Tolkien estate claims trademark for "shire"

Cory Doctorow 2:03 am Wed Jul 14, 2004

The Tolkien estate and Warners have sent out a lawyergram to the owner of shiremail.com, arguing that the word "Shire" belongs to them. The Register traces over 1,000 years of usage of the word "Shire" in England, and enumerates many towns with the word "shire" in their names across the English countryside.

n fact, we don't think it would be too provocative to suggest that JRR Tolkien may have been inspired by over a thousand years of common history when he first came up with the name "The Shire" as the idyllic home country of the books' main protagonists, the hobbits.

However, the legal letter claims that "goodwill in the name has been achieved through sales of such books". Certainly The Shire sounded rather nice as presented in the fictional books, but we suspect the goodwill towards the area in which people live was there before Mr Tolkien even put pen to paper.

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