J. R. R. Tolkien's name: What is the meaning of "Ronald" and "Reuel"?

Question

Could somebody explain how the words "Ronald" and "Reuel" in Tolkien's name are classified?

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

John - given name aka first name
Tolkien - surname aka last name
Ronald - ?
Reuel - ?

Explanations that are not good enough for me:

Reuel was a family name; it was the middle name of Tolkien’s father (Arthur Reuel Tolkien).

Source: http://tolkienblog.com/tolkien/john-ronald-reuel-tolkien/

What do the initials ‘J.R.R.’ stand for?

John Ronald Reuel. John was his grandfather’s first name, and Reuel was his father’s middle name; but to his relatives he was mostly known as Ronald. As we can see in his published Letters, he was liable to use any of his given names depending on the addressee, and sometimes omitted them altogether in favor of initials. The name Tolkien is of Saxon (that is German) origin, and means ‘foolhardy’.

Source: https://www.tolkienestate.com/en/paths/faq/biographical-information.html

The quotations above describe the history behind "Ronald" and "Reuel", but they don't really answer (at least at the first glance) which classes (by classes, I mean things like "first name", "last name", "middle name", "second first name" [like in Norma Jean Mortenson], and so on) these words belong to.

Answer 1

In English, and many other cultures (broadly, North-West/Central European in origin), people are often given middle names. A person's "given" (i.e. given by their parents) name consists of their "first" name and any middle names.

There is no limit to how many middle names a person has (if any), or what they are. Many families have different traditions, reusing names of parents or grandparents, or inheriting the same first or middle name through the generations. Most common is one middle name, and it is rare in English to see more than two (notably, members of the Royal Family often have three).

Classifying his "full name":

          |---given name--|
Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL D.Litt.
    |       |  |----------|    |    |---honours¹---|
  title     |  middle names    |        
            |               surname
        first name

Just to confuse things some people go by their middle name (e.g. James Paul McCartney), or by their whole given name, which may or may not be hyphenated (e.g. Mary-Kate Olsen, Billy Ray Cyrus), or of course by a nickname or shortening of one of their names. Some people have a compound surname, which is usually hyphenated (e.g. Mountbatten-Windsor), but not if it includes "of" or "from" (e.g. Vincent Willem van Gogh). Some people take an additional middle name later in life (e.g. a confirmation name) that is not part of their given name, but this is usually not official. Finally, a few individuals have only a single legal name, e.g. Teller, though I'm sure his family still call him Raymond (or Ray, or Joe, I don't know).

¹Commander of the British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Doctor of Letters (Litterarum)

Answer 2

Discussed by Tolken in Letter: 309. John was a traditional name in the family for a first child. Of his middle names, Ronald was a substitute for a name favoured by his mother (Rosalind) and Reuel was (possibly) a friend of Tolkien's grandfather and had become a family traditional name for no apparent reason other than that they liked it.

Now, my dear, as to my name. It is John: a name much used and loved by Christians, and since I was born on the Octave of St John the Evangelist, I take him as my patron – though neither my father, nor my mother at that time, would have thought of anything so Romish as giving me a name because it was a saint’s. I was called John because it was the custom for the eldest son of the eldest son to be called John in my family. My father was Arthur, eldest of my grandfather John Benjamin’s second family; but his elder half-brother John had died leaving only 3 daughters. So John I had to be, and was dandled on the knee of old J.B., as the heir, before he died. (I was only four when he died at 92 in 1896.)

My father favoured John Benjamin Reuel (which I should now have liked); but my mother was confident that I should be a daughter, and being fond of more ‘romantic’ (& less O[ld] T[estament] like) names decided on Rosalind. When I turned up, prematurely, and a boy though weak and ailing, Ronald was substituted. It was then a much rarer name in England as a Christian name – I never in fact knew any of my contemporaries at school or Oxford who had the name – though it seems now alas! to be prevalent among the criminal and other degraded classes. Anyway I have always treated it with respect, and from earliest days refused to allow it to be abbreviated or tagged with. But for myself I remained John. Ronald was for my near kin. My friends at school, Oxford and later have called me John (or occasionally John Ronald or J. Rsquared)...

As for an ‘Elvish’ name: I could of course invent one. But I do not really belong inside my invented history; and do not wish to!

As for Master: I am not one. In high uses it would be presumptuous and profane to adopt such a title; in lower uses it is conceited. I am a ‘professor’ – or was, and occasionally in more inspired moments deserved the title – and it is now at any rate (though not in Oxford of the generation before mine) a customary social title.

So what? I think if for private reasons John or Ronald is not pleasing for you to use (I quite understand that the collocation John Ronald is so) then we must fall back on ‘Professor’. (And I shall call you Lady!)

Of course there is always Reuel. This was (I believe) the surname of a friend of my grandfather. The family believed it to be French (which is formally possible); but if so it is an odd chance that it appears twice in the O[ld] T[estament] as an unexplained other name for Jethro Moses’ father-in-law. All my children, and my children’s children, and their children, have the name.

Answer 3

In the more or less modern English speaking world, parents have a lot of freedom to give their children any names they want to, and adults have the freedom to change their names to anything they want, and even children can ask their friends to call them by whatever nicknames they prefer, and hope that their friends will do so.

About two centuries ago, my great great great grandfather Jacob Demuth (1779-1842), of Lancaster, Pannsylvania, married three times and had twenty children, ten boys and ten girls. Even though Jacob demuth had no middle name, all of his 20 children had at least one middle name.

Some of those middle names were additional personal names, and some of those middle names were surnames of families used as middle names.

Six of his daughters had one middle name, four of his daughters had two midddle names, seven of his sons had one middle name, one son had two middle names, and two sons had three middle names.

The sons with three middle names were Carl Augustus Rudolphus Hartaffel Demuth and Gottrid Ottfrid Obadja Eckert Demuth. Some of those names come from the family of Jacob Demuth's mother Elizabeth Hartaffel (1746-1841), whose parents were Rudolphus Hartafel and Sophia nee Eckert.

Here is a link to a genealogy of Jacob Demuth's family, although some of their names are spelled differently than the registers of the Lancaster Moravian church were Jacob's children were baptised.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Demuth-138[1]

Jacob Demuth's third wife was babtised in Philadelphia with the names of Anne Francis Veronica Hurst (1801-1868). Her full married name became Anne Francis Veronica Hurst Demuth. After Jacob's death in 1842 she was mentioned many times in city directories, legal papers, church records, the census, newspapers, etc., with several different arrangements of her names and initials, so some people might suppose the different names were of different women.

So even two hunded years ago, there was great variety in the number of personal names or family surnames which might be given as middle names of persons.