Sméagol — what’s in a name?

On Facebook today, Marcel Aubron-Bülles sent out an appeal to linguistically minded Tolkien scholars, tapping me on the shoulder along with Michael Drout, Thomas Honegger, Rainer Nagel, and others. His question: “Sméagol is derived from ‘smygel’, in itself an OE noun (see Bosworth/Toller). Is ‘Sméagol’ therefore a modernised adaption, i.e. a noun?”

Michael Drout was the first to weigh in, suggesting Sméagol derives not from smygel “burrow, cave” but from sméagan “to inquire, investigate, be curious about”, on the grounds that Sméagol was “the most inquisitive member of his community, and he got his name before the murder of Déagol (which means ‘secret’).”

Then, Marcel quoted from the guide to the people, places, and things that Tolkien prepared for translators in the mid-1960’s: “Smials. A word peculiar to Hobbits (not Common Speech), meaning ‘burrow’ […]. It is a form that the Old English word smygel ‘burrow’ might have had, if it had survived. The same element appears in Gollum’s real name, Sméagol.”

To this, I would add that Tolkien had already addressed this point in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, where he wrote:

This assimilation [i.e., the same as in “the forms and spellings of place-names in Rohan”] also provided a convenient way of representing the peculiar local hobbit-words that were of northern origin. They have been given the forms that lost English words might well have had, if they had come down to our day. Thus mathom is meant to recall ancient English máthm, and so to represent the relationship of the actual Hobbit kast to R. kastu. Similarly smial (or smile) ‘burrow’ is a likely form for a descendant of smygel, and represents well the relationship of Hobbit trân to R. trahan. Sméagol and Déagol are equivalents made up in the same way for the names Trahald ‘burrowing, worming in’, and Nahald ‘secret’ in the Northern tongues. [App. F, II]

And there is a relevant passage from Tolkien’s letters also, in a 1967 draft letter to “Mr. Rang”, who had written Tolkien to inquire about his nomenclature. Here, he notes that Old English is the source for:

a few […] survivals in Hobbit-dialect derived from the region (The Vale of Anduin to the immediate north of Lórien) where that dialect of the Northmen developed its particular character. To which may be added Déagol and Sméagol; and the local names Gladden River, and the Gladden Fields, which contains A.S. glædene ‘iris’, in my book supposed to refer to the ‘yellow flag’ growing in streams and marshes. [Letters, #297]

Sméagol is not attested in the Old English corpus, though there are many words built from the same roots. In addition to sméagan (as Mike Drout has already noted), there are sméah “creeping in, penetrating”, sméalic “searching, penetrating”, smúgan “to creep, crawl”, sméa(g)ung “search, inquiry, investigation”, etc. But since *sméagol isn’t attested, how do we know whether it would have derived from a noun or a verb. Indeed, how do we know what part of speech *sméagol itself would have been? These questions are at the heart of what Marcel was trying to figure out.

The key lies in its mate, déagol, which is a genuine Old English word. As Mike and others have pointed out, it means “secret, dark, obscure, hidden”, quite suitable for any friend of Sméagol’s. Appropriately enough for an associate of Gollum, déagol also appears in a riddles in the Exeter Book (“Hyrre ic eom heofone, || hateþ mec heahcyning / his deagol þing || dyre bihealdan”). So, if anything can, déagol ought to shed light on *sméagol.

Déagol (also dégol, díegol, dígol, etc.) is an adjective deriving from Primitive Germanic *dauȜilaz. There are cognates in Old High German tougal(i) “hidden”, Old Norse dul “concealment” and dylja “to hide, conceal” (which exhibits palatalization and would probably have been *dylga at some earlier point), and even Modern Swedish dold. The Old English word also survived into Middle English as diȜel. Adjectives ending in –ol normally derive from verbs, and the suffix is indicative of tendency, inclination, ability, etc. Besides déagol (from díegian “to hide” + –ol), there are plenty of other examples: béogol “agreeable”, fretol “greedy”, hetol “hateful”, meagol “earnest, mighty”, numol “capable, nimble”, sprecol “talkative”, sweotol “plain”, þancol “thoughtful”.

This suggests very strongly that *sméagol could well have been a genuine adjective (derived from Primitive Germanic *smauȜilaz), even though it is nowhere recorded. It would apparently have been formed from sméagan “to consider, meditate, examine” + –ol. It probably would not have come from smúgan. That verb could have given rise to an adjective *smugol “creeping, crawling, gliding”, and indeed the Middle English smuhel “lithe, gliding, stealthy, slippery”, a hapax legomenon occurring only in the Ancrene Wisse, is its likely descendant (and cp. Old Irish smugall). This is a word that probably attracted Tolkien’s eye at some point, considering his work on the Ancrene Wisse. But indirectly, the verb sméagan probably did arise metaphorically from smúgan “to creep, crawl”, with its more appropriate sense of Gollumishness. And cp. Old Norse smjúga and of course, Tolkien’s Smaug. Although *sméagol is not recorded, the element sméa– is attested in the adjective sméa-þancol “contemplative, sharp-witted”. And although an adjective *sméagol hasn’t survived in English, at least the noun smygel has. I’ve wondered whether this may be the source of the Germanic/Slavic/Jewish surname Smigel, Smiegel, Schmiegel, etc. Does anyone know?

