The name Lowden in the Notion Club Papers - a dissent from John Garth

John Garth has speculated that the name Lowden - of the character in the Notion Club Papers - was derived from a place name near Nottingham, England - as follows:

I happened to be showing [my mother] a map of the area just east of Nottingham. This is the location of the village of Gedling where Tolkien was staying when he wrote ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’. Rather randomly, my mother read out the name of a neighbouring village, Lowdham. L-O-W-D-H-A-M: the distinctive spelling matches the character’s surname, though no one seems to have made the connection between the two until now. I’m told by Andrew H. Morton, author of the excellent focused study Tolkien’s Gedling 1914, that the village of Lowdham would have been a pleasant spot, just the right distance for a Sunday walk from Gedling. So Lowdham of the Notion Club not only speaks Tolkien’s memory of the 1914 Éarendel discovery, but is named for the immediate area of the poem’s composition. It’s also worth noting that on the fake title page Tolkien drew for ‘The Notion Club Papers’ (Sauron Defeated 154), the date of publication is 2014. Surely here he was thinking consciously, as we are now, of the centenary of Middle-earth, and identifying its beginning as the poem he wrote on 24 September 1914. The light of Éarendel shines throughout the external history of Middle-earth as surely as it shines through the internal history, going from the Two Trees all the way to Frodo’s star glass.

Since this speculation has been repeated elsewhere, I think it is worth recording my dissent from this derivation which I noted in the comments, but which did not elicit a response:

Against this is the fact that the *earliest* spelling was Loudham, with a ‘u’ – emphasizing the idea that he was ‘loud’ (like Dyson). You may be right but I had always (vaguely) assumed that re-spelling Loudham with with a ‘w’ was just adopted to make the name less crudely ‘Dickensian’ (i.e. the novelistic convention by which people’s names reflect their distinguishing characteristic).

My point is that the spelling Lowden came after the spelling Loudham (as mentioned by Christopher Tolkien in the Introduction, page 150) - so that it is the origin of Loudham that needs explaining, not Lowdham. And therefore that the place near Nottingham has nothing to do with the case.

On the other side - and supporting Garth's original argument, as a philologist, it is possible that Tolkien was going by the sound of names rather than by the spelling; and on that basis there is 'no difference' between Lowdham and Loudham.

However, I think it is unlikely and that Loudham was named as a joke on the (original) 'loudness' of voice and personality that was a defining characteristic of Hugo Dyson - the Inkling who Loudham was intended to reference, in the earliest drafts. But that as the Notion Club character developed and became deeper and more significant (and quite different from Dyson), the 'corniness' (or over-obviousness) of such a name became inappropriate, and was 'disguised' by respelling it.