Cent o HedhellemAn Examination of the Elven Tongues

Ostadan

January 19, 2002

Contents1 Introduction 1

2 Why Study Elvish? 2

3 Two Histories 33.1 Internal History: The Sundered

Tongues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33.2 External History: Qenya and

Gnomish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

4 The Sounds of Elvish 5

5 Quenya: ‘Elven-Latin’ 6

6 Sindarin: Shifting Sounds 8

7 Some Examples 9

8 Further Reading 10

A Word Lists 12

Answers to the Exercises 16

1 IntroductionAs many Tolkien enthusiasts know, the world ofMiddle-earth was first conceived as the result ofTolkien’s enthusiasm for linguistic invention. Ashe wrote in 1967 (in a suggested correction to anarticle about him),

“The imaginary histories grew out of Tolkien’sprediliction for inventing languages. He dis-covered, as others have who carry out suchinventions to any degree of completion, that alanguage requires a suitable habitation, anda history in which it can develop” [Letters,#294].

Certainly, one of the most distinctive features ofTolkien’s works is the extensive use of complexand consistent languages, of which the most vis-ible and best developed are the Elvish languages.Almost all of the exotic place-names in The Lordof the Rings are Elvish in origin, as (of course) arethe names of the Elves, the Numenoreans of Gon-dor, and even some weapons. A large number ofTolkien’s readers — many more than he expected— have studied the Elvish languages and their al-phabets, and have employed them for a variety ofpersonal uses.

Unfortunately, no explicit description of the vo-cabularies, phonologies, and grammars for theElvish languages seen in The Lord of the Ringshas ever been published, leaving Tolkien’s read-ers with the task of reconstructing them by in-ference on the basis of the material available,much as professional linguists reconstruct ancientlanguages. This makes it difficult for the non-specialist to employ the Elvish languages effec-tively. The situation is exacerbated by the factthat the only widely available book on the sub-ject for a general audience, Ruth Noel’s The Lan-guages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth (Houghton Mif-flin, 1974 and 1980) is generally regarded withproper scorn by Tolkien language enthusiasts

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(sometimes known by the Quenya word lamben-golmor), not only because it is outdated — it pre-dates the publication of the twelve volumes of TheHistory of Middle-earth — but because it is filledwith misleading and incorrect information. Thisarticle, then, is intended as a very rudimentaryintroduction to Tolkien’s Elvish languages. It doesnot attempt to ‘teach Elvish’ or provide a detailedtreatment of their structures. Instead, we hopeto give a general feel for the ‘features’ of the lan-guages for Tolkien fans who have not yet investi-gated the subject to any great extent, and directthem to other resources for further study. Thosein a hurry may simply wish to skip to Section 8,Further Reading for references to other sources.

2 Why Study Elvish?If you are reading this article, you probably don’tneed anyone to tell you why the study of Elvishis of interest — one might as well ask why peoplememorize Hobbit genealogies (or, for that matter,baseball statistics or any other ‘useless’ informa-tion). But beyond purely ‘academic’ interest, hereare some of the applications to which people haveput their knowledge of this lore.

• Small communications among fellow fans.Tolkien himself would sometimes write theQuenya word Namarie (usually translated as‘farewell’) at the bottom of letters. In theFather Christmas Letters, one letter to hischildren from Polar Bear included the ‘Arctic’phrase Mara mesta an ni vela tye ento, ya ratonea (Goodbye till I see you next and I hope itwill be soon), closely resembling an early ver-sion of Quenya. Many Tolkien fans will sim-ilarly inscribe the Sindarin greeting Suilador the Quenya closing Namarie in letters, orquote Frodo’s Quenya greeting to Gildor whenmeeting new Tolkien friends.

• Decoration. This is more appropriate toTolkien’s invented alphabets, the Cirth andthe Tengwar (which will not be discussed in

this article), than to the languages them-selves. Nevertheless, using Tolkien’s alpha-bets or Roman (English) lettering, some peo-ple may inscribe the Sindarin for “Speak,friend, and enter” over their front door (oron their refrigerators), or invent new inscrip-tions in Sindarin or Quenya for similar pur-poses.

• Creative Writing. While there is not enough‘known’ about the Elvish languages to per-mit anyone to write extensive works1, severalpeople have composed short works of Quenyapoetry (usually accompanied by some annota-tion) simply for art’s sake.

