The name Tolkien (really GQ, not CS)

Can anyone tell me the origin of the name Tolkien? It’s always struck me as vaguely exotic, and somehow well suited to appearing on book covers in large, exotic fonts. Somehow, if his name had been Robert Brown or John Smith, it just wouldn’t have had that same flavor on a title page.

Yet, as far as I can determine, J.R.R. Tolkien seems to have been as English as England itself.

What’s the straight dope?

According to Planet-Tolkien:

and from TolkienSociety.org:

I hope those help.

The first explanation seems rather implausible, since it connects the family to both German nobility (the Hohenzollerns) and French nobility. Since the English Tolkiens were not particularly noble, but the idea in that story is that they’re former nobility, descendants of a great family that saved Vienna from the Turks. It then goes on to claim that the family was deeply intertwined with history, and that its members fled Germany for France, and France for England shortly thereafter. It’s a very interesting, very hopeful story, but many people who claim to be descended from nobility are not, and the claim needs to be carefully examined before it is accepted.

The fact that the name is translated into the native language of the country Tolkien’s ancestors fled to is also very Tolkienish, and the ideas of nobles taking flight, fallen kings and the defense of the civilized world from an infidel horde all occur in his work.

Googling ‘von Hohenzollern tollkûhn’ finds mostly versions of the Tolkien story and a few German pages. Nothing seemed to suggest that any of the von Hohenzollerns were dubbed Tollkûhn, but absence of evidence is not sufficient to disprove the story.