This week Nature celebrates the tercentenary of Carl von Linné (1707-1778), better known as Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who created the modern style of biological nomenclature, bringing serene Scandinavian order to what had been a taxonomic bear-pit.

A feature crucial to the entire Linnean project is that names have an existence quite separate from the thing named. This feature is usually forgotten by biologists. But not, it seems, by scholars of different stripes.

The Late Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, for example, an authority on Beowulf and the Middle-English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but better known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is not usually regarded as a scientist.

Indeed, his popular image as a figurehead of bucolic nostalgia and incipient tree-huggery has eclipsed his own view of himself that he was, indeed, a scientist, and by his own admission – a scientist of words. As a professional philologist, Tolkien’s job was to explore the roots of words and their meanings.

In so doing he became fascinated by a conundrum absolutely central to his calling: that is, how certain meanings become attached to combinations of letters. Why, for example, is water called water, and not, say, manxome or momewrath? Of course, one can trace the etymology of words back through their antecedents, but that is simply to throw the problem back into the past, not to solve it.

Considering the question as it is, though, it becomes clear that the names of things have lives of their own, different from those of the objects to which they refer. At the same time, names are emphatically not random combinations of letters, but are coined to reflect some attribute of the objects to which they refer. The contrast between these two properties of names – their independence, and yet their reference to the things named (without which names themselves would not exist) exposes an intriguing and enduring tension.

Tolkien exploited this tension in his fiction right from the start. In the first few pages of The Hobbit – in itself a children’s story very characteristic of its period (it was published in 1937, the same year that Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), the wandering wizard Gandalf chastises home-loving hobbit Bilbo Baggins for remembering the wizard’s reputation, even though he doesn’t connect it with the menacing figure on his doorstep: ‘you do know my name, though you don’t remember that I belong to it,’ says the wizard: ‘I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me!’

The tension deepens, however, because Gandalf is no random word-string to attach to any passing wizard. Tolkien got the name from Voluspa, a poem in Old Norse, which at one point lists a roll-call of dwarves, many of whose names Tolkien used for dwarves in The Hobbit. But one of the names is ‘Gandalf’, which Tolkien recognized as not dwarvish at all: Gandalf (gand + aelfr) can be glossed as ‘wand-elf’ or ‘staff-elf’ – a taxonomically succinct name for a wizard.

Much of the ‘mythic depth’ in Tolkien’s work – and, arguably, one reason for its enduring appeal – comes from Tolkien’s knowing playfulness on the central tension of nomenclature. But it is this very same tension that animates biological taxonomy, too.

The legacy of Linnaeus was more than just as a housekeeper of names, a quotidian tidier-up of what had been a chaotic system of nomenclature. By systematizing names, he exposed the same tension between names and things named that intrigued philologist Tolkien, starting a scientific discourse that continues to this day. I’d argue that if it were not for that tension, we’d have less reason to commemorate Linnaeus’ birth 300 years later – but rather than his relegation to a footnote of biology, a fate suffered by many of Linnaeus’ contemporaries, any one of whom might have a greater claim on the substance and development of biological thought, he occupies a position in the pantheon only a little below that of Darwin.

For example, plans to commemorate the tercentenary of Linnaeus’ close contemporary, the encyclopaedist and once hugely influential biological theorist Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), are modest by comparison. A Google search for ‘Linnaeus’ and ‘tercentenary’ yielded 17,300 hits: for ‘Buffon’ and ‘tercentenary’, just 392.

But whereas Buffon’s 44-volume epic Histoire Naturelle can hardly be said to have much modern relevance except to historians of science, Linnaeus’ work started a scientific discourse which is still ongoing, in the form of the constantly revised and updated Codes of Zoological and Botanical Nomenclature. That these are less ossified legal codes – still less constitutions – and more accumulations of the scientific equivalent of common law, testifies to a living, evolving conversation.

To many, the formal codes of nomenclature that are the direct descendants of Linnaeus’ original Systema Naturae of 1735 are regarded as the epitome of dry-as-dust pedantry. To view them as such would be a mistake, because nomenclature, and specifically the tension between names and things, is a live issue that shapes our own perceptions of ourselves.

Here is an appropriately tolkienian example. In 2004, Nature published a report of a sensational find, the remains of much of a skeleton of a tiny individual of a hitherto unknown species of hominid, discovered in a cave in Indonesia (see P. Brown et al., A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia, Nature 431, 1055–1061, 2004).

The find was sensational, in part, because the skeleton was only 18,000 years old, much more recent than one would expect from its primitive morphology, and from the fact that modern humans (Homo sapiens) had been living in the area for some tens of thousands of years.

The find was tolkienian, because some of the authors and all the popular press were quick to dub the find ‘The Hobbit’, a nod to Tolkien’s lost race of diminutive people of whom Bilbo Baggins was the most celebrated example—the ‘type specimen’, if you like.

The researchers were initially very puzzled by what they had found. Although the skull was very human-like, it was very small indeed, far below the range of variation we associate with the genus Homo. The remainder of the skeleton looked extremely primitive – reminiscent of primitive australopithecines that lived in Africa more than three million years ago.

As a way of squaring this circle, the researchers initially placed their creature in an entirely new genus, Sundanthropus, the ‘man’ from the Sunda region of Indonesia – not as a way of trumpeting their find, but as a mere place-holder, reflecting their own uncertainty about the true heritage of this creature. To draw the power from a name, one should make it as neutral as possible.

The referees of the paper, however, looked at the rounded, domed skull and were very firm on the attribution of this creature – despite its tiny size other oddities, the creature should be admitted to our own genus. And so Homo floresiensis was born. (And what about me? Oh, I was the handling editor, or, in this case, the Ringmaster).

The backlash was swift and terrible – if Homo floresiensis were a member of the genus Homo, critics claimed, it couldn’t have been a ‘normal’ example, but an individual crippled by some kind of pathology.

The issue rages on to this day, but one cannot help wondering whether the Indonesian Hobbit would have attracted such opprobrium were the researchers to have stuck to their guns with Sundanthropus. The appellation of Homo implies far more than a simple change of name, the substitution of one random word-string with another, but challenges biological (not to mention social, psychological and religious) concepts of the meaning of humanity, and its biological limits.

Linnaeus, who coined the term Homo in 1758, was no help. Rather than naming a ‘type’ or reference specimen and listing a series of diagnostic criteria in the fashion subsequently approved, Linnaeus wrote the gnomic equivalent of ‘reader, know thyself’, thus opening a taxonomic can of worms whose contents gyre and gimble to this day.

When Shakespeare wrote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, he could hardly have been more wrong. Our understanding, our appreciation, our very concept of a rose depends critically on the name we choose for it: it would smell far less sweet were we to name it ‘slug’ or ‘municipal refuse collection depot’.

And by the way, Tolkien hated Shakespeare…