• Role-playing Games. Tolkien passed away in1973, less than two years before the first pub-lication of Dungeons and Dragons (it is amus-ing to speculate on what the consequencesmight have been if such games had been pop-ular in Tolkien’s lifetime). Participants insuch games — referees and players alike —often wish to give Elvish names to characters,weapons, or places. Although some may ques-tion whether the use of such names in an en-vironment other than Tolkien’s world — thehistory of which is so closely tied to those lan-guages — is really appropriate, Tolkien him-self was willing to supply one reader withseveral names for bulls in Sindarin (such asTarmund, ‘Noble bull’) for her herd [Letters,#345], so such uses may not be unreasonableafter all.Similarly, it is common for people to assumepseudonyms in Elvish languages for Internetforums and the like. These are sometimesbased on the real-world etymology of the in-dividual’s name, such as Meldon for David(meaning ‘beloved one’), based on the Quenyaadjective melda (‘beloved’).

• Motion Pictures. Early articles in the popu-lar press covering Peter Jackson’s films glibly

1Of course, you can write anything you like; but even lam-bengolmor will not necessarily understand what you have writ-ten.

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dismissed Elvish as a “gobbledygook” of for-eign sounds requiring subtitles, but Jacksonknew that audience acceptance of his vision ofMiddle-earth as a real place would require (inpart) that ‘real’ Elvish language must be por-trayed, beyond the passages that are foundin the books2. To this end, Elvish scholarsDavid Salo and Bill Welden were employed totranslate dialogue into Sindarin and Quenya(much of which necessarily required inven-tion and speculation on their part) and assistin proper pronunciation of these dialogues aswell as the other Elvish names that are spo-ken in the films. As it has turned out, theseElvish ‘fabrications’ have drawn much atten-tion, and interest in Tolkien’s Elvish creationssurged greatly with the success of the firstfilm.

3 Two HistoriesUnlike the historical languages of our world,Tolkien’s languages each bear two histories: the‘internal’ or Middle-earth history that describeshow the Sindarin, Telerin, Avarin, Vanyarin,and Quenya languages evolved from the commonproto-Elvish spoken by the Elves who first awak-ened at Cuivienen; and the ‘external’ or real-world history that describes how the Qenya andGnomish languages devised by Tolkien in 1915–1917 changed over the decades, as Tolkien’s lin-guistic and aesthetic tastes changed, leading tothe Quenya and Sindarin languages seen in TheLord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Peoplewho ‘do Elvish’ need to be aware of both histo-ries when attempting to understand how the lan-guages work.

3.1 Internal History: The SunderedTongues

As told in The Silmarillion, the Elves were once asingle people in the period following their awaken-

2Oddly, many of Tolkien’s actual Elvish passages are notportrayed in the film.

ing at Cuivienen, and spoke a single tongue, some-times called Common Elvish or Proto-Quendian.But as the Great Journey to the West began, theElves were divided into several groups, and theirlanguages began to diverge. In the words of Pen-golodh,

Thus, swifter or slower, yet ever inescapably,the far-sundered kindreds of the Quendi weresundered also in speech: the Avari from theEldar; and the Teleri from the other Eldar;and the Sindar, who abode in Middle-earth,from the Teleri that came at last unto Aman;and the Exiles of the Noldor from those thatremained in the land of the Valar. [TheHistory of Middle-earth XII, Dangweth Pen-golodh]

When the rebellious Noldor returned to Middle-earth, they learned the speech of the Sindar andit became their tongue of daily use. Indeed, Thin-gol forbade the speaking of the Noldorin tongue,Quenya, in his realm. Thus, Sindarin (with somedialectic variation) became the tongue of all theElves of Beleriand. Quenya, itself somewhatchanged from the Quenya of Valinor, became akind of ‘Elven Latin’ or ceremonial tongue, knownto all learned people, but used by only a few indaily speech by the end of the Third Age, in whichperiod most of our information was recorded.

Thus, in The Lord of the Rings, two very dis-tinct branches of the Elvish language are seen:Sindarin, the language in which are given most ofthe proper names such as Minas Tirith or Orcrist;and Quenya, the language of Galadriel’s lament inLothlorien, and in which Frodo greeted Gildor. Itis important to distinguish between the two lan-guages. For example, someone recently closed anarticle with “Namarie, mellyn”; but Namarie, seenin Galadriel’s lament, is Quenya, while mellyn,the plural of mellon, is Sindarin (‘friend’, perhapsthe best-known word in any Elven tongue). Wewill later see how the sound systems of the twolanguages are quite different, and, for the mostpart, not hard to identify.

