this is actually not incongruent with a known small enclosure, which would have been partly fenced and gated with wood and perhaps had a wooden stile. Especially if it was being used to enclose live-‘stock’ animals. In the context of the folk-tale idiom for rapid movement across open country, many such obstacles as fences and stiles would have been encountered and leaped ‘over’ (if on horseback, or if a large and nimble lad). Recall also the need, on moorland, to mark paths with wooden posts that would stand out above snow-drifts.

Anyway, those are my first thoughts. I can’t afford the £11 for Hooker’s book A Tolkienian Mathomium, but will provide an update on this if I can eventually get a copy.