A mathom on Tolkien’s birthday

One of Tolkien’s gifts to us is the word mathom. It seems a good topic for the Professor’s birthday. So let’s unwrap the word and find out what it has to give us as readers of The Lord of the Rings.

Most readers are likely to meet mathom first in the description of gifts Bilbo gives away on his birthday at the start of The Lord of the Rings. We learn that on their birthdays, delightfully, hobbits give presents rather than receive them. ‘Not, of course, that the birthday-presents were always new; there were one or two old mathoms of forgotten uses that had circulated all around the district.’

The Prologue has more to say: ‘anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.’

Among the objects of no immediate use which hobbits wished to preserve were items of curiosity, of little use to them, and of obscure value. We would call them museum-pieces, and the Shire’s own museum at Michel Delving was called the Mathom-house. One of its holdings, lent by Bilbo, was his mail shirt, given to him from Smaug’s hoard by the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain. In a country where ‘heroes are scarce, … swords … mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers’ (The Hobbit, chapter 1), mail shirts too would seem useless. Yet the mail shirt turns out to be worth more than ‘the whole Shire and everything in it’, as Gandalf later reveals.

Mathoms have hidden value, and so does the word mathom.