We see some hints of the relationship betweenthe two languages in some words like Quenyalasse, Sindarin lass, ‘leaf ’, or in words that

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diverged from Common Elvish more, such asQuenya alda (‘tree’) versus Sindarin galadh (withdh representing the voiced th sound as in “these”).These two words both resulted from a primitivegalada.

It may be noted here that Ruth Noel’s book,while mentioning the existence of a commonproto-language, seems to say that Sindarin cansomehow be derived from Quenya. This simplisticidea makes it impossible to account for the initialsounds of pairs like Q/S nar/naur (‘flame’) on onehand, but Q numen versus S dun, both meaning‘west’, on the other (the latter words both derivefrom a primitive root, ndu). The result is a seriesof impossible-to-apply ‘rules’ contrasting the twolanguages.

3.2 External History: Qenya andGnomish

In a letter to W. H. Auden [Letters, #163], Tolkiendescribed how his youthful encounters with lan-guages shaped the development of his own lan-guages.

. . . the discovery . . . of a Finnish Grammar

. . . was like discovering a complete wine-cellarfilled with bottles of an amazing wine of akind and flavour never tasted before. It quiteintoxicated me; and I gave up the attemptto invent an ‘unrecorded’ Germanic language,and my ‘own language’ — or series of inventedlanguages — became heavily Finnicized inphonetic pattern and structure.

That is of course a long time past now. Lin-guistic taste changes like everything else . . .Latin and the British type of Celtic have itnow . . .

This earliest version of Tolkien’s language, calledQenya (not yet spelled “Quenya”), had becomequite elaborate by 1915 (when Tolkien was about23), and he wrote down an extensive vocabularyand grammar, the Qenya Lexicon (Qenyaqetsa),in notebooks dated 1915–1917 (published in thejournal Parma Eldalamberon #12, 1998; see Sec-tion 8, Further Reading). The Finnish character

of Qenya and its successors may be glimpsed bynoting how ‘familiar’ (to a Tolkien fan, anyway)seem some of the names in the Finnish Kalevala:Ilmarinen, Aino, Untamo, Melatar, or even spe-cific words like tie, meaning ‘road’.

It is evident that Qenya was the language clos-est to Tolkien’s heart. He wrote poems in itover the years (of which the best known is Gal-adriel’s lament in Lothlorien), and its vocabularyand grammar appear to be the most developed.Over the years, the Finnish character of the lan-guage was softened, and the resemblance to Latinincreased. In a letter to Naomi Mitchison [Letters,#144], he wrote:

The archaic language of lore is meant to bea kind of “Elven-latin”, and by transcribingit into a spelling closely resembling that ofLatin . . ., the similarity to Latin has been in-creased ocularly. Actually it might be said tobe composed on a Latin basis with two other(main) ingredients that happen to give me“phonaesthetic” pleasure: Finnish and Greek.It is however less consonantal than any of thethree.

In the original conception of the mythology, Qenyawas the language of the elves of Valinor, but notthe language of the rebellious Noldor, as Quenyais in The Silmarillion. The language of the Noldor,or Gnomes, was very different.

Just as the Finnish language strongly influ-enced Qenya, the (wholly unrelated) Welsh lan-guage, which fascinated Tolkien even as a child,became the linguistic-aesthetic inspiration forTolkien’s second Elvish language, the languageof the Noldor, or Gnomish. Contemporary withthe Qenya Lexicon was the Gnomish Lexicon(i·Lam na·Ngoldathon, published in Parma El-dalamberon #11, 1995). Gnomish never lost its‘Welsh’ character; the language we recognize asSindarin bears much resemblance to the Gnomishof the Lexicon, though it is almost entirely dif-ferent in detail. Again, we can see resemblancesbetween Gnomish (and Sindarin) and Welsh byconsidering some words and names found in theWelsh Mabinogion: Govannon, Annwn, or Dol Pe-bin; or words like morwyn, ‘maid’ or llaw (which, if

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it were Sindarin, would be spelled lhaw), ‘hands’.In the later phases of Tolkien’s work, the word“Gnomish” was abandoned in favor of “Noldorin”.

Gnomish and Qenya underwent many changesfor over twenty years, and the relationship be-tween the languages, and the other Elvish di-alects of Beleriand, grew more complex. By thetime work on The Lord of the Rings began, theNoldorin and Qenya languages had reached formsfairly close to what we recognize as Sindarin andQuenya. At that time, Tolkien wrote down two im-portant works that appeared in Volume V of TheHistory of Middle-earth: the Lhammas, which de-scribed the now quite complicated relationshipsamong the various Elvish dialects as they werethen conceived, and the far less formal Etymolo-gies, a list of many Common Elvish word roots,listing the Qenya, Noldorin, and other Elvishwords derived from them. While many of the par-ticulars in the Etymologies were discarded in thecourse of writing The Lord of the Rings (and sub-sequently), it remains the single most importantsource document for Elvish scholarship to date.

