Life, Writing, Weirdness

The Hobbit was published in 1937. I didn’t read it back then, of course, not having been born until late 1970. I think I was about 7 years old when I read it the first time. My first reading of Lord of the Rings would come the next year, first with a copy of Fellowship found on a high bookshelf in our house and then in the form of an all-in-one volume of the trilogy gifted to me by my uncle to keep me out of his hair a bit more while he worked on a car during a long visit to my mother’s family.

When you only see something in print, whether it’s a regular word or a proper name, however it might have been invented or created for the story you’re reading, you decide on a pronunciation at the time if one isn’t provided and that’s what sticks with you. Smaug, in my young mind was clearly pronounced ‘smog’. I would be somewhere deep in my teenage years before I would bother with the appendices in Lord of the Rings, and it was far too late to change my mind on the pronunciation at that point even if I had red appendix E closely enough to notice that the AU diphthong was intended to be pronounced as the vowel sound in loud or how rather than like in squad, possibly the only comparison word I had when I first read it.

I grew up reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings regularly, a couple of times a year as a kid and teenager and once a year as an adult until I had kids of my own. At some point, as an adult at least, it clicked that I had been pronouncing it wrong, but at that point my reasoning was advanced enough to decide that if professor Tolkien had wanted to make sure that 7-year-old me pronounced Smaug the way he intended, then there would have been an easy to access pronunciation guide in The Hobbit instead of burying it deep enough in the supplementary material of a book I didn’t have, that many people never read, and that I wouldn’t find it for a decade or more.

The 1977 Rankin bass animated adaptation of The Hobbit pronounced it ‘smog’. The year I was in grade 4, the grade sevens (the senior grade in public school at the school and province I went to, I think) put on the stage version of The Hobbit. They also used the pronunciation ‘smog’. (You can still purchase that script for performance if you know where to look.)

I had plenty of reinforcement going up. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard it pronounced ‘smowg’ out loud until I was working at the World’s Biggest Bookstore in my early 20s and someone wanted to be pedantic during a discussion about fantasy books in general add The Hobbit in particular. “Well, actually…”

If someone’s first exposure to the story was the bloated Three film Peter Jackson version, then they will certainly be pronouncing it the way Tolkien intended. But for those of us for whom the book came first, it’s probably a coin flip based on how it looked it should sound in our heads at the time.

So, do I come down on the side of Smog or Smowg?

Whatever makes the person saying it happy.

Oh, eventually, something close to everyone who’s left alive will pronounce it according to the guidelines in Appendix E of Lord of the Rings, but for now, I don’t think it really matters. If someone pronounces it Smog, that pretty much guarantees that it’s the pronunciation they decided on themselves while reading it in the absence of external input. They had to figure it out themselves. Of course, the same is likely true for people who mostly pronounce it Smowg while they were reading. Maybe they read the Lord of the Rings first and spent enough time with Appendix E that Tolkien’s pronunciation stuck when they went back to The Hobbit, or maybe that’s how they decided to pronounce it while reading. Either way, the reading is the important thing.

So, no, I don’t care how anyone pronounces it, but I hope everyone enjoys the story.

Be well, everyone.