Belladonna is Italian for “beautiful lady,” also the name of a striking poisonous plant.
Belladonna is Italian for 'beautiful woman,' a name that arrived in English primarily through botany: Atropa belladonna, the deadly nightshade plant whose berries were reputedly used by Renaissance Venetian women as eye drops to dilate their pupils, creating a wide-eyed appearance considered alluring at the time. The genus name Atropa comes from Atropos, one of the three Fates in Greek mythology — the one who cuts the thread of life — making the full botanical name a marriage of beauty and death that has fascinated writers and physicians alike. The plant has threaded through Western history as both poison and medicine.
It appears in accounts of Macbeth's army allegedly poisoning Danish invaders, in herbalists' manuals as a painkiller, and in the development of atropine, still used in modern medicine to dilate pupils for eye examinations. In witchcraft lore, belladonna was an ingredient in flying ointments, lending the name an atmosphere of Gothic romance and occult mystery that has made it irresistible to fiction writers. As a personal name, Belladonna remained largely in the realm of literary imagination and villain-naming until the twenty-first century, when maximalist and botanical names began reclaiming their place on birth certificates.
It appears in Tolkien's legendarium as Belladonna Took, Bilbo Baggins's adventurous mother — a detail that has endeared the name to a generation of readers. Today it occupies a particular niche: flamboyantly beautiful, slightly dangerous, and unmistakably memorable.