Bad guy: Sauron
Secret bad guy: Sarumon
Tolkien studied languages, so he would’ve understood and probably appreciated how often things are named purely based on what they do or their immediate aesthetic values. Language is all about communication after all. Sometimes that necessitates complexity, but it should always be as simple as possible without sacrificing nuance.
the vast majority of place names irl are just objective descriptors, optionally with that having been twisted through time.
Exeter means “castle on the river exe”, starting as “esceancaster”; Aberdeen means “mouth of the river dee”; Amsterdam means “dam in the amstel”; Stockholm means roughly “log islet” as it started on the tiny central island which they put logs around.
And of course in germanic areas there’s the very common “burg/borg”, which just means that the place has a castle/fortification.
Here’s somthing neat, the moon of saturn, titan, has 2 mountains called Mons doom and Mons erebor
I was gonna make a snarky comment about how Treebeard has a cool Elvish name, then I looked it up and “Fangorn” literally means “Treebeard” in Sindarin 🤷♂️
Yeah but his original name really is unpronouceable because it would take literal days to spell out, if I remember correctly. So it’s not completely unrealistic for others to want a shorter version. Like when Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu gets shortened to Taumata Hill in english.
Didn’t at some point he say “some call me Treebeard”?
