The Hobbitonian Anthology

The collection of articles in The Hobbitonian Anthology is a miscellany, but largely linguistic in nature.

Part One of the book is about names: Bilbo, Bag-End, Boffin, Farmer Maggot, Puddifoot, Stoor, Huggins, Tom Bombadil, The Ivy Bush, The Golden Perch, and a bevy of place names in the neighborhood of Evesham, the ancestral home of Tolkien’s mother’s family, the Suffields. The articles in Part One discuss the meanings of these names and their English analogues, both from a linguistic, a geographic, and biographic viewpoint.

The articles in Part Two explore the terms bootless, nine days’ wonder, confusticate and bebother, hundredweight, and leechcraft.

In Part Three, Hooker continues his work in translation studies, looking at the Bulgarian, Belorussian, Czech, Slovak, Dutch, German, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian translations of The Hobbit with a series of comparative pieces on how the translators handled Tolkien’s nomenclature. A number of the articles were originally published in Beyond Bree, but an equal number appear here for the first time.

In his foreword to this newest collection of Hooker’s articles on J.R.R. Tolkien, Jason Fisher casts a backward glance at James Dunning’s foreword to Hooker’s previous collection of essays, A Tolkienian Mathomium. Dunning, says Fisher, “posed the quite reasonable question, ‘Why would one wish, then, to read what Hooker has to say?’ He elaborated three major reasons, each impressively introduced with Latin ordinals, so I hope I may refrain from further embroidery here in Mark’s second collection of essays on Tolkien. I certainly will resist the temptation to launch into a litany of new reasons, each impressively introduced with Old English! But were I to venture a terse answer, it need be no more than to point out that if you liked the last one, you’re going to like this one.”

In his review of A Tolkienian Mathomium, the prominent Tolkien scholar David Bratman said that “the common thread” to the articles “is a cheerful attention to detail.” An early review by “The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza” of the analysis of the origin of the name Tom Bombadil appearing in The Hobbitonian Anthology ranks it as “the best explanation yet of how the name Tom Bombadil came into being.”