census of the ancients

[calimac]

I've been holed up in research mode, which tends to make me whatever the opposite of voluble is. I wrote that I'd completed my paper for the Tolkien Conference, but in a sense that's not true. My paper is on the real-world distribution of Tolkien's hobbit surnames: I'm mostly concerned to rebut the urban legend, or perhaps more accurately the rural legend, that they're Kentucky country names. (When Tolkien was a student at Oxford he knew a Rhodes Scholar from Kentucky who in later years said etc etc etc. Whatever the truth of this story, the names themselves aren't any more characteristic of Kentucky than of anywhere else in the US, and sometimes a good deal less so.) But I also have a section on their distribution in England. Is it significant that in his first drafts of hobbit family trees Tolkien used one distinctively Yorkshire name that he later dumped in favor of a name from southeastern England? I dunno, but I do now know that the 1901 England-Wales census is a dandy source to use to find name distributions in, so I've been looking up hobbit names and tallying the results by hand, since I can't find a better way of doing it. (Yeah, there's a place keyword search, but the vocabulary isn't controlled, so it's useless for my purposes.) One problem with this site is it's full of typos probably dating from the original census transcriptions, so the more common the name the more reliable the results are. Tolkien himself was 9 years old at the time, but you'll only find him (and his mother and brother) if you look under "Tonkien". Opps.

Comments

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

That is such a cool tool. I tried looking up my maiden name, but there are way too many Oxleys in the census data to give me any useful information. I never knew it was all that common in England!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The search form will only display the results if there's 300 or fewer of them. If a name is more common than that, I use the age range and/or sex restrictors to take a sampling.

Searching on Oxley for a 3-year age span got me results that showed it was a common name in Yorkshire, especially in Sheffield.