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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8256856" data-attributes="member: 18">Yup it was a household name growing up in the UK for me, as I expect it was for many, and never heard anyone, IRL, on the radio (the BBC radio 4 production of LotR was pretty great), or on TV say it any way other than Tol-keen.C.S. Lewis had a posh British accent by the time he met Tolkien (overwriting his previous Irish accent).In the UK at the time, and still today, there's a class distinction about how people pronounce the letter a in some words (including place names and people names), though this is also influenced by regional accents where present. Speaking very broadly (I know with other British people we could probably have an entire thread on this and its precise nuance), many middle-class (esp. upper-middle Southerners) and virtually upper-class people/accents tend to pronounce a as a broad sound in a lot of words, like the a in y'all unless you absolutely can't (like "cat", which you can only say with a short a, at least without sounding so like a lunatic even rich people notice).  Whereas working-class people/accents tend to make the a distinctly shorter, and in some it can even become an o-like sound.As C.S. Lewis had the archetypical "posh" accent (confirmed by recordings) by this point, he would have used a broad a for something like "tall", so kind of like like y'all but with a t. Whereas a Cockney, say, would have said something more like "tol" like doll. I've heard Americans go both way in regional accents on this. Tollers is thus congruent with pronouncing it as "Tol-keen" (with "tol" as in "told") not "Tall-keen", which would have been written "Tallers" or something.However the complicating factor is that loads of people back then (and this certainly continued at least into the '90s), especially posh ones, had nicknames that didn't actually sound like their names (not even using the same phonemes, even if you'd write them down with the same initial letter) and indeed were often pretty ridiculous, so god knows!</blockquote>

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