Hobbit.
(iv)
The Name ‘Thranduil’
The Elvenking is never named within The Hobbit; like the Mayor of Lake Town
(who never does acquire a name), he is always simply referred to by title throughout.
Not until The Lord of the Rings is he given a name, Thranduil, and made father
of the elven member of the Fellowship, Legolas Greenleaf. Even in The Lord of
the Rings most of what we learn about him comes from Appendix B: ‘The Tale of
Years’; he never actually appears in the main story. His name is not easily explicated
but seems to be in early Sindarin (that is, Gnomish/Noldorin, later rationalized as a
dialectical form), and to contain the same element as the place-name Nargothrond:44
Narog + othrond, ‘fortified cave by the river Narog’ [Salo, p. 386; HME XI.414].
The thrand/(o)thrond element, meaning fortified cave (ost + rond), fits very well
with the character as described in The Hobbit, where the chief thing we know about
him is that he’s a king dwelling in a cave; the –uil or -duil suffix might relate to
dûl (hollow), but more likely links to drui, drû (‘wood, forest’) [Gnomish Lexicon,
page 31]. If so, a possible gloss would be ‘(One who lives in) a (fortified) cave in
the woods’.
(v)
The Wine of Dorwinion
It must be potent wine to make a wood-elf drowsy. But this it would seem
was the heady brew of the great gardens of Dorwinion in the warm South, not
meant for his soldiers or his servants, but for the king’s feasts only, and for
smaller bowls, not the butler’s jugs. Soon the chief guard fell asleep and not
long after the butler put his head on the table and snored beside him.
—p. 383.
The presence of wine from Dorwinion in the Elvenking’s halls is yet another piece
of circumstantial evidence demonstrating the affinity in Tolkien’s mind between the
elves of Mirkwood and those of Doriath, Thingol’s people, since such wine appears
in only two of Tolkien’s works, The Hobbit and ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’
[begun circa 1918], and both times in connection with wood-elves. In the alliterative
poem, Beleg the hunter gives this same wine to Túrin and his companions after
he finds them lost in the woods of Doriath:
... their heads were mazed
by the wine of Dor-Winion that went in their veins,
and they soundly slept ...
—‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’,
lines 229b–231a; HME III.11.
Furthermore, we are told that this wine
... is bruised from the berries of the burning South –
and the Gnome-folk know it, and the nation of the
Elves,
and by long ways lead it to the lands of the North.
—ibid., lines 225–227.
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That this wine would stupefy starving human travellers is no wonder, but its potency
is also testified by its effect on Orgof, one of Thingol’s high-ranking thanes
(the figure known as Saeros in the published Silmarillion); it is when he is ‘deep
drunken’ (line 484) on this same ‘wine of Dor-Winion that went ungrudged/in their
golden goblets’ (lines 425–426a) that he taunts Túrin, resulting in his own death.
These two incidents are the only two times in Tolkien’s work when he describes an
elf becoming drunk, and it can hardly be an accident that the same wine (potent indeed)
was involved in both cases.
Unlike many names in The Hobbit, Dorwinion seems easy to explicate: Dor, land
(as in Gondor, Mordor, Dorthonion); winion, wine: Wine-land or Vinland. David
Salo (A Gateway to Sindarin, page 374) considers it a mixed Sindarin-Welsh form
(Welsh gwin, wine) but it might as easily be taken as a case where Sindarin’s inspiration
in real-world Welsh has been less assimilated than usual; many similar
instances are cited in An Introduction to Elvish, Jim Allan et al., pages 49–50.
However, against this we must set a late linguistic essay Tolkien wrote glossing
names in The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he gave a completely different explanation
for the name:
In the Hobbit all names are translated except Galion (the Butler), Esgaroth,
and Dorwinion. Galion and Esgaroth are not Sindarin (though perhaps ‘Sindarized’
in shape) or are not recorded in Sindarin; but Dorwinion is Sindarin
meaning ‘Young-land country’.
Above the gloss he has later written in pencil ‘or Land of Gwinion’. The Gnomish
Lexicon gives gwinwen as a word meaning ‘freshness’ (Parma Eldalamberon
XI.46), with gwion being one of the words meaning ‘young’ (ibid.42). The glosses
given above, while authorial, postdate the creation of these names by decades and
so may be afterthoughts rather than definitive explanations. But if they do indeed
reveal what was in Tolkien’s mind when he first created the name – that is, if Dorwinion
in fact meant ‘Land of Youth’ rather than ‘Wine-land’ when Tolkien first
created the name – then here he is deliberately drawing on Celtic (specifically Irish)
myth. Not only is Tir na nÓg (‘The Land of Youth’) one of the most famous of the
Celtic otherworlds that could be reached through imrama (voyages into the mythic
West), but it was one that particularly interested Tolkien, who intended to devote a
chapter of the unfinished The Lost Road [1936] to ‘a Tuatha-de-Danaan story, or Tirnan-
Og’ (HME V.77), having already mentioned it in his 1924 poem ‘The Nameless
Land’, where he describes Tol Eressëa:
Than Tír na nÓg45 more fair and free,
Than Paradise more faint and far,
O! shore beyond the Shadowy Sea,
O! land forlorn where lost things are,
O! mountians where no man may be!