So, to bottom line this meandering meditation on our slippery friend. The name Sméagol has not been modernized. It retains the form of an unattested but straightforward Old English adjective, precisely analogous to Déagol. And I agree that Mike Drout is probably right that Sméagol derives directly from sméagan (with the addition of a suffix of tendency), and not from smúgan or smygel directly. Moreover, we must conclude that Tolkien was a little bit, well, wrong, when he suggested that Sméagol had to do with burrowing, creeping, worming, etc. Or rather, that sense is there, but it’s buried deeper (appropriately enough), underneath the more immediate sense of inquiring, investigating, being curious about things.

Are the grammar books all right about alright?

I used to be a bit of a perfectionist when it came to language. I was known — infamous, I should say — for correcting everyone’s grammar, from the time I first learned what grammar was, all the way to the time I started learning about the differences between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Nowadays, I’ve given up correcting people’s grammar — not because it doesn’t need correcting (!), but because I’ve learned that it is practical usage, even incorrect usage, that moves the wheels of language. If people are going to start spelling nightlight as nitelite, well, why not? If people want to use they in the singular, well, this has a long pedigree in English usage (if it was good enough for Shakespeare). And if people want to spell all right as one word, alright, let them.

For the record, I spell it all right, and consequently, it tends to catch my eye when people spell it alright. This is what happened while I was reading a political commentary by the well-known journalist, David Frum. The title of the column is, “In South Carolina, the kids are not alright” [link]. The title doubly caught my eye, and you might be able to guess why. Frum adopts the renegade spelling alright, referring to a song by The Who in which it is so spelled. But the same phrase is the title of a successful, award-winning film, The Kids Are All Right. See that? Thirty-five years more recently than the song, and thirty-one more recently that a documentary film about The Who with the same title, the newer film reverts to the “correct” spelling. My guess is that the 1965 song was the inspiration for the title of the 2010 film, but I don’t know that for a fact.

But although (all though) I write all right, it doesn’t bother me when others write alright. Why not? Apart from the fact that the linguistic winds are always (all ways) blowing change into the sails of the language, and apart from the fact that the compound form is already (all ready) deeply entrenched in popular usage, there is a long, legitimizing history of this form. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has it, marked obsolete, and dates one of its earliest uses (c. 1230) to a passage in the Ancrene Riwle. The OED gives the passage thus, “And alriht so of þe oðre wittes”. In fairness, some editors of this work have transcribed it al riht (two words). For example, J.R.R. Tolkien [1], and much more recently, Bella Millett [2]. In fact, most editions of the Ancrene Wisse have it as two distinct words, though I have seen one or two which have it as a single compound word, and it was obviously also (all so) the case with the edition consulted by the staff of the OED. How can we answer which is right, among all the extant manuscripts, and with all the editorial preferences imposed on them? [3]

But this is rather beside the point, or perhaps it even reinforces the point, as I hope some of the parenthetical phrases in the preceding paragraph suggest. All right comes down to us from the Middle English al riht(es) or alriht(es), in turn from Old English eal(l) riht or eal(l)riht. Certainly, the origin of this, and all of these similar collocations, is as two distinct words, but it has been written as one for nearly as long as it has two. In my view, there is no reason for anyone to feel guilty about writing alright, all right? It’s a perfectly good word, albeit (all be it) wrong by convention. But grammar is a fragile thing. Tomorrow, who knows?

And now, I am wondering: have today’s francophones started writing çava (as one word)? After all, the OED gives alamode as a perfectly good alternative for à la mode.


[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, MS Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 402. Early English Text Society, No. 249. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. See, for example, p. 36, l. 21f., where Tolkien reads al riht al swa (“all right also”).

[2] Bella Millett, ed. Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts. Early English Text Society, No. 325. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. This is essentially an edition updated from Tolkien’s of forty years earlier. Compare to [1] the passage on p. 27, here read a bit differently, as al riht alswa. By “corrected edition”, does she mean to say she’s correcting previous editors or correcting the scribes? :)

[3] To give one notable example: Frances M. Mack and Arne Zettersten, eds. Ancrene Riwle: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, BM MS Cotton Titus D xviii. Early English Text Society, No. 252. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Here, to compare to the same passage in the previous notes, we have yet a third transcription: alriht alswa. Arne Zettersten also discusses alriht, again giving it as a single word, in his Studies in the Dialect and Vocabulary of the Ancrene Riwle. Lund Studies in English, No. 34. Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1965. This was the translation into English of Zettersten’s doctoral thesis, and it bears all the signs of influence and advice from Tolkien, a friend and colleague to Zettersten at the time. I am tempted to call Zettersten a protégé of Tolkien’s, but I am not quite sure it would be accurate. But Mack and Zettersten’s edition came just one year after Tolkien’s, as the Early English Text Society attempted to work its way through all of the extant manuscripts.