Wet Tolkien Connections

Yesterday I went on a fruitless quest to find two young White-tailed Sea Eagles allegedly hiding out on the North York Moors.  I didn't find them, perhaps they were away on other errands on behalf of Manwë.  However, on the journey I did pass a few Tolkienesque sign-posts.

Welcome to Wetwang, shame about the modern sign 

Several miles beyond Beverley heading north the road climbs up an incline before reaching a village on a high ridge - this is Wetwang.  When you leave the same village by heading north again towards Malton you once more plunge down, so this village stands proud from the surrounding area on both its northern and southern aspects.  The village is on chalk, so in addition to sheer sides which quickly helps drain away any rainfall, the precipitation also seeps swiftly through the chalk.  So, rather ironically, despite its name, Wetwang is one of the driest villages on the Yorkshire Wolds.  Of course, in The Lord of the Rings Wetwang or Nindalf is a wetland area on the approach to Mordor from the Emyn Muil.  Tolkien is known to have had an interest in Yorkshire place-names, but he may have come closer to Wetwang than seeing the name on a map or in a list of Yorkshire place-names.  Wetwang used to be a station on the rail network, so Tolkien may have passed this way on his family holidays from Leeds University on the way to Filey.

The only wet place in Wetwang

One of the two possible derivations of the name Wetwang is simply the far too obvious ‘wet field’, but in his excellent new book, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, John Garth points out that “the dry-as-dust origin for Wetwang seems to be a Norse legal term for a ‘field of summons for the trial of an action’ [p.109.]”.  Tolkien may have even been making a joke.  His version was correcting a wrong in the real world.  Wetwang SHOULD have meant a wet field, and in the world he created it could and did!

Hobbit-sized Sign to damp area of The Shire

Carrying on in a northerly direction, and not too far out of Malton I passed signposts to first Low and shortly afterwards High Marishes.  Of course the Marish was a low-lying boggy area of the eastern Shire.  On investigation Low and High Marishes seemed to be tiny Hamlets without welcoming village signs, but once I drove past the almost non-existent villages of well-scattered farmsteads I discovered a sign pointing back to them!  One of the buildings I drove past displayed architectural features which showed it must have once been a railway building.  I need to check railway routes to see if Tolkien could have left Leeds for Filey in the early 1920s and passed the Marishes, or did he pass them when he visited Whitby in 1910, or on the way from Harrogate to Holderness in April 1917?    Alternatively, did Tolkien just place an “i” in the middle of marsh to invent a suitably hobbity name for a damp part of the Shire?