About the word "noisome"
On the recent thread about the name “Shelob,” someone posted the quote from Letters 70 where Tolkien observed to Christopher that the name “sounds quite noisome.” It occurred to me that I had never looked into that particular word. So I did.
According to the OED “noisome” means foul-smelling. Tolkien liked it, he used it five times in TT and three in RotK, applying it to the Dead Marshes, the pools among the slag-heaps, and the flowers of Minas Morgul. (Obviously he was taking liberties in calling a name smelly.) Etymologically, it is a back-formation from “annoy,” which is French anoyer. The adjective for a word that changes like this by losing its first syllable is “aphetic,” BTW.
There is a related word “noyous” which is synonymous with “annoying,” Chaucer uses it in The House of Fame, where an eagle picks him up and carries him off to the palace of the title. Chaucer makes a fuss, and the eagle tells him, “Geoffrey, thou art noyous for to carry!” (One of the reasons I love Chaucer is that whenever he puts himself in one of his poems,, he makes himself the butt of a joke.) I am convinced that this line inspired the scene in The Hobbit where the eagle tells Bilbo, “Don’t pinch! ...You need not be frightened like a rabbit, even if you look rather like one.”