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Tolkien Trivia This is a collection of random trivia about Tolkien, his work and Middle-earth. If you have a contribution or a correction, feel free to send it to gorel@theonering.net. You can test your Tolkien trivia knowledge with this quiz at triv.net: The Quiz Pippin's Dangerous Sister Lalia the Great (or Fat) was matriarch of the Tooks at the time of Bilbo's famous party, but owing to her size was not able to attend. In 1402, having been wheeled to the Great Door to take the air as was her custom, her chair went over the threshold and she tumbled down the stairs and into the garden to her death. The rumor was that her attendant had been Pearl, Pippin's sister, who was then excluded from the accession ceremony of Lalia's son Ferumbras. But some time later Pearl was seen to be wearing a pearl necklace from the hoard of the Thains. It is interesting to note that Ferumbras was unable to wed while his mother was alive because no hobbit lady was willing to live in the Great Smials with Lalia as a mother-in-law. Borrowing Numenor Tolkien had read to C.S. Lewis pieces of the mythology that became the Silmarillion, and Lewis was pleased enough with it to borrow the name Numenor, which appears in That Hideous Strength as Numinor. Lewis had only heard the name so he misspelled it. Tolkien perceived other such borrowings by Lewis, such as Tor and Tinidril from Tuor and Idril. Samwise Tissue When Tolkien was a child in Birmingham, gamgee was a word for cotton-wool. There was a gossipy old man at a family holiday location that Tolkien took to calling Gaffer Gamgee around his children, and the name became associated in the family with any such men. Tolkien thought it was a "Hobbit-like" joke to give the name Gamgee to Sam's family since they were friends of the Cottons. Tolkien later learned that gamgee came from gamgee tissue, named after the inventor, a surgeon. Tolkien noticed one day an obituary for Sampson Gamgee, Professor of Surgery at Birmingham University. His father's name was given as S. Gamgee, and it is likely that his father was the inventor, and very possibly called Sam. Atlantis Tolkien was troubled by a recurring dream of a great Wave drowning the land. He always woke up gasping for air, but managed to "exorcize" the dream by writing about it. Tolkien began a time-travel book in which the hero would have been present at the fall of Atlantis, called Numenor. He eventually adapted the Numenorean parts into his greater mythology. He described it as a "curious chance" that Numenorean Akallabeth, meaning Downfall, was Atalantie in Quenya, from the stem "talat" for "slipping, sliding, falling down."