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The Dutch town where 56 streets are named after Lord of the Rings characters

In Geldrop, next to Eindhoven, 56 of the 60 street names on one estate are Lord of the Rings characters. Here is what the register shows, what the town has said about who chose them, and what nobody has ever put on paper.

By Daily Dutch News
Culture correspondent
Published
5 min read
A blue Dutch street sign reading Saruman on a green lamp post in Geldrop

Your address can be just Frodo. In Genoenhuis, a neighbourhood of Geldrop on the eastern edge of Eindhoven, 56 of the 60 registered street names come from The Lord of the Rings and the wider world J.R.R. Tolkien built around it, and 54 of them carry no laan, straat or weg at all. Frodo 1 and Gandalf 12 are legal addresses in the national register, not nicknames.

The 56 names make up about 14% of all 401 street names in Geldrop. 52 of them have people living on them, 1,348 addresses in total, in a neighbourhood of about 3,400 residents. The largest is Laan van Tolkien, Tolkien Avenue, with 210 addresses numbered 2 to 244. The other 4 roads in the neighbourhood, Genoenhuis, Emopad, Zwembadweg and Industriepark, were there before the estate was built: their oldest houses date from 1915 to 1967.

Who is on the signs

The scheme reaches far past the three Lord of the Rings films, into corners of Tolkien’s world most readers never get to.

  • The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship and Gondor: Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir, Gimli, Faramir, Denethor, Cirion and Palantir.
  • The elves: Galadriel, Celeborn, Elrond, Arwen, Lorien, Nimrodel, Amroth and Elanor.
  • Númenor and the Silmarillion: Elendil, Isildur, Anarion, Elros, Amandil, Silmarien, Valandil, Varda and Yavanna.
  • Rohan: Theoden, Eomer and Eowijn.
  • The Hobbit, the dwarves: Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, Dori, Ori, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur, with Durin, Farin and Erebor, the Lonely Mountain. 2 of Thorin’s 13 companions, Nori and Oin, never got a street.
  • The rest: Bombadil, Fangorn, Haradpad, Saruman, the only villain with a street, and Laan van Tolkien for the author.

6 of the names are Dutch rather than English, because they come from Max Schuchart’s translation, In de ban van de Ring, published in 1956 and 1957 as the first translation of The Lord of the Rings into any language. Samwise Gamgee is Sam Gewissies here. Merry and Pippin each have 2 streets, their Dutch short names Merijn and Pepijn and their formal names Meriadoc and Peregrijn, and Westernesse and Silverlode became Westernisse and Zilverlei. The register spells every name without accents: Eomer, Theoden, Gloin.

A preschool on the estate is called De Hobbit. Its address is Gandalf 2.

Older than the films

The usual assumption is that a Lord of the Rings neighbourhood is film merchandising in street-sign form. The register says otherwise. The first houses on these streets were finished in 1990: 127 that year, on Laan van Tolkien, Aragorn, Elendil, Cirion and Westernisse, and 61 more in 1991. The Fellowship of the Ring reached Dutch cinemas in December 2001, 11 years later. By then 38 of the 52 residential Tolkien streets already had their first houses.

The theme is older than the films. Many of the streets are not. Almost the whole dwarf quarter came afterwards: Thorin, Gimli, Durin and Erebor from 2005, Balin, Dwalin, Bifur, Bofur, Dori and Kili from 2007, Fangorn from 2004 and Meriadoc from 2008. 230 homes on Tolkien streets date from 2004 or later. The neighbourhood was Tolkien-themed a decade before the films, and then kept being extended on the same theme after them.

One limit should be stated plainly. The address register dates buildings, not names, so 1990 is the year the first houses were finished on streets that now carry these names. The names were in official use by then. When they were chosen is a different question.

Who did this, and why

No naming decision for Genoenhuis has ever been published. The national archive of official municipal publications only reaches back to the 2010s, so a Geldrop decision from around 1989 or 1990 exists only on paper, in a municipal archive whose online inventory stops at 1970. Geldrop was an independent municipality until it merged with Mierlo in 2004.

The municipality has never published a word about the theme as a subject. All 38 entries in its official publications that mention Tolkien are routine notices for Laan van Tolkien: permits, a demolition, a crane, a container, a parking bay, a sewerage plan. Its tourism site does not mention Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings or Genoenhuis anywhere. The heritage it promotes is the town’s textile industry.

The town’s own explanation survives only as an email. In 2014 the municipality told a reader who had asked about the names that the town already had a great many street names, that staff were looking for original ones, and that a person working there at the time was a great fan of Tolkien and had the idea. No name, no department, no date.

A second account, published in 2019, says the street-name committee was given 14 days to come up with names, first wanted to honour former councillors, ran short, and that its chairman put The Lord of the Rings on the table. It cites no document. The man it credits has himself written a history of Geldrop’s street names, and in it he writes that it is often impossible to establish who compiled such series of names. He does not claim this one. We are not naming him.

The rulebook offers no help either. The Netherlands has no national rule about what a street may be named after; the 2024 model ordinance for municipalities is purely procedural, about signs, visibility and numbering. Geldrop-Mierlo’s own current rules give the naming power to the mayor and aldermen and set content rules only for naming streets after people, who must be dead, out of public life and uncontroversial. They say nothing about fiction. They first mention choosing a theme for a new neighbourhood in 2024, roughly 34 years after the town did exactly that in Genoenhuis. The municipality has no standing street-name committee today.

Nowhere else in the country

No other Lord of the Rings street names exist in the Netherlands. Register searches for Tolkien, Gandalf, Frodo, Legolas, Elrond, Aragorn and Galadriel return matches only in Geldrop, and no Dutch street contains Hobbit, Mordor, Gondor or Narnia. Flanders has none either.

Geldrop had themed literary streets before The Lord of the Rings arrived: a separate cluster on the other side of town is drawn from Carolingian romance, with Waleweinlaan, Roelantlaan, Reinoutlaan and Laan der vier Heemskinderen. The nearest comparable cluster is 8 km away in Eindhoven, where Blixembosch-Oost carries at least 25 fairy-tale street names. Geldrop’s Lord of the Rings cluster is more than twice that size.

There is no plaque in Genoenhuis. The signs carry no explanation. Who that fan at the town hall was, the town has never said.

Sources

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