I wanted to give you some background on myself and the name my husband and I chose for our puppy. When I was growing up, I got a border collie puppy, and I named him Samwise Gamgee. Sam was a wonderful dog, and I miss him so much! Sam was the reason I am obsessed with border collies. Ever since my Sam had to be put to sleep, I have wanted to get another puppy, but the timing was never good. The wait has been long and difficult, and we are so excited that in just a few weeks, we will have a puppy! One of the first decisions we had to make was a name for our puppy.
So obviously I am a huge fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, but what you may not know is that my husband is also a fan! For those of you that are familiar with my blog about my hamster, Tarcil, this is probably not news to you. Tarcil is named after a character from The Lord of the Rings. So we decided that we wanted to stick with our theme which meant picking a name from The Lord of the Rings universe. We wanted something a little more obscure, but that would still be simple for others to read and pronounce. We also wanted a name that represented a good, strong character with an appropriate meaning. My husband immediately started listing his suggestions and I wrote down the ones that I also liked. He looked online at LOTR wiki while I searched through the appendix and indexes of books. We kept coming back to the first name I had on my list, which was Beren. We quickly realized that we weren't going to find anything that we liked as much and so without much effort, we agreed on the name!
For those that are less familiar with LOTR, Beren was a man who won the hand of Luthien, an elf, by cutting a Silmaril out of Morgoth's crown. He became the father of the line of the Numenorean Kings. To quote from The Silmarillion: "None have ever come back from the mansions of the dead, save only Beren son of Barahir, whose hand had touched a Silmaril; but he never spoke afterward to mortal Men."
Now I realize that my description of Beren may have been more confusing to some of you that aren't as nerdy as me and my husband. So for you, I would say that Beren is essentially an older, cooler version of Aragorn. In fact, in the extended edition of Two Towers, there is a scene in which Aragorn is singing an elvish song while keeping watch as he thinks about how much he misses Arwen. Frodo, who understands some elvish, asks Aragorn who the song is talking about, and Aragorn tells him that is it the Tale of Beren and Luthien - a man who married an elf. It is a neat scene and I am glad it made it into the movies.
I hope you enjoyed reading this background to naming our puppy! I can't wait to bring him home! But until then, I have lots of preparing to do. :)
