The naming of weapons in Middle-earth is the giving of names to swords and other powerful weapons in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. He derived the naming of weapons from his knowledge of Medieval times; the practice is found in Norse mythology and in the Old English poem Beowulf. Among the many weapons named by Tolkien are Orcrist and Glamdring in The Hobbit, and Narsil / Andúril in The Lord of the Rings. Such weapons carry powerful symbolism, embodying the identity and ancestry of their owners.
There are multiple parallels between Tolkien's usage of named weapons in his Middle-earth writings, and the Medieval epics. These include their inheritance as heirlooms, sometimes royal; their rediscovery in ancient treasure-hoards; their being broken and reforged; their adornment with runic inscriptions; and their interlinking with the lives of their owners.
Background
Naming of Medieval weapons
In Medieval epics, heroes gave names to their weapons. The name, lineage, and power of the weapon reflected on the hero. Among the major tales are those of Sigurd the Volsung and his sword Gram that he used to kill the dragon Fafnir; Beowulf and the swords Hrunting and Nægling; King Arthur's Excalibur, the "Sword in the Stone"; Roland's Durendal; Waldere's Mimming; and the Elder Eddas account of the "Waking of Angantyr" (the Hervararkviða) and the sword Tyrfing.
Heroic literature did not always name its weapons; in ancient Greece, Homer describes the shield and spear of Achilles in detail but does not give them names. He does not name the crucial bow of Odysseus: the weapon that allows him to demonstrate his own identity, his own name as he returns home to Ithaca, functions anonymously in the story. The case is different in the stories and myths of medieval Northern Europe, where the name of a weapon, especially of a sword, gave it an identity, almost a personality. The name, writes the Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft, "marks a weapon as an heirloom tying generations together and legitimizing the heir who holds it." Some 200 sword names are recorded in medieval writings, in line with the Norse practice of naming objects in stories, such as the Dwarf-made chain Gleipnir that unbreakably fastened Fenris the giant wolf.
Powerful swords
Such weapons were praised both for their strength and for their history. For example, Nægling is repeatedly described with epithets such as "sharp", "gleaming", "bright", "mighty", and "strong", while its history is explicitly recalled in phrases such as "excellent ancient sword", "ancient heirloom", and "old and grey". They might have magical powers: Excalibur shines
In Norse mythology, similarly, a sword may shine like the sun, as in the Poetic Edda: "Surt from the south comes / With flickering flame; Shines from his sword / The Val-god’s sun."
Swords may be heirlooms within a royal family, or may be recovered from ancient hoards of treasure, in either case having a lineage and story of their own. A sword-blade could be adorned with runes; these might attach power, history, and magic spells to the weapon, just as Sigurd was instructed to engrave runes of wisdom and victory on his sword Gram. The historian of arms Ewart Oakeshott described the sword as having "a potent mystique which sets it above any other man-made object". Swords had two attributes which made them especially highly prized: they were costly to manufacture, and effective as weapons.
In Middle-earth
Weapons of power
Tolkien named many weapons, mainly swords, but also including Aeglos, the spear of the Elf-king Gil-Galad; Belthronding, Beleg's bow; Dramborleg, Tuor's axe; and Grond, the name both of the evil battering-ram from Minas Morgul, and of the mace of the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, in his Middle-earth writings. As in medieval epics, the sword in particular symbolised the heroism and position of its owner. As the Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger put it, the sword "proclaims the emergence of the hero"; further, "the fates of sword and man are linked, and the destruction of one signals the end of the other".
Such themes can be seen clearly with Aragorn's sword Andúril, but they run similarly through Tolkien's accounts of many other named weapons. The swords Glamdring and Orcrist named in The Hobbit fit two strands of the Medieval pattern, as they are both ancient, having been forged in the First Age, and were retrieved from a treasure-hoard, having been held by the three Trolls in their cave. Reforging and rediscovery effectively pass old power to the new weapon and its new owner, and renew that power.
