A Boy Named Alice?


I saw The Two Towers on November 9, 2017 and there is a scene where Aragorn talks to a Rohan boy who had been given a sword and and armor to help defend Helm's deep. The boy says he is _____, son of ____. I couldn't hear the names he said very well.

With my poor hearing it sounded like the boy said his name was Alice. I know that the Rohan people didn't use modern English names and Alice is a female name, so I thought that he simply has a name that sounds a bit like Alice.

The full cast list in IMDB lists Calum Gittins as Haleth. Calum Gittins is the son of Paul Gittins and screenwriter Philippa Boyens and was born July 16, 1986. Thus he turned 13 and 14 in 1999 and 2000, the years that the Lord of the Rings movies were filmed and would have somewhere between 12 and 14 when his scenes were filmed.

Wikipedia says the boy, a character invented for the movies, is Haleth son of Hama.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_characters_in_The_Lord_of_the_Rings_film_series

Like most Elves and good Men, the people of Rohan used names which had been used for centuries or millennia previously, and the name of Haleth seemed familiar to me. The scriptwriters got the name Haleth from two canonical characters in the books, Haleth (killed Third Age 2758, 261 years before The Two Towers), elder son of King Helm Hammerhand of Rohan (killed 2759), and Haleth, great warrior and chieftain who led the Second House of the Edain through terrible dangers to their new homeland in the First Age - almost seven thousand years before the Two Towers.

The boy Haleth could have been proud, if he knew, to share his name with a brave prince who lived centuries earlier and with a great warrior and leader in Beleriand in the First Age - except that the great Haleth in the First Age was a woman, which he might have found embarrassing.

So maybe mishearing Haleth's name as Alice was not as misleading as it seemed at first!

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Well why not? Star Wars has a boy named Annie!

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Annie is just a diminutive of Anakin.

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Duh.

He's still named "Annie" though, hearing the name makes me giggle when I see the prequels.

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I know, to think that the boy who would grow into a man to kill children was called that several times by several people. I'm not surprised that Annie has anger issues.

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I'm not sure your amusement at "Anne" Skywalker would be shared by Anne de Montmorency (1493-1567), Duke of Montmorency, Marshall of France, Constable of France, a famous French general and statesman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_de_Montmorency

And similarly there was Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1864), hero of the American Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_Lafayette

A great grandmother of mine was Ida Elizabeth Smith Demuth, who shared her name with a famous Ida in Anglo-Saxon England. Ida, the first known King of Bernicia (reigned c. 547 to 559).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_of_Bernicia

And by an amusing coincidence, a girl in my family is named Ella. And in Anglo-Saxon times there were a few famous kings named Aelle, which is probably pronounced similarly to Ella.

Aelle, legendary first King of Sussex, was supposedly active in 477, 485, and 491.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86lle_of_Sussex

And there was king Aelle of Northumbia (killed 867) who is a character in the movie The Vikings (1958).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86lla_of_Northumbria

There are many other examples of names that were sometimes boy's names and sometimes girl's names.

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Well if you want to get SERIOUS, you might be interested to know that men's names have a tendency to become women's names over time, and the reverse is not true. In patriarchal societies or where masculinity is thought to be superior to femininity, parents will give girls masculine names as they associate masculinity with power or strength, and will not give boys feminine names as they associate femininity with weakness. Or think that a boy with a feminine name will be bullied and a girl with a masculine name will not.

Florence and Joyce or Jocelyn used to be a man's name, Sydney, Ashley, Beverly, Leslie, and Lynn changed from men's names to women's names during the 20th centuries. Perhaps that doesn't hold true in Middle-Earth, there was a female Haleth in the Silmarillion, and a male Haleth turned up in 3rd age Rohan.

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