Scribble Pig

TLDR at bottom.

Many years ago when I was a teenager (early 90’s) we lived in a newly built house in a small UK cul-de-sac. My Mum has this thing against gas, so we had the house built all electric and no gas supply.

One day I’m home alone and the doorbell goes. There’s a man with a clipboard and he says he’s here to “read the meter”. I point out its the cupboard beside him and he says, “No, that’s the electric one.”. I tell him that’s the only one I know about and I’m on my own so he can’t come in. So he mumbles “I’ll just estimate it then” and walks off to the next house.

This was years ago when I lived and worked in St Louis. I worked in a call center for a major banks mortgage support group. It was actually a pretty sweet job, good benefits, good pay and mostly good co-workers. But of course there was always that one guy.

He was a complete jerk both to all of his co-workers and customers. He was universally hated in the department especially because of his habit of putting his phone on mute and going off on his caller while still on the call with some of the foulest swearing you could imagine (I spent four years in the Marine Corp and even I was impressed and disgusted) and he would do it loud enough that your caller could hear it. Now this was in the late 1980’s so our phones were still just desk top phones with a physical hold button.

Okay, so my friend Chloe just pointed this out, and it’s amazingly accurate:

“Because of the scarcity of Dwarf-women, their secrecy and similarity in appearance to males, and their lack of mention, many Men failed to recognize their existence.”

Okay, so?

Well, Tolkien was a philologist, and a Norsist, and that means he knew Völuspá well enough to pull the names of every dwarf from Dvergatal and he had a pretty firm grasp Old Norse grammar.

In fact, he grasped it well enough that he knew if you dropped an n from a name ending in -inn, it changes from the masculine definite enclitic to the feminine.

Well, what the hell does any of this mean?

Well, I give you the names of the Dwarves from the Hobbit, as they appear in Dvergatal (stanzas 14-16) and in the order they appear:

Dvalins,* Dáinn, Bívurr, Bávurr, Bömburr, Nóri, Óinn, Þorinn, Þráinn, Fíli, Kíli,  Glóinn, Dóri, Óri

Now, in the Hobbit, they’re named as follows:

Dwalin, Dáin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, Óin, Thorin, Thráin, Fíli, Kíli, Glóin, Dori, Ori.

Now, you notice something with the way those names got changed? That’s right, he changed the masculine -inn definite suffix to -in, which is feminine.**

That means that, at least grammatically, Dwalin, Dáin, Thorin, Thráin, and Glóin are female Dwarves.

Since we know Tolkien was meticulous about his grammar, this was done most likely as an in-joke (lol we’re so learnèd about Norse grammar that my comment on Dwarf women being indistinguishable from men is hilarious because of this grammatical funniness)

But there’s a not-inconceivable chance that the Dwarves were using the masculine pronouns in Westron because that’s what the Men who met them used, despite the fact that a third of the company was female, and hey, it’s kinda neat to think he wrote a bunch of Dwarf-ladies going on an adventure.

*-ins is the masculine Genitive definite article suffix in Old Norse

RADICAL SATURDAY

Rover is the sweetest kindest force in my life, my closest ally, my best friend, the family member who molded me as a person who I would absolutely lay down my life for. Please let me show you photos of this perfection incarnate.

This beast is almost done thank god