#attercop

English Noun - A Spider.

"Old fat spider spinning in a tree! Old fat spider can’t see me! Attercop! Attercop! Won't you stop, Stop your spinning and look for me?" - from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Attercop comes through the Middle English attercoppe, from Old English átorcoppe, a combination of the elements átor for 'poison', and coppe (alternatively cobbe), an indistinct morpheme referring to round things (compare 'cup' and 'cob', and the German 'Kopf'). A vestige of the word is still to be found in the word "cobweb" (from Middle English coppeweb) still in regular use today. A similar word from the Old English, but which does not come down to modern usage, is the variant átorloppe, which includes rather the element loppe meaning spider (alternatively lobbe, thus also Tolkien's use of "lazy lob"). Cognates for attercop exist in other languages related to English, such as the Danish and Norwegian "edderkopp" and the dialectical Swedish "etterkoppa", both meaning spider.

It looks very similar to Tolkien's style of illustration! With the invisible Mr. Baggins in a sillhouette in a cloud of smoke like the Conversation With Smaug

This post is going to be a little different than my normal fare, since I just got through reading one of the most interesting pieces of philological dissection I've ever come across. In The Hobbit, when Bilbo calls the spiders stupid names, I never really considered why he said what he did -- figured it was just silly names to fit with the relatively childish feel of the book.

Oh boy was I wrong! To quote Jason Fisher, author of said piece, "how far down the rabbit hole it is possible to go!" Truly, Tolkien's words have some of the most complex, interesting histories drawing from over a dozen different languages. In fact, all three names he calls the spiders in The Hobbit -- attercop, lazy lob, and crazy cob -- all mean spider (in some way or another)!

My man actually researched and made up (or resurrected if you'd prefer) three ancient words to mean the same thing, and for a single song no less!

Previously when I had read The Hobbit as a kid, I loved it, but that's because I found it charming and witty and all the other things kids love in simple novels. But now I've got to thinking about it again, and I'm wondering how many little philological in-jokes, references, and connections are hidden away in those pages...

Some places are just...wrong. That feeling to us is something deep, but rarely do we take the time to think on why. But to Tolkien, the reason is clear and usually possesses eight legs and a multitude of bulbous, inhuman eyes. What is it about the lairs and nests of spiders in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that so effectively captures this sense of wrongness?

Effectively, everything about these places upends our normal, comfortable expectations of the outside world. Light, wind, birdsong -- these things we hardly ever notice, but their absence is impossible to ignore. So when we read of a place that "here the air was still, stagnant, heavy, and sound fell dead" instantly, that landscape in our minds takes on that abiding sense of wrongness (LOTR, The Two Towers). So too does a lack of light "like a patch of midnight that had never been cleared away" conjure to mind a visceral, almost instinctual fear (The Hobbit).

And to us, just as it is to the hobbits in either tale, when something is wrong, danger is surely lurking closeby. In our world, such characteristics we intentionally ascribe to such places we wish the public to stay away from, manmade or natural. Unsafe caves and shores are kept lightless -- a darkened window brings no visitors, after all. So too do we keep prisons dark, quiet, and still.

But what is evil without stank? Shelob, arguably the second most evil creature on Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age, lived in a lair so horrid that "out of it came a reek so foul, a sense of lurking malice so intense" that Frodo and Sam physically recoil from it. I wish I could think of a place we intentionally make smell horrid so that people flee from it, but mostly, stench seems to be a side effect of evil in our world. Still, the smell of a place has definitely made me turn about face and run before, so never underestimate a strong funk.