—lines 49–53; HME V.99–100.
If these associations were present from an early date, it would explain the unusual
potency of the wine from this magical land – compare Dunsany’s Gorgondy, the
wi`ne of the gnomes; so potent that drinking it can kill even a hardened sailor outright
(‘The Secret of the Sea’; The Last Book of Wonder [1916]), so superlative
that it surpasses all other wines and its taste can lure a man into fatal risks to gain
more (‘The Opal Arrow-Head’ [1920], collected in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix [
1947]).
If Dorwinion indeed means ‘The Land of Youth’, then we would expect there to
be only one such enchanted land in all the world. On the other hand, if it simply
means ‘Wine-land’, that name could plausibly be applied to more than one country.
Are we justified in considering the Dorwinion referred to in the Túrin story as the
same land referred to in The Hobbit? Certainly Tolkien does seem to have re-used
the name at least once, when he included in the final paragraph of the 1937 Quenta
Silmarillion a reference to ‘the undying flowers in the meads of Dorwinion’ as part
of Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle (HME V.334); while this fits in perfectly with the
‘Land of Youth’ gloss it cannot at the same time be accommodated to Dorwinion’s
mention in the alliterative poem and The Hobbit – however precious and potent the
wine drunken in Menegroth and the Halls of the Elvenking, it certainly had not been
imported all the way from Elvenhome. Moreover, in the revised version of The Lay
of the Children of Húrin [circa 1923], it specifies that this wine reaches Doriath by
way of dwarven traders:
... berries of the burning South–
the Gnome-folk know it, from Nogrod the Dwarves
by long ways lead it to the lands of the North
for the Elves in exile who by evil fate
the vine-clad valleys now view no more
in the land of Gods.
—lines 539–544a, HME III.111.
These two references could be reconciled if we assume that the vine-clad valleys
of Valinor were known as Dorwinion, as per the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, and the
elves of Beleriand applied the name to a quite distinct wine district in Middle-earth
in memory of that other Dorwinion, but it seems far more probable that Tolkien
simply re-used the name in this section of the Quenta Silmarillion (which is more
closely related to the 1930 Quenta than most of the 1937 text; see Note 32 on p.
429). By contrast, I think the two Dorwinions referred to in the alliterative poem and
the wood-elf chapter of The Hobbit are one and the same, that Tolkien borrowed the
name and concept entire from the old lay and that, given the geographical flexibility
of lands ‘off the map’ to the south, the same referents would serve.
Dorwinion does not appear on any of Tolkien’s Beleriand maps (see ‘The First
“Silmarillion” Map’, HME.[219]–234), nor on the Wilderland map accompanying
The Hobbit (see DAA.[399] and the maps on Plates I and II), nor on the large foldout
map of Middle-earth published with volumes one and two of The Lord of the
Rings. However, it does appear on Pauline Baynes’ version of the Middle-earth map
published in 1970, at the mouth of the River Running on the north-west shore of
the Sea of Rhûn (in the exact same spot where the label ‘Sea of Rhûn’ appears on
Tolkien’s own map, drawn for him by his son Christopher). This is one of a number
of new names Tolkien provided Baynes for her map in 1969, not all of which
were placed correctly, as noted by Christopher Tolkien (Unfinished Tales, pages
261–2),46 but in this case we can confirm its placement thanks to the same unpublished
late linguistic essay already cited, in which Tolkien comments that Dorwinion
‘was probably far south down the R. Running, and its Sindarin name a testimony to
the spread of Sindarin: in this case expectable since the cultivation of vines was not
known originally to the Nandor or Avari’.47 In any case, its placement here, even if
in accordance with Tolkien’s instructions, is a late accretion and almost certainly not
what he intended at the time he wrote The Hobbit, when the surrounding geography
was as yet undetermined; on Baynes’ map, Dorwinion is no further south than the
Necromancer’s tower (Dol Guldur) and roughly equal to the southern edge of the
Wilderland map – hardly ‘in the warm South’ (a location more like the later Ithilien
would seem to be more in keeping with Tolkien’s original conception, given his descriptions
of the latter’s climate in The Lord of the Rings).