Names: Calder Cob

SPOILER WARNING:
This post discusses material from the Bree-land introduction and the Epic Quest Bree-land Prologue.


Tolkien was the master of names. Almost all of his names were well thought out, for those that weren't he created elaborate retro-cons to explain them. I would imagine that his created a real challenge for the developers of LOTRO; they couldn't just slap together some cool-sounding syllables and move on. They had to make certain that the names match Tolkien's legendarium. The men of Bree-land are one good example. Tolkien, in the FotR describes there thus: "The Men of Bree seemed all to have rather botanical names, like Rushlight, Goatleaf, Heathertoes, Appledore, Thistlewool and Ferny (not to mention Butterbur)." Later, in the Return of the King, Barliman Butterbur adds another name, Pickthorn when telling of those killed in the troubles in Bree while Frodo and company were away.

LOTRO uses all of these names. Bill Ferny and Harry Goatleaf, of course, are named characters from the novel and show up in game, but the developers also used the rest of theses surnames for characters scattered around Bree. Seven surnames, however, would not do for the large number of NPCs in Bree-land, so the developers had to invent names. For the most part they stuck to the "botanical" rule. Thus we see Thistlewool, Pruner, Henseed, Oakleaf, and the like. We, however, also see a fair number of non-botanical names, such as Brackenbrook. One of the most prominent of these is the first villain of the game, Calder Cob.

"Calder Cob". The name has a nice alliteration to it, but where does it come from? The surname is easy "Cob" is an archaic term for "spider" which survives in the word "cobweb". So the first villain, the guy who sets you up to be ambushed, the guy who betrays his home village, is named "spider". Nice job developers. Furthermore, spiders are everywhere in this game. Not just as mobs, but as the focus of several quests, from the spiders of the East Path, to the Chetwood, to the Midgewaer marshes, spiders are a standard mob. One of the early boss fights is against an giant spider, Iornath. Later an even bigger spider, Morin is a surprise boss in the epic storyline. Every area I've been in has spiders. Naming the first villain one encounters "Cob" is great foreshadowing.

But what about "Calder". Calder is not a common given name in English. It is however a surname, which derives its name from several Calder Rivers in northern England and Scotland. Where the rivers got the name is less certain. Several possible derivations from ancient Welsh and Old Norse have been proposed. My favorite is the Old Norse "Kaldr" meaning "cold". If you accept this then "Calder Cob" reads as "Cold Spider", which is a nice name for a villain.

There is one final tidbit. Many prominent people have had the surname "Calder" including athletes, politicians, and a rather famous family sculptors. Amongst these is James Alexander Calder (1915-1990) a prominent Canadian botanist. Turns out it's a "botanical" name after all.