A new blog-post series has started, on Tolkien’s early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. Here are the first two short essays on the early days of the text and story…

Tolkien Begins the Sequel to “The Hobbit”.

Tolkien’s “The Return of the Shadow,” 1937-1939.

They appear to provide a good introductory overview, though not a huge amount of depth. While it’s true that, as a name, “Bingo Bolger Baggins is somewhat of an absurdity” to modern post-war ears, if might not have seemed so in the late 1930s. According to the dictionaries the game seems to have emerged as ‘Lotto’ from the mid 1920s onward and had some overlap with lotteries. But so far as I can tell ‘Lotto’ only became ‘Bingo [Cards]’ when these arrived as a thing after the war. Bingo halls were only a big thing after the mass arrival of TV in the later 1950s, meaning that loss-making cinemas were converted to bingo halls in the early 1960s.

There appears to be a good philological reason for the original choice of “Bingo” (Frodo’s original name) and I suspect there would be others found if I dug deep enough. But Tolkien was definitely not naming his hero after the gambling dens of the local housewives.

“Trotter” (the original Aragorn) is also mentioned in the blog posts and his characteristics also have philological roots, though these lead into Northern myth and lore rather than the linguistics via the name. Also south, to Jason.

More authoritative accounts will of course be found in the Hammond & Scull three-volume Companion and Guide, aka Chronology and Reader’s Guide, not to be confused with their The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion.

Also on matters Tolkish, I’m pleased to report that I’ve scraped up enough silver pennies to buy the new John Garth book on Tolkien’s various topographies and topophilias, emboldened by its increasingly excellent reader reviews. It’s very rare that I buy a book at full-price and in hardcover, but this has become a ‘must-read’. It should be arriving in the Amazon locker next week.