Posted: May 16, 2000 at 10:03:01: by Martin Read
: : Tolkien liked to use such terms as "hosts" and "companies" to
: : describe the populations of peoples: he didn't have our modern
: : thing for precise numbering. But I wonder how imprecise he
: : really was. Hosts and companies are traditional terms. There
: : probably was a range of numbers for a host during the times
: : that term was in use to describe organized (more or less)
: : groups of warriors. Tolkien, always careful in his use of
: : words, wouldn't grossly violate such a range, and from that we
: : can get an idea of how amny elves were in the hosts of the
: : first age and so forth.: "Host" is a word often found in Biblical translations from the KJV era onward, but it's not often used much any more (except maybe in Tolkien-inspired fantasy literature). It comes from Middle Latin, so I don't know if the root word was used in the Vulgate. It generally is used to mean "an army" or "a multitude". I've never seen any source which tried to assign a range of numbers to it. Interestingly the Latin root of host, hostis, was the progenitor of two words in modern English of very different meanings. Host as in the person looking after guests, and hostile. I believe the basic original term meant "stranger." This was then extended to one who gave protection to strangers in a host-guest relationship. At the same time the strangers which a small community came into contact with were often both hostile and in armed bands or armies and so the use of host in that sense developed. An Anglo-Saxon definition of "army" which might equate with host, was an armed band numbering 200 and over.
|
