A member of the Hornblower family, and perhaps a descendant of the famous Tobold Hornblower who first brought pipe-weed to the Shire, Tanta lived about two hundred years after Tobold's time. She married into the Baggins family when she wed Largo Baggins. They had just one recorded child, a son named Fosco, but through Fosco arose a line of descent through Drogo to Frodo Baggins, making Tanta Hornblower a great-grandmother of Frodo.
Notes
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We have no dates for Tanta herself. The dates shown here are for her husband Largo Baggins, to whom Tanta's lifetime was presumably approximately comparable.
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2 |
We have no real clues about the origin of the name Tanta. It likely originates in Old English (like that of her illustrious forebear Tobold Hornblower) though its origins are obscure. To the Anglo-Saxons the word tān meant 'fate' or 'fortune', and a seer or fortune-teller was a tānhlyta. This is close enough to 'Tanta' that it may represent the intended meaning, but Tolkien himself states that the name was meaningless (or at least that it held no meaning to the Hobbits of the Shire).
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- Updated 7 June 2019
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