Enough catching up! Let me get to the point of this particular blog entry. It has to do with a word that Tolkien used in the opening chapter of The Hobbit, and that word is snapdragons.
"They used to go up like great lilies and snapdragons...and hang in the twilight all evening!"
Funny thing, for many years I have used the term "Snapdragons!" as an exclamation like one would say the word, "Shoot!" But, I never remembered where I got it from or what it meant...until now.
There's a great book I'd like to recommend to you by Oliver Loo called A Tolkien English Glossary: A Guide to Old Uncommon and Archaic Words Used in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. You can download it on Kindle for free here.
Here is the the definition of snapdragons:A plant of the scrophulariaceous genus Antirrhinum, esp. A. Majus, an herb long cultivated for its spikes of showy flowers, of various colors, with a corolla that has been supposed to look like the mouth of a dragon.
That sounds like a pretty cool looking plant to me!
Tolkien's attention to geography and flora, especially, has always impressed and intimidated me. I'm no botanist and I feel very uneducated when it comes to the science of geography and ecosystems, etc. When I write, I have to study so much about flora and fauna and recently I found a website to help with this called iNaturalist.org. I highly recommend it to anyone writing adventures for The One Ring or Adventures In Middle-earth roleplaying games and you want to add some interesting descriptions to give your gaming sessions a more authentic Tolkienian feel. If anyone finds a geography site with land and water descriptions, please let me know!
Oh, look here! I found a picture of snapdragons. Beautiful.
