Random Fandom Linguistics

Because sometimes life drops little gems into your day. I had to photocopy out a 70-odd page booklet for work today, a 1979 short dictionary of one of the local dialects circa the 1790s and where the words derived from. I was idly browsing through it as the pages came out of the printer, and one of the words caught my eye.

You remember in The Hobbit when Bilbo is taunting the spiders of Mirkwood? He goes:

Old fat spider spinning in a tree!
Old fat spider can't see me!
Attercop! Attercop!
Won't you stop,
Stop your spinning and look for me?

Old Tomnoddy, all big body,
Old Tomnoddy can't spy me!
Attercop! Attercop!
Down you drop!
You'll never catch me up your tree!

For some reason, I always thought 'attercop' was just a random word thrown in to make the rhyme. But apparently it's actually a word derived from Old English which means, naturally, 'spider'.

... Given Tolkien, I really ought to have known, oughtn't I -_-;