Colophon

The design of this site is based on TerraFirma^1.0 by NodeThirtyThree, via Open Source Web Design. All photography is by Hannah Roth.

This site is powered by the Drupal content management system.

What's “Tookish”?

It's from J.R.R. Tolkien, which is admittedly pretty geeky; although the concept appears in Lord of the Rings, the best illustration probably comes from these two passages from The Hobbit:

. . . the mother of this hobbit — of Bilbo Baggins, that is — was the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small water that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures . . .

As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him . . . Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves . . .

In 1999, my (now) wife Hannah and I were living in Thailand, and wanted to use a website to tell the stories of our travels around Europe, Africa, and Asia to our friends and family back in Canada; “Tookish” seemed an appropriate concept, so we bought some domain names.

When we returned to Canada and I started my web business, I split the tookish.org domain off and kept if for travel stories, and used tookish.net for the new business. Although the relevance is obviously much less literal, I think that tookishness suggests a curiosity and a sense of adventure that applies somewhat more generally.