The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (79 page)

30 November 1972

Merton College, Oxford

Dear Mrs Thurston,

Thank you for your letter. Personally I am rather against giving strictly human and noble names to animals; and in any case Elrond and Glorfindel seem unsuitable characters, for their names which meant (1) ‘The vault of stars' and (2) ‘Golden hair' seem inapt. I recently played with the notion of using the word for bull I gave you, which introduced in the form -
mund
gives a fairly familiar sound (as in Edmund, Sigismund, etc.), and adding a few Elvish prefixes, producing names like Aramund (‘Kingly bull'), Tarmund (‘Noble bull'), Rasmund (‘Horned bull'), Turcomund (‘Chief of bulls'), etc. I wonder what you think of these?

Arwen was not an elf, but one of the half-elven who abandoned her elvish rights. Galadriel (‘Glittering garland') is the chief elvish woman mentioned in
The Lord of the Rings
; her daughter was Celebrían (‘Silver queen'). There was also Nimrodel. But I shouldn't really like these names to be given to heifers or cows. If you care for the Aramund type, I could invent a few female names. But though it is made on classical models rather than elvish, wouldn't the name of Farmer Giles' favourite cow – Galathea (in
Farmer Giles of Ham
) – be useful? which as it stands might be interpreted ‘Goddess of milk'.

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien.

13 December 1972

See
Lord of the Rings
Vol. I, p. 272: ‘He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom' (/or she) – Gandalf. I should not feel inclined to help in this destructive process, even if it did not seem to me that this exercise was supposed to be your own private work without assistance. . . . . It is also said (I p. 93) ‘Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.' I am sorry if this letter sounds grumpy. But I dislike analysis of this kind.

17 December 1972

Merton College, Oxford

Dear Richard,

Forgive me for not answering your interesting letter (of Aug. 14) much sooner. . . . . As you probably know, I am an old man, and slower at work than I used to be; but I am still burdened with a great many affairs, that constantly interrupt my efforts to publish at least some of my other legends. I have also often been unwell during the last 3 months.

All your questions are interesting, but I am afraid satisfactory answers require in many cases reference to linguistic and legendary matters that would take far too long to deal with in a letter.

1.
pedo mellon
. I do not know why you are not satisfied with G[andalf]'s own interpretation, I p. 321–2,
Say ‘friend':
i.e. utter the word ‘friend'. Because it makes G. seem rather dense? But he admits that he was, and he explains why – adequately for those who realize what a burden of responsibility, haste, and fear he bore.

2. Q[
uenya
]
names of Kings, etc.
Q. was known to the learned in Gondor at least as well as Latin still is in W. Europe. Its use was honorific, and there was no reason to accommodate the Q. names to Sindarin. And none of the Q. names in the lists (III 315–8–9) are accommodated: all are in
form
entirely suitable to Quenya. Q. permitted, indeed favoured, the ‘dentals'
n, l, r, s, t
as final consonants: no other final consonants appear in the Q. lists.
Angamaitë
‘Iron-handed', and
Sangahyando
‘Throng
^fn133
-cleaver', were good Q. but no more so than the other names, and there was no need to assert their royal descent, as that was clear. They were, however, possibly ‘aggressive' in being personal warrior names (or nicknames), whereas the other (few) warlike Q. names, like
Rómendacil,
were ‘political': assumed by a king in celebration of victories against a public enemy.

3.
High-elvish
and
Sindarin
. The mixture may seem curious to us, but it was entirely in accordance with the history of the First and Second Ages, briefly alluded to in III append. A 313–7. Also III 363. At the time of the L.R. (see III 106) Quenya had been a ‘dead' [language] (sc. one not inherited in childhood, but learnt) for many centuries (act. about 6,000 years). The ‘High-Elves' or exiled Noldor had, for reasons that the legend of their rebellion and exile from Valinor explains, at once adopted Sindarin, and even translated their Q. names into S. or adapted them.
Galadriel
though beautiful & noble enough in form is not a Q. name, any more than
Gil-galad,
which contains the S. word
galad;
and
Celeborn
is a transl. of the orig. name
Telporno;
though said to be a kinsman of King Elu Thingol he was so only afar off, for he too came from Valinor. It may be noted that at the end of the Third Age there were prob. more people (Men) that knew Q., or spoke S., than there were Elves who did either! Though dwindling, the population of Minas Tirith and its fiefs must have been much greater than that of
Lindon, Rivendell
, and
Lórien
.
^fn134
In Gondor the generally used language was ‘Westron', a lang. about as mixed as mod. English, but basically derived from the native lang. of the Númenóreans; but Sindarin was an acquired polite language and used by those of more pure N[úmenórean] descent, esp. in
Minas Tirith,
if they wished to be polite (as in the cry
Ernil i Pheriannath
III 41 cf. 231, and Master
Perian
160).
Narsil
is a name composed of 2 basic stems without variation or adjuncts:
√NAR
‘fire', &
√THIL
‘white light'. It thus symbolised the chief heavenly lights, as enemies of darkness, Sun
(Anar)
and Moon (in Q)
Isil
.
^fn135
Andúril
means Flame of the West (as a region) not of the Sunset.

