Alan Sisto

We did some salvage work this morning, Pippin and I. There are lots of things floating about.

It was Pippin who found two small barrels washed up out of some cellar or storehouse, I suppose.

When we opened them, we found they were filled with this, as fine a pipeweed as you could wish for, and quite unspoiled.

Ergo, pipe weed is tobacco, plain and simple.

Well, I think the answer is linguistics as usual.

I mean, if you don't know what the answer is with Tolkien, that's probably it.

See, tobacco is a word that comes to English through Spanish from the late 1500s, in part from Caribbean languages.

Tolkien usually tried to minimize these types of words when he wrote The Lord of the Rings.

I mean, he tried to minimize Latin words that would have been old enough.

He definitely tried to avoid these New World words, except it seems for potato, which also is from the Spanish, in this case, patata, from a Carib language of Haiti, batata, both referring to the sweet potato, but it was

eventually extended to apply to the common white potato.

The word is still quite Spanish, and it had been for about 400 years before Tolkien had Sam talking about his favorite food.

On another note, folks, tomato doesn't appear in either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.

That's just a movie thing.

I don't know about that much, but it doesn't drive me out of the room the way the others do.

And finally, if it's not bad form to do so, I'll quote my book, the book that Sean and I wrote together, Why We Love Middle Earth.

And he really loved smoking.

In a 1966 interview with the Daily Telegraph magazine, he was recorded as saying, every morning I wake up thinking, good, another 24 hours pipe smoking.

He was even smoking during the interview, not so strange for the 60s perhaps, which Tolkien apologized for in a 1967 letter to the authors of the article, as it apparently made understanding his responses rather difficult.

So it stands to reason that he would make one of his own favorite hobbies a favorite hobby of Middle Earth as well.