Sparrow Alden has published a paper on hyphens in the latest issue of Mallorn, which rejoices in the erudite title “Hyphens as Sub-Lexical Morphemes in The Hobbit“.1 If you’re not a member of the Tolkien Society, you’ll be able to read it for free in a few years, or maybe you can reconstruct it from the pieces she’s already published on her blog.
It’s not easy to make the jump from a quantitative analysis full of numbers and graphs to the level of discourse that humanists expect. Sparrow makes it, and sticks the landing. Her idea is that Tolkien, as translator of a text originally in Westron, needed to come up with English equivalents to highly specific words in hobbit-speech for which we’ve never needed an equivalent. (e.g., “hobbit-speech”) The pattern, therefore, is that hyphenated words are focused in parts of the text that deal with things known well to Bilbo, but not to us. Where things are commonly familiar or commonly strange, the hyphens aren’t necessary to the translation. Very nice!
Let’s see where that idea can take us. I was looking for color-names in The Lord of the Rings the other day. It has ten cases of colors with hyphens in them.
| Color | Mentions |
| grey-green | 7 |
| silver-grey | 3 |
| golden-red | 2 |
| blue-grey | 1 |
| brown-green | 1 |
| black-grey | 1 |
| green-white | 1 |
| green-yellow | 1 |
| red-golden | 1 |
| silver-green | 1 |
“Grey-green” is used for everything from fields of grass to Ents. “Black-grey” is tree bark in Fangorn; “brown-green” is oak trees just about to bud. “Golden-red” is a rowan-tree or a fire. If Sparrow’s idea is correct, the vegetation in Middle-earth is of a slightly different color from anything we’re familiar with, and maybe burns differently. “Silver-grey” is purely Elvish; it’s perfectly reasonable to suppose Elves make things in a color we don’t have. “Silver-green” is Goldberry’s dress; ditto. The two “green-” compounds are Gollum and Shelob; I’m glad to be unfamiliar with them. “Red-golden” is Gandalf’s fireworks, which I regret never seeing. “Blue-grey” is smoke. That’s the only weak spot; smoke ought to be familiar.
All together, the idea that hyphenated words are translations from things we don’t exactly have holds up well.
Pensée d’escalier
The word “orange” does not appear in LotR. “Red-golden” and “golden-red” must be Tolkien’s attempt to come up with an Old-English equivalent of the color. (I don’t know why — according to the OED, its use as a color name was used as early as 1557 so it sneaks in before the deadline.) This is a case where we know the concept perfectly, but Bilbo and Frodo didn’t.
Carl F. Hostetter
The Old English period is usually held to have ended by about 1100 A.D., and 1500 A.D. is regarded as the start of the Modern English period. So no, “orange” was never an Old English word. O.E. instead used such terms as _ġeolurēad_ (yellow-red) for the color orange.