So I'm listening to the Andy Serkis audiobook of The Silmarillion, presumably as penance for past misdeeds*. I got to a bit where the race of man is finally actively on the scene**, and they run through a whole series of family trees in quick succession. And, I just--I mean--

Bregolas.

Really?

Bregolas? Like a stoner saying, "Bruh, Legolas," whilst recounting the events of The Lord of the Rings? (To say nothing of the epic parental "fuck you" energy of then naming his sons Baragund and Belegund.)

I don't know to what I should attribute this behavior. Is it because Tolkien was the linguistic equivalent of the Jurassic Park scientists and was so busy seeing if he could (these phonemes are permissible in this conlang) that he forgot to ask if he should (make a family where everyone's names both alliterate AND rhyme)?

Or was it because of his fondness for the mythos of regions in which patronymic naming conventions produce the likes of Lars Larson and Ragnar Ragnarsson on a regular basis, and never you mind if that is a wise bit of reality to reproduce in fantasy fiction with a massive cast spanning ages?

Or shall I blame it on being an English gentleman, 90% of whom are required to be named John, James, or William at any given moment?

He doesn't indulge in (or at least reveal) this as much in LotR proper. It's only the occasional side characters in which you start to devolve into barely differentiated names. Boromir and Faramir represent classic Tolkien naming bullshit, but they also aren't part of the plot at the same time.

The Hobbit, of course, is this habit taken to comical extremes in the dwarves. But the dwarves are also not so much stock characters as nearly interchangeable paper dolls, apart from Thorin. They can have silly names that you can't ever keep straight, because it never matters which one of them is doing a particular thing. They are distinguished by their hat and cloak color combos as much as their names, and those never matter after introductions either.

But The Silmarillion has the epic and serious tone of LotR, while simply pelting the reader with streams of similar-to-nearly-identical names. Half of the owners of which will then be referred to by some title gifted or earned going forward anyway. The one saving grace is that they haven't quite had time enough to start naming all their children after one beloved dead grandfather or another.

And some day, a bit later, Douglas Adams will say to hell with all that and write,

“Yeah. Listen, I’m Zaphod Beeblebrox, my father was Zaphod Beeblebrox the Second, my grandfather Zaphod Beeblebrox the Third …” “What?” “There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate!”

*I jest, of course, but it is certainly not a breezy read.

**Not going to lie, I am barely managing to track the timeline here. Tolkien scholar, I am not. Possibly Men have been around for a while, but I can't track the Sindarin terms well enough to realize it. (°ロ°)