It was not until quite late in the writing of TheLord of the Rings that the roles of Quenya andSindarin as the respective languages of the Noldorand Sindar emerged. In fact, the word “Sindarin”did not appear until the writing of the Appendices.Once The Lord of the Rings saw print, Tolkienfelt bound by the linguistic information (both im-plicit and explicit) contained therein. There weresome minor revisions and corrections pertainingto Elvish matters over the years (such as chang-ing a noun inflection in Frodo’s greeting to Gildor),but The Lord of the Rings is considered to repre-sent the definitively ‘real’ Elvish of the Third Age.

4 The Sounds of ElvishAs the foregoing discussion makes clear, many as-pects of the Elvish languages are unclear even toscholars; inferences must be drawn from materi-als that are necessarily incomplete and unsystem-atic. Indeed, Tolkien changed his mind often, andthe available materials are sometimes downright

contradictory.Nevertheless, one area that is quite well under-

stood is that of phonology: the sounds associatedwith the Elvish dialects. Appendix E of The Lordof the Rings, describing the alphabets, providesvery complete descriptions of the sounds used bythe Noldor and Sindar. As this is intended as anintroduction, not an encyclopedic treatment, wewill illustrate the phonological characteristics ofSindarin and Quenya by presenting a collection ofelementary ‘rules’ by which one can usually distin-guish between Sindarin and Quenya. Of course,there will be many exceptions.

In this discussion, the abbreviation CE refers toCommon Elvish, the common ancestor of Quenyaand Sindarin.

• Final vowels in CE disappeared in Sindarin.If you see a word with more than one sylla-ble ending in a vowel, it is probably Quenya,although Sindarin verbs like daro will oftenend in vowels.Conversely, if an Elvish word ends with a let-ter other than a vowel, or the letters n, r, l, ors, it is almost certain to be Sindarin.

• The CE sounds t, p, and k were normally soft-ened, or lenited, in Sindarin when they oc-curred in the middle of words, especially be-tween vowels. Their sounds became d, b, andg, respectively. If you see a word with the un-lenited forms in such a position, it is probablyQuenya, and not Sindarin.

• On the other hand, CE included the d, b, andg sounds, and these were modified in Quenya.d regularly became l (although it remainedwhen strengthened in combinations like ndand ld); b became v (as in Q vala versus Sbalan), and g disappeared entirely (except af-ter n). Thus, if you see a word with these con-sonants appearing outside the combinationsng, mb, nd, rd, or ld, it is not Quenya.

• Some other consonantal sounds are uniqueto one or the other language. The Sindarinsound dh (a lenited form of earlier d) did not

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occur in Quenya. The qu sound of Quenyais not found in Sindarin; it was based on aCE sound that became p in Sindarin3. Theolder sound th (as seen in English words like“threat”) was modified to Quenya s.

• The long vowels a, e, and ı are uncommonin Sindarin, compared to Quenya; the diph-thongs oi, ie, and eu only occur in Quenya.On the other hand, the diphthongs ae andoe are unique to Sindarin, as are the circum-flexed vowels in accented monosyllables likedur. The vowel y occurs only in Sindarin; theconsonantal y only occurs in Quenya.

Of course, these rules will not solve all problems.For example, the word elen could be either Sin-dar or Quenya based on its appearance; as it hap-pens, it is the normal Quenya word for ‘star’, but isalso a Sindarin word, “only used in histories or theworks of the Loremasters, as a word to include allElves (Eldar and Avari).” [The History of Middle-earth XI, Quendi and Eldar] 4

There are also a few things to remember aboutpronunciation. Neither language has a silent e atthe end of words; Tolkien usually wrote final e as eto emphasize its pronunciation as a separate syl-lable.

Also, always keep in mind that Tolkien used cto represent the sound k, mainly to improve theappearance of the Elvish languages, and it shouldalways be so pronounced: “Keleborn”, not “Sele-born”, and “Kirith Ungol” (which is how Christo-pher Tolkien, wishing to avoid mispronunciation,spelled it on the map in The Lord of the Rings),not “Sirith Ungol”. Also, a final f in Sindarin ispronounced (as in Welsh) as v.

