All right you two - find a room.
Regarding names from Tolkien’s writings: I know the old man considered himself to be writing–or really, recreating–a mythological history of the English people; that is, he considered the stories he was making up to be representative of what the English would have know as their cultural epics a la “The Iliad” and such, if such works had been passed down to later generations. (There’s a lot of jive on this in the History of Middle Earth volumes, if I remember right; I read that stuff years ago.) And Tolkien used real old Anglo-Saxon dialects for his fictional languages.
So given that, I wouldn’t be surprised to find at least some of these names being used and passed on entirely unrelated to his works. I bet some of them were probably being used before he ever wrote a word.
For example, I know the name Eärendil has some currency still, usually spelled like Arundel or something similar. (I think that specific example was mentioned in the HoME volumes.) So I guess everyone can just go nuts with the names without feeling self-conscious, 'cause there’s probably lots of folks in far corners of the British Isles who have the same names. And who’ve never read The Lord Of The Rings. Or, possibly, have never read.
So Thorin Oakenshield? Yeah, I believe it.
Bumped.
This singer, named after a Tolkien character, performed at Bach Festival at Baldwin Wallace University this weekend, but unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to hear her: http://www.luthienbrackett.com/#!about/c1enr
I just looked for any information that’s available about how many women are named Arwen in the U.S. There are certainly more than 500 of them. As you can see from the following websites, the proportion of babies named Arwen in the U.S. has been about 85 per 1,000,000 babies over the past 15 years or so. There are about 4,000,000 babies born each year in the U.S. So the number of babies given the name Arwen over that time is about 15 times 4 times 85. And there are certainly lots of them who were born more than 15 years ago. One that I know was born about 1972:
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/infantcare/conditioninfo/Pages/born.aspx
Living in Anne Arundel county I know that Arundel means “Nest of Eagles” perhaps just similar etymology?
Don’t see “Arundel” listed as either a Sindarin or Quenya word:
http://www.jrrvf.com/hisweloke/sindar/online/sindar/dict-sd-en.html
http://www.rialian.com/quenya-english.htm
Anne was the daughter of the Baron of Wardour!
Since this thread was last active, I’ve had a kid in one of my camp groups named “Serenity”. I didn’t ask her to be sure, but stopping to think about it, she was about the right age to be named after the ship.
Well done, doc. Well done.
And the Islets of Langerhans, as we all know, are at the Government Publishing Office in Washington, D.C.
At what latitude and longitude?
I know somebody who gave their kid the middle name of Atriedes.
I knew (well, heard tell of…the son of a friend of my first wife) a kid named Strider. And this was decades before the movies came out, so this is some hard-core geekiness.
He had a sister whose middle name was Evenstar.