ettenmoors?

This second time through The Lord of the Rings, I have found myself caught up on a relatively obscure point. It comes on the fifth day after the attack on Weathertop, and as there is no way over the river except by the bridge, Strider remarks:

“I am afraid we must go back to the Road here for a while. We have now come to the River Hoarwell, that the Elves call Mitheithel. It flows down out of the Ettenmoors, the troll-fells north of Rivendell, and joins the Loudwater away in the South. Some call it the Greyflood after that. It is a great water before it finds the Sea.”¹

Strider helpfully glosses the Ettenmoors as “troll-fells.” The more familiar component here is moor, which means a desolate, sometimes marshy and peaty land with poor soil, comparable to a bog, marsh, or fen. It corresponds to fells. Then etten must be related to troll in some way. The word derives from the Old English eoten, and it is commonly glossed into modern English as giant. Indeed, the trolls which Bilbo faces are quite large. But there is another word which often receives the same gloss: ent. This is a bewildering fact. For in Tolkienian usage the ents are the walking, talking shepherds of the trees, and beyond size they are most unlike the trolls. Over and against rash, crude, and wicked trolls, ents are measured, thoughtful, and principled. They are friends, not foes of the free peoples, and their dwindling is a terrible loss to creation. At risk of oversimplification, it is clear that, in the professor’s mind, ettens are bad and ents are good.

Nonetheless, they are both rendered “giant”, and even Tolkien was not free from such confusions, if only for a time. In the earliest map of Middle-earth for The Lord of the Rings, those lands north of Rivendell are first named the Entish Lands.² They are renamed to the Trollfells, then Bergrisland, before the final Ettenmoors. The former survives as a gloss, but as for the latter, a bergrisi is a mountain giant from Norse myth. The word risi appears quite synonymous with the perhaps better known jǫtunn, whose kind inhabits Jǫtunheimr. But the translation giant is quite problematic, as the jǫtnar are not necessarily prodigious in size.

It might be said that the jǫtnar are Norse cousins of the eotenas, for jǫtunn and eoten are close cognates. And here, too, the gloss of giant obscures as much as it elucidates, for one finds that the Anglo-Saxon poetic mind recognises the eoten as a wondrously skilled blacksmith.³ We are told of how Beowulf wields the eald sweord eotenisc, the “old eotenish sword” taken from the cave of Grendel-dam (l. 1558). The phrase appears at least twice more in Beowulf, notably with Ongentheow’s helm cloven by the eotenish sword of Eofor thegn of Hygelac (l. 2979). Nonetheless, eotenas appear to be quite large; speaking of Beowulf’s eald sweord eotenisc, we are told that hit wæs mare ðonne ænig mon oð to beadulace ætberan meahte, that is, it was more than any other man might bear into battle (l. 1560–61). Interestingly, Mees notes a possible etymological association with gluttony, comparing Proto-Germanic *etunaz, which is linked with *etanan, “to eat”.⁴ One is reminded of the trolls’ fixation and prolonged discussion over their captured Dwarven meal.

Unlike in Old Icelandic, where jǫtunn and þurs appear mostly interchangeable, among the Anglo-Saxons eoten and þyrs seem to remain largely distinct categories. The þyrsa are the most negatively connoted, with common associations to sorcery and the demonic aspect of the supernatural. For instance, the glossary in the Brussels codex of Aldhelm’s De Virginitate gives þyrsa oððe wyrmgalera, or “þyrsa or snake charmers” for marsorum, a Latin tribe renowned for witchcraft and the like. In his 19th century glossaries Thomas Wright associates the þyrs with the Latin orcus, a personification of death; caci, the fire-breathing giant who famously terrorised the Aventine Hill; and the colossi and the cyclopes. The most famous þyrs is Grendel, and his description is thoroughly monstrous, having scales and welts like steel. He is a sceadugenga, a “shadow walker.” But the boundaries of this ontology remain unclear. Grendel is also called an eoten and descended from Cain. The progeny of that first murderer are the eotenas and elves and orcs and giants—this time a loan from Latin gigantes—and these are the enemies of God.

So also are the trolls in Tolkien, those corruptions of the Enemy. It is then no wonder that, no doubt thinking of Grendel, he should understood etten to mean something like a troll. But the helm of Ongentheow cloven by the eald sweord eotenisc is an entiscne helm. If eotenisc arms are so enormous, are also the armours of entas of an equal weight, and the man’s head so large to bear such a helm? No; but entas are quite different, and so are the Ents…