Exercise 1 Identify the following words asSindarin or Quenya: Calacirya; Galadriel;Taniquetil; Morimaite; Calenardhon; Balrog;Gandalf.

3If this sounds strange, compare words like Greek penta (orWelsh pump) and Latin quinque, all meaning ‘five’.

4Just to confuse matters, it also meant ‘star’ in a few archaicSindarin compounds like elenath

With this survey of elementary Elvish phonologyunder our belts, we now look at a few of the salientfeatures of Quenya and Sindarin.

5 Quenya: ‘Elven-Latin’We speakers of English have a relatively easy taskwhen learning the formalities of our grammar5.Nouns only come in a few varieties (singular, plu-ral, and the possessive form of each), and the onlypresent-tense conjugation for regular verbs is theaddition of an s (sometimes pronounced z) afterthe third-person singular. Our pronouns are onlya bit more complex, since they include an objectivecase (e.g., “me” instead of “I” in certain contexts).Only our system of verb tenses, with helping verbsto produce complex tenses like “he might havebeen about to read the book”, exhibits significantgrammatical complexity, comparatively speaking.Yet even there, the form of a regular verb onlychanges in the past tense and in the present par-ticiple (i.e., “I bake, I baked, I am baking.”).

By comparison, Quenya (like Latin andFinnish) is a more inflected language, in whichan assortment of grammatical particles (like theplural marker s in English) and occasional pho-netic changes mark the uses of nouns, adjectivesand verbs.

To illustrate this, let us consider a regularQuenya noun, parma, meaning ‘book’; with thedefinite article, i parma, ‘the book’. We cannot only form a regular plural, parmar6, butalso a dual plural, parmat, meaning ‘a pair ofbooks’. Quenya nouns can also be marked witha possessive (or, more properly, genitive case).So, if the Quenya word for ‘name’ is esse, then‘name of (a) book’ would be parmo esse; ‘names ofbooks’ would be parmaron essi7. Such noun vari-

5Setting aside, for the moment, our many irregular verbsand nouns.

6A mistake made by many casual readers is to use the plu-ral form instead of the singular, or vice-versa; as, “Gandalf isa Maiar,” instead of the correct “Gandalf is a Maia.” Now youknow better.

7Nouns ending in e or a consonant are regularly pluralizedwith a final i.

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ations indicating grammatic function are calledcases; the inflection of a noun for these cases iscalled declension — the bane of Latin studentsfor centuries. Fortunately, compared to Latin andFinnish (which has no fewer than fifteen nouncases), the Quenya case system is relatively sim-ple. There are, for example, no grammatical gen-ders in Quenya.

To continue our example, we might want to talkabout a word (quetta) out of the book. For thiswe need another case, called ablative, so that wecan say quetta i parmallo, ‘a word from the book’.There are several other noun cases, and differingforms of the plural as well.

Furthermore, nouns may have possessives em-bedded into them. To build on our example, I canrefer to thy book as parmalya, my book as par-manya and our book (exclusively thine and mine)as parmalva. Such nouns can have a case end-ing added, so that ‘from my book’ would be par-manyallo. Thus, if omentie is the Quenya wordfor ‘meeting’ and ‘time’ is lume, then we can nowanalyze what is surely the most famous exampleof Quenya noun declension, lumenna omentielvo.Here, we meet the allative case ending -nna togive us ‘at/upon the time8.’ ‘Our meeting’ isomentielva, so the genitive -o inflection gives usthe well-known translation, ‘on the hour of ourmeeting’.

Exercise 2 If anna is the Quenya word for ‘a gift’,and malo means ‘a friend’, how might you tag aholiday present as ‘a gift from a friend’?

The first part of Frodo’s greeting demonstratesa simple sentence with a subject followed by apresent-tense verb: elen sıla, ‘(a) star is shining.’If several stars were shining, one would say elenisılar. In this example, a one-syllable primitiveroot, SIL (the root for silmaril), is used as a verbby adding -a and also lengthening the vowel; withlonger verbs (e.g., lanta, ‘fall’), no vowel lengthen-ing occurs. If we wish to say that a star will shine,we can say elen siluva; the -uva suffix indicatesthe future tense.

8The final a is, in Frodo’s actual greeting to Gildor, omittedsimply as a contraction with the following vowel.

