The wife of Thain Fortinbras II, who long outlived her husband and ruled the Tooks of Great Smials for twenty-two years. She was famous for her tremendous girth (she was known in less polite circles as Lalia the Fat), which was rumoured to have prevented her attendance of Bilbo's famous Birthday Party. She died the following year in an unfortunate incident involving a tipping wheelchair and a flight of garden steps.
It should be noted that Lalia Clayhanger does not actually appear in any of Tolkien's canonical works. She is not mentioned, nor even alluded to, in The Lord of the Rings (being absent even from the family tree of the Tooks, where she might be expected to appear beside her husband Fortinbras II).
Her sole appearance in Tolkien's work, in fact, is in a letter he wrote in reply to certain queries from a reader (specifically, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien No. 214 to A.C. Nunn (draft), probably written in late 1958 or early 1959). In that long letter (which was ultimately unsent) Tolkien goes into remarkable detail on various aspects of Hobbit society, and gives the story of Lalia the Great in particular detail. So, while there may be some theoretical question over Lalia's canonicity, she is nonetheless one of the better-documented members of an extended Hobbit family.
Notes
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The meaning of the name Lalia is uncertain. In its (rare) modern use, it is thought to derive from the Greek for 'speech', implying a person who speaks well (but Lalia Clayhanger's rather fearsome reputation does not seem fit well with this interpretation). Indeed, it is far from clear that Tolkien intended the name to carry any particular meaning at all, though one alternative would be Latin lalia, 'lilies'. This would fit with the Hobbits' fondness for giving flower names to girls (and there was indeed one Hobbit known to have been named after this particular flower, Lily Baggins).
As with her given name, the meaning of Lalia's family name of Clayhanger remains uncertain. The -hanger perhaps relates to Anglo-Saxon hangra, a hillside or slope, especially one covered with grass or trees. If so, Clayhanger would mean something like 'clay hillside' (which might in turn imply that the family's Hobbit-hole had originally been made in such a place).
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- Updated 26 May 2023
- Updates planned: 1
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