4. You are of course right in seeing that the words for ‘silver' point to an orig.:
^*
kyelepē:
Q.
tyelpe
(with regular syncope of the second
e
): S.
celeb
: and Telerin
telepi
(in T. the syncope of second vowel in a sequence of 2 short vowels of the same quality was not regular, but occurred in words of length such as
Telperion
). Though
tyelpe
remained in Q.,
telpe
(with Q. syncope) became the most usual form among the Elves of Valinor, because the Teleri in their lands, to the north of the Noldor, found a great wealth of silver, & became the chief silversmiths among the Eldar.

5.
Aragorn
etc. This cannot contain a ‘tree' word (see note).
^fn136
‘Tree-King' would have no special fitness for him, and it was already used by an ancestor. The names in the line of Arthedain are peculiar in several ways; and several, though S. in form, are not readily interpretable. But it would need more historical records and linguistic records of S. than exist (sc. than I have found time or need to invent!) to explain them. The system by which all the names from
Malvegil
onwards are trisyllabic, and have only one ‘significant' element
^fn137
(
ara
being used where the final element was of one syllable; but
ar
in other cases) is peculiar to this line of names. The
ara
is prob. derived from cases where
aran
‘king' lost its
n
phonetically (as
Arathorn
),
ara
- then being used in other cases.

I have not bothered to explain the S. lenitions in the Appendices, already overloaded, because I am afraid they would have been passed over, or have been felt unintelligible and tiresome, by practically all readers, since that is the normal attitude of the English to Welsh. (The lenitions or ‘mutations' of S. were deliberately devised to resemble those of W[elsh] in phonetic origin and grammatical use;
^fn138
but are not the
same
in either p[honetic] o[rigin] or g[rammatical] u[se].) Thus
ost-giliath
‘fortress of the stars' in which the second noun functions as an uninflected genitive shows no mutation. Cf.
ennyn Durin.
In S. this absence of mutation is maintained (a) in compounds and (b) when a noun is actually virtually an adjective, as in
Gil-galad
Star (of) brilliance. In S. initial
g
was retained in composition, where a contact
n
+
g
occurred. So
born
‘hot, red' +
gil
to
borñgil; morn
‘black' +
dor
to
morñdor
; the triconsonantal group then being reduced to
rg, rd.
t > þ(th) is the nasal mutation, and so appears after the plural article in:
thîw, i Pheriannath. palan-tîriel
should phonetically >
-thíriel,
past participle ‘having gazed afar'; but grammatically before actual forms of verbs, the soft mutation only was normally used in later S., to avoid the confusion with other verb stems, and the soft mut. of
was also often used for the same reason.
Palantír
is Q. <
palantīr
with continuative stem of TIR watch, gaze at etc.
tíro
is S. but a mistake in printing for
tíro
imperative (of all persons) in S. (I have appended a good many notes on the Elvish S. verses to Donald Swann's musical settings in
The Road Goes Ever On
. This includes a note on
ath.
)

ath:
Though it cd. be an S. form of Q.
atta
‘2', it is not in fact related, nor a sign of a dual. It was a collective or group suffix, and the nouns so formed [were] originally singulars. But they were later treated as pl[ural]s, especially when applied to people(s).
^fn139
The S. duals of nouns or pronouns early became obsolete, except in written works. A case occurs in
Orgalaðad
‘Day of the Two Trees', but since these S. nouns were all derived from Quenya names of the 6-day week, brought from Valinor, it may be due to an attempt to imitate Q. duals, such as
ciriat
2 ships.
^fn140
In any case
-d
was later lost, and so we have
argonath
^fn141
‘the group of (two) noble stones instead of
^*
argonad. Orbelain
is certainly a case of ‘phonological' translation (of which the Noldor were quite capable), since
Valanya
(adj.) must be from older
^*
Balaniā
which would > S.
^*
Belain
, but no such form existed in S.