Origin of Baggins

[Desi Baggins]

How did Tolkien come up with the surname Baggins?

I read that baggings was slang for snacks in Tolkien's time. Since snacks and food are always on a Hobbits mind...drop a g and get Baggins.

What do all the language lovers out there think of that?

[Magpie]

Only have a moment, but the first place I might look is in Letters. Do you have that Desi?

[Desi Baggins]

I don't have Letters....I found this idea of baggings in a book called The Magical Worlds of The Lord of the Rings. It doesn't say where it got that info from specifically it just list at the end of the book all of it's referances. The Letters is referanced.

[Magpie]

hmmm... I was going to look through the index since I had some free time, but I can't seem to find my copy.

[Vanye]

I checked the index in 'Letters' & none of the references said anything about the origin of the name Baggins. But in Magical World' it says that Tolkien's aunt lived on a 'cul-de-sac called Bag End. Cul-de-sac means "end of the bag" or "dead end". It seems as if "The Annotated Hobbit has something about the origin of the name also, though I might have imagined that ! Vanye

[Desi Baggins]

I also read that part about the cul-de-sac. I love the way Tolkien twisted words and made names for people and places.

[Stormrider]

JRR Tolkien The Author of the Century by Tom Shippey also mentions the cul-de-sac in reference to Bag End:

As part of the ongoing and French-oriented snobbery of English society on Tolkien's day (and later), municipal councils were (and still are) in the habit of indicating a street with no outlet as a "cul-de-sac". This is French, of course, for 'bag end', though the French actually call such a thing an impasse, while the native English is 'dead end'. It is a bad mark for the socially aspiring branch of the Baggins family that thy have tried to Frenchify themselves and disguise their origins: they call themselves the Sackville-Bagginses, as if they came from a ville (or villa?) in a cul-de-sac(k) (Bag End).

Then in Author of the Century,Tom Shippey state this about the name of 'Baggins':

Baggins is incipiently vulgar. One of the Trolls, who are very vulgar, is called Huggins, indeed Bill Huggins, not so far from Bilbo Baggins. Huggins meanwhile is a diminutive form of a personal name (Hugh, Hugo), like the common surnames, Watkins, Jenkins, Dickens, and so on. Baggins, however, isn't, though it is a common word in two senses. It is 'common' in not being standard, therefore vulgar, low-class, dialectal; and it was in common use across the whole of Northern England to mean the food a labourer takes with him when he goes off to work, or anything eaten between meals, but especially, says the OED, afternoon tea 'in a substantial form'. (bold my emphasis) Tolkien certainly knew this, and knew also that the OED had tided the word up from 'baggins' to 'bagging' for the word is cited and defined in the New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District to which he had written an appreciative prologue in 1928.

[Vanye]

Gosh I never even thought of looking in "Author" (which I have read). I guess we will track down all the info that is out there eventullly w/so many of us working on it: we shall leave no stone unturned! I do still believe that there is something in "The Annotated Hobbit", of course it may be references to the passages we have tracked down in other books. but then again it may be just my "part-timers" at work here. If there's more to be found out there this pack of bloodhounds will track it down. Guessing the lesson here is don't pose a question if you do not wish to know everything there is to know on the subject!! Vanye ;D