The past tense is a little fuzzier. Different verbsseem to form the past tense in different ways, de-pending on their original derivation. For example,mata, ‘eat’, is said to form the past tense, mante,‘ate’, by “medial nasal-infixion”, the insertion ofthe sound n. More common is the addition of ne,as in vane, ‘passed away’. Finally, there is a per-fect tense, the form of the past tense denoting acompleted action, as in avanie, ‘has passed away.’It is formed by prefixing the root with its (first)vowel, and adding ie. There are several publishedexamples of this.

Verbs of any tense can be conjugated (sort of)by the addition of suffixes similar to those used toform possessives. For example, Elendil’s words re-peated by Aragorn, Et Earello Endorenna utulien,‘Out of the Great Sea to Middle-earth I am come.’The basic verb stem, ‘come’ TUL- forms the per-fect tense, utulie; then the first-person suffix -nis added. A pronoun can also be added as theobject of the verb, as in Aragorn’s exclamation,utuvienyes, ‘I have found it’, in which the per-fect verb utuvie is marked with an extended first-person suffix to give utuvienye, ‘I have found’ andfinally a third-person suffix -s is added to completethe word.

Exercise 3 The normal word-order for Quenya isSubject-verb-object, as in English. If the root for‘see, watch’ is TIR- (as in palantır), how do you say‘I am watching the stars’?

Exercise 4 The Quenya word for ‘sun’ is anar;the root for ‘light’ is KAL-, and the word for ‘path’is tie. Gelmir told Tuor, Anar caluva tielyanna.What did he say?

Hopefully, this look at some of the things thatgo on in Quenya has not been too frightening!It does demonstrate the highly inflected charac-ter of the language. Fortunately, as we will seelater, there are many good documents — bothin print and on the Web — by people who havespent a lot of time figuring these things out, andsummarizing them neatly. As it turns out, be-cause Tolkien wrote many annotated examples of

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Quenya prose and poetry, and essays dealing pri-marily with its structure, Quenya is actually morewell documented than Sindarin. This is surpris-ing to many people, for whom the word “Elvish”usually suggests the Sindarin language, which isso visible in The Lord of the Rings in the namesof people and places, and of course in the inscrip-tion on the West-gate of Moria. With this in mind,we now turn our attention to the language of theGrey Elves.

6 Sindarin: Shifting SoundsAs we learned earlier, Tolkien modeled Sindarinin some ways after the Welsh language. One ofthe unusual things about Welsh is that pluralsare often formed by the change of internal vowels.This is the result of old plurals ending in -i. Eventhough that ending was dropped, it affected thepronunciations of the other vowels in the word. Avery similar phenomenon occurs in Sindarin, al-though the details are a bit different. Even ca-sual readers of The Lord of the Rings probablyrecognize the resulting plural formations: adan,‘man’ (as in dunadan), plural edain9; certh, ‘rune’,plural cirth; orod, ‘mountain’, plural eryd (eredin older names); and of course orch, plural yrch.This phenomenon is very consistent, and there aremany examples.

Exercise 5 What are the plural forms of: galadh;amon; mellon; edhel? Do you recognize what theymean?

Sindarin also had a class plural, -ath, seen in suchwords as periannath, ‘(the race of) halflings’ andelenath, ‘the host of the stars’. Note that these aregenuine plurals, and the adjectives that modifythem are pluralized normally, as in Pinnath Gelin,the ‘green ridges’ of Gondor. There are also other‘irregular’ plurals formed by adding suffixes10, asin Dru/Druin but these are uncommon.

9This should properly be pronounced to rhyme with English“dine,” not “dane”.

10as there are in Welsh, e.g., ebol-yon, ‘colts’

Not only vowels, but consonants shifted in Sin-darin. Earlier, we saw how consonants changedfrom primitive Elvish in certain contexts. Thissoftening, or lenition11, of consonants could occurat the beginning of words in certain contexts, in-cluding the formation of compounds. The exactrules are uncertain12, and it seems that Tolkienchanged his mind about them frequently, judg-ing from manuscript corrections and different ver-sions of names from different times. The mostcommon context for lenition is when a word isused in close compounds. So, we see elvellyn, ‘elf-friends’ from el+mellyn; Perhael, ‘Half-wise, Sam-wise’ from per+sael; fanuidhol, ‘cloudyhead’, fromfanui+dol, and so on. Lenition also occurs at thebeginnings of singular nouns following the defi-nite article i (e.g., i Varanduiniant, ‘the Brandy-wine bridge’). Finally, lenition occurs when thenoun is the direct object of the verb. For example,when the hosts of the West praise Frodo and Sam,they say Daur a Berhael, Conin en Annun! Eg-lerio!, “Noble and Halfwise (i.e. Frodo and Sam),Princes13 of the West, glorify (them)!”. Here, thewords taur and perhael are implicitly the directobjects of the verb eglerio, and so their initial con-sonants are lenited.

