Shagging rats
Okay, I've often wondered about the name Shagrat in Lord of the Rings. Now I've seen it argued that the name Halfast is in fact Tolkien's donnish pun on half-assed, but I have a hard time believing he meant to imply "rat-fucker" by Shagrat. Is there another meaning of "shag" that he was playing on? In the US there's the usage in the phrase "shagging flies," which means catching fly balls in baseball batting practice. I see that "shag" means "to chase after" in that sense. Is that the sense Tolkien was using here? Rat-chaser?