Proudfeet

Blogging has been kind of light lately because I’m studying Anglo-Saxon at Signum U and I just don’t memorize things as quickly as I did when I was young. However, this week’s assignment is noun declensions, and the assignment I am at the moment neglecting reminded me of a small point in The Fellowship of the Ring.

Tom Shippey famously pointed out that “Sackville” is really just French for “Baggins”, and judges that “It is a very bad mark for the socially aspiring branch of the Baggins family that they have tried to Frenchify themselves…” (Shippey, p.10)

When Bilbo is calling them down at his Farewell Party, he refers to the family of “Proudfoots”. “ProudFEET!” old Odo contradicts him. (Tolkien, I, i) What’s the subtext, here? I submit that we’re looking at the same phenomenon.  In French, the plural of “pied” is formed by appending an “s”. In Anglo-Saxon, though, “fot” uses the radical consonant declension, and becomes “fet” in the plural.

Bilbo is indulging in a bit of linguistic raillery here, good-naturedly accusing Odo of being like the Sackville-Bagginses. Odo is having none of it, and insists on a proper English form of his name. I suppose he has to insist fairly often, since something like 83% of the Odos in Wikipedia are French.

Works Cited

Shippey, Tom. J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century. Houghton-Mifflin, 2002.

Tolkien, J.R.R., The Lord of the Rings. Houghton-Mifflin, 2002.