The Origin of the Elrond’s Last Homely House in Rivendell
Hello,
A reading friend posed a Tolkien-related word question recently. “We use homely typically to refer to someone who’s a little worse than plain-looking, without being actually ugly. But then there’s Tolkien’s rather mysterious phrase about how Elrond’s place in Rivendell is “the Last Homely House East of the Sea.” Clearly he doesn’t mean it’s not good-looking.”
I’ll come back to Rivendell in a moment but first to homely. It has two distinct but related meanings. The first is that of being like home. In fact you might have used homish in the 1500s or homelike in the 1700s for the same meaning. Homely’s first meaning is that one — something domestic, belonging to the home. It dates to the 1300s and comes from the older Middle English word hom ( home), and before that Old English ham (you’ll find that in the word hamlet for village), and ultimately from the Proto Germanic word haimaz ( home). With time, homely became a way to describe something as being simple and unadorned, like most homes of that time.
By the end of the 1400s homely had picked up a variation of its meaning where that simplicity and lack of adornment twisted slightly to imply the thing was without beauty and perhaps roughly or crudely made. This is unfair as any good crafter or artist will tell you there is true skill in making something so simply that is it beautiful. In North America, particularly New England, this new meaning of homely was extended to describe people who were ill-tempered or ugly. You’ll find it in some English novels of the 1800s, typically describing plain women who were unlikely to marry well as a result of their appearance, but it’s not used often nowadays in British English.
As for Rivendell and the Last Homely House, I was lucky enough to find an excellent and very detailed source of information on this topic at the Tolkien Gateway. It explains, which I remembered from the books, that the elven outpost of Rivendell was founded as a refuge. Elrond’s house itself was called the Last Homely House East of the Sea because it was the last friendly or home-like place before you entered the wilder spaces of the Misty Mountains and beyond. The elves themselves came from west of the sea, so in a way the name was the directions, the address if you will. The name Rivendell referred to its position in a deep river gorge. They also added a piece of information I hadn’t stumbled upon before.
There is some information in a letter by Tolkien about the source of his inspiration for Rivendell. He visited a place called Lauterbrunnen, in Switzerland in 1911, a few years before his experiences as an officer in the British army in World War I. He was only 19 years old at the time but he later wrote “I am … delighted that you have made the acquaintance of Switzerland, and of the very part that I once knew best and which had the deepest effect on me. The hobbit’s journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods, is based on my adventures in 1911.”
It seems reasonable to me that when, after the war, he wrote of a place of utter peace and homely tranquility beside high mountain peaks that he might think back to his adventures hiking and camping in the steep Swiss valleys.
Recently I’ve been editing “Words the Vikings Gave Us” (my third word history book, due out later this year) and you’ll be glad to hear that Tolkien pops up there thanks to his use of Icelandic sagas as source material and inspiration. I also managed to squeeze in attercop as one of the words (fans of “The Hobbit” will know what I mean).
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace
Tweeting as @Wordfoolery
Books about word history https://wordfoolery.wordpress.com/my-books/
Revised for Medium, but originally published at http://wordfoolery.wordpress.com on April 12, 2021.
