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Tolkien studied languages, so he would’ve understood and probably appreciated how often things are named purely based on what they do or their immediate aesthetic values. Language is all about communication after all. Sometimes that necessitates complexity, but it should always be as simple as possible without sacrificing nuance.
the vast majority of place names irl are just objective descriptors, optionally with that having been twisted through time.
Exeter means “castle on the river exe”, starting as “esceancaster”; Aberdeen means “mouth of the river dee”; Amsterdam means “dam in the amstel”; Stockholm means roughly “log islet” as it started on the tiny central island which they put logs around.
And of course in germanic areas there’s the very common “burg/borg”, which just means that the place has a castle/fortification.
In fairness, Mount Doom has multiple different names. Source: Finished the Silmarillion for the first time last night. :)
Orodruin, Amon Amarth, Mount Doom.
I used to parrot the “created multiple languages, named the place Mount Doom” meme up until I started getting deeper into Tolkien lore. Now I’m the obnoxious one that points out all the other names for Mount Doom, as well as translating other “cooler” names to show that they’re all similarly named (my favorite being Khazad Dum, or “Dwarf Hall”, followed by Cirith Ungol, or “Spider Cleft”).
This is also fairly common in real life, for example, this map of Japan with the Prefectures translated to English.
I want to go to How Good? now to find out.
“can you fetch the fork lift? I need to get a palette of troops from the army warehouse”
I think this is the same in pretty much every country (well, once you add in people’s names, like Jacksonville or Virginia), but it’s a little more difficult to find because you have to use an etymology dictionary instead of just looking up the meaning of Chinese characters in a regular dictionary of that language because they’re are still in current use.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Kingdom_county_name_etymologies?wprov=sfla1
still hill huh, sounds dangerous
Nourishing joy sounds like a pleasant place.
…yeah, i’d rock thousand leaves…
On my way to Capital City.
Got to stop at How? Good on the way
Yeah, it’s like The Grand Canyon has a bunch of other names, but the one we stuck with is just: “The grand canyon. You know which one I’m talking about.” Sometimes the boring but obvious name works. It’s more believable that the people in this world renamed stuff to something obvious.
Mount Doom is also where the band Amon Amarth got their name from which is funny because they don’t have any songs with Tolkienian fantasy and they’re not really even huge Tolkien fans. It just sounded cool
I was gonna make a snarky comment about how Treebeard has a cool Elvish name, then I looked it up and “Fangorn” literally means “Treebeard” in Sindarin 🤷♂️
Yeah but his original name really is unpronouceable because it would take literal days to spell out, if I remember correctly. So it’s not completely unrealistic for others to want a shorter version. Like when Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu gets shortened to Taumata Hill in english.
Bad guy: Sauron
Secret bad guy: Sarumon
Didn’t at some point he say “some call me Treebeard”?
