Talk:Underhill (house)

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Rename?

I am skeptical about the name Underhill. It means several other things already. The mention of the name in Tolkien's timeline draft is hard to understand, and I find the interpretation that "Underhil is Tom Bombadil's house" a bit tentative. He could write "Underhill" in confusion or uncertainty.

I agree that we need an article about his house (Fonstad even dedicates a page to it in the Atlas) but I suggest we stick to "House of Tom Bombadil" which is used in the chapter name. We can add the name "Underhill" in Tolkien's draft in the text. Sage (talk) 09:25, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

We have been having a discussion about it in the discord server, but we were also thinking of renaming it to House of Tom Bombadil. I myself am the guy that made this page, and I made it because I was looking in Index:Locations, and saw this stated as the name of his house, so I thought it was more "official". But yeah, House of Tom Bombadil is a better name. Aenorean (talk) 13:02, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure. I also find the note in the Chronology to be vague, but I can't think of any other plausible interpretation it may have. Mord 05:05, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

If I understand the Tolkien Gateway Naming policy correctly, it does not concern the name of the page itself, but the large header displayed at the top of the article's conent (the article title). However this title seems to be automatically created based on the title of the page. The page for the house of Tom Bombadil should not be called Underhill, because that name is not used in The Lord of the Rings. The Chronology of The Lord of the Rings is just notes written by J.R.R. Tolkien for himself to aid him in the writing of The Lord of the Rings, not something that he wrote for publication. If J.R.R. Tolkien would have wanted to give a name to the house of Tom Bombadil he could have done so before the publication of the first edition of LOTR and again before the publication of the second edition of LOTR (in which he made several changes and inserted new material). Both in the published LOTR and in The Return of the Shadow and The Treason of Isengard, "House of Tom Bombadil" is only used in the title of the chapter in LOTR because that form of capitalization is the standard spelling for titles, but "house of Tom Bombadil" is used in the narrative of LOTR and is used in Christopher Tolkien's comments in The Return of the Shadow and in The Treason of Isengard. In my opinion, the name of the page and the article title should be "house of Tom Bombadil" and not Underhill and the page should have the unnamed tag to make it clear that J.R.R. Tolkien did not give a definite name to the house of Tom Bombadil in his published LOTR. --Akhôrahil (talk) 08:31, 21 June 2023 (UTC)