Exercise 6 The adjective celebrin means ‘sil-very’; tal is ‘foot’. What is the result of combiningthem into a close compound?

Exercise 7 The Sindarin word for ‘word’ is peth(from the same word as Quenya quetta). Why doesit appear as beth in Gandalf ’s spell, Fennas no-gothrim, lasto beth lammen (“Gateway of Dwarf-folk, hear my tongue’s word”)?

Sindarin also has a nasal mutation which occursafter certain words ending in -n or -m. The con-sonant sound changes, and, in many cases, thetriggering letter disappears; it is implicit in the

11It is notable that this word appears nowhere in Ruth Noel’sbook, and she does not appear to recognize it in many cases.

12In Welsh, lenition occurs under very complex rules, such as“a feminine singular after an article.” Sindarin appears sim-pler.

13This appears to be an irregular plural.

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mutated consonant. The classic example of this isthe phrase, Ernil i-pheriannath. Here, we meet(in disguise!) the plural article in; it just means‘the’, but for plurals (rather like the Spanish arti-cle los). The result is to make the p sound into an fsound; Tolkien spells this as ph to make this mu-tation evident. Thus, while Pippin describes him-self as a perian, ‘halfling’14 the collective plural forhis race is periannath and ‘Prince of the Halflings’is Ernil i Pheriannath.

There is much that can be said about Sindaringrammar, and, once again, this introduction can-not provide a complete treatment of the subject.However, we must mention one grammatical fea-ture that is an important part of the names seenthroughout The Lord of the Rings and The Silmar-illion. This is the use of adjectival ordering tomodify nouns. Sindarin adjectives are normallyplaced after the nouns that they modify; lenitionsometimes occurs when this happens. For ex-ample, Parth Galen, ‘green lawn’ (with a lenitedform of calen, ‘green’). This adjectival position isalso normally used to represent the genitive case(which we recall is similar to a possessive), as seenin Ennyn Durin Aran Moria, ‘Doors (of) Durin,Lord (of) Moria’. Note that in this case, conso-nant mutation does not take place. However, ifan article occurs, nasal mutation occurs. So, wehave Aragorn’s letter to Sam describing his titlesas aran Gondor ar Hır i Mbair Annui, ‘king ofGondor and Lord of the Westlands’; no mutationtakes place in aran Gondor, but a nasal mutationafter the plural genitive article i(n) causes the nor-mal plural bair to become mbair. There is also asingular article, en, that can be used only in thisgenitive context, as in Voronwe’s descriptions ofthe mountains of Echoriath as ered e·mbar nın,‘(the) mountains (of) the home (of) mine’.

7 Some ExamplesWe now close with some examples of ‘doingElvish’, by presenting some simple translations of

14the same word per, ‘half ’, is seen in other words like Per-hael (Sam) and the half-elven peredhil.

names and short sentences. For our first example,we consider the name Green Books. In Quenya,we already know that parma means ‘book’; andwe may remember the ‘green-elves’ or laiquendifrom The Silmarillion. Although Etymologies in-dicates that the Qenya word was laiqua (underthe root LAYAK), in a later correspondence ex-plaining the meaning of the name Legolas [Let-ters, #211], Tolkien gave the revised Quenya wordlaica for ‘green’. Pluralizing this adjective, weget Laice Parmar, pronounced as “LIE-keh PAHR-mahr”15. For Sindarin, we look up PAR- andfind that the Sindarin equivalent of parma is parf(with the regular dropping of the final vowel andthe lenition of m to v), plural perf. In the same let-ter, Tolkien says that the more common Sindarinword for ‘green’ is calen, so we can translate GreenBooks confidently as Perf Gelin. Remember thatthe final f is pronounced as a v, so this would bepronounced, roughly, as “pairv GEHL-een”.

The construction of the Sindarin title for thisarticle was problematic. The word cent, ‘exami-nation’ (pronounced “kent”), was derived from theQuenya word Kenta, ‘enquiry’, which seems to berelated to the verb stem KEN- ‘see, behold’. TheSindarin form is by analogy with the entry in Ety-mologies giving Qenya qanta and Noldorin pantas equivalent derivations from the root KWAT-,‘full’. The last word, hedhellem, is the plural formof edhel-lam, ‘elf-tongue’: the Sindarin equivalentto Quenya lambe is lam(m) (consider, for example,the phrase lasto beth lammen). The conjunctiono, ‘about, concerning’, and the addition of an ini-tial H- to the following word is based on the entryin Etymologies for OS-. This entry was, at leastpartially, obsoleted by a different derivation of ost,‘fortress’ in Quendi and Eldar, but no mention ismade of any replacement for this useful preposi-tion. Mature Sindarin, like Noldorin, does reducean s found between vowels to h, so if OS- is valid,the initial H in Hedhellem is justified 16. In any

15Thanks to Fredrik Strom of the Elfling mailing list forpointing this out.

16Some scholars would argue for oh Edhellem. It must alsobe mentioned that such a preposition would be partly homo-phonic with the preposition o meaning ‘from’ seen on the West-

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case, a Quenya equivalent would be Eldalambi-centa (using c to represent the k sound).

Earlier we mentioned the possibility of puttinga Sindarin inscription on a refrigerator door. Aneasy possibility might be “Enter, friends, and eat!”We know the form of the first three words by anal-ogy with the West-gate inscription: minno mellyna. Note that if the word mellyn were lenited to vel-lyn, it would mean ‘Enter a friend’, which is notwhat we want to say17. For the command, ‘eat’,we recall that the root MAT- has this meaning; Et-ymologies gives medi as the Noldorin equivalent.This is consistent with Sindarin rules: the oldert between vowels becomes d in Sindarin, and theinfinitive verb ending -i causes the nearby vowelto change (as in the plural formations). But weknow that the Sindarin imperative verb endingis -o (as seen on the West-gate, or Gandalf ’s com-mand to open, edro!), which does not cause a vowelshift, so the imperative form is mado, and ourRefrigerator-gate inscription is the unexpectedlyalliterative Minno mellyn a mado. We can makeit more alliterative by throwing in the adverb mae‘well’ (as in Glorfindel’s exclamation, mae govan-nen, ‘well met’), giving us Minno mellyn a maemado, “Enter, friends, and eat well!”

This article was prompted by seeing an arti-cle ending in the macaronic (i.e., mixing Sindarinand Quenya) Namarie Mellyn, intended to mean“Farewell, friends.” We can find the Quenya equiv-alent to mellyn by once again turning to Etymolo-gies, and examining the entry MEL-. While wemight expect the Quenya equivalent to use thesame vowel, it turns out that there is an “irreg-ular vocalism” in this word, so that the actualword is malo (plural malor). So we can simply say,Namarie, malor. For the sake of demonstration,we can decide that we want to say, ‘Farewell, myfriends.’, in which case we add the usual posses-sive and get Namarie, malonyar. Finally, perhapswe want to be really ambitious and say ‘Farewellto my friends’. Here, we need a dative case ending(used typically when something is being given to

gate of Moria.17This analysis may be what misled Gandalf in interpreting

pedo mellon.

someone). We can find this in some of the onlinelocations or printed journals; it is, in the plural, -in, so we finally get Namarie malonyain. Unfortu-nately, there does not appear to be a ready equiva-lent for Namarie in Sindarin, although some fansuse the phrase cuio mae, “live well”, for this pur-pose.

8 Further ReadingThose wishing to study further have two kindsof sources available to them: ‘primary’ references— the works actually written by J.R.R. Tolkien;and ‘secondary’ materials — analyses and com-pilations created by others. In The Lord of theRings itself, the most important section is Ap-pendix E, which describes the sounds of the Elvishlanguages, and the Tengwar and Runic letteringsystems. Appendix F also gives an outline ofthe various languages of Middle-earth, includingElvish, and describes how real-world languageslike Old English and Norse are used to representthem in the novel. The Appendix on calendarshas some interesting vocabulary and it may beinstructive to compare the Sindarin and Quenyanames with their Anglicized (Hobbitish) counter-parts. The Appendix to The Silmarillion has a listof Elvish names used in that work, with some et-ymological information.

One valuable resource that is unfortunately outof print is the songbook for Donald Swann’s songcycle, The Road Goes Ever On. This 1967 volumecontains a supplementary section by Tolkien giv-ing word-for-word translations of Namarie and AElbereth Gilthoniel (including nicely calligraphedTengwar versions of both). While this volume hasbecome difficult to obtain, it can sometimes befound for upwards of $75 US from used book deal-ers and Web auction sites.

The History of Middle-earth comprises twelvevolumes and may be difficult to acquire in itsentirety for some. For the Elvish linguist, themost important volume is Volume V: The LostRoad. As mentioned earlier, this volume con-tains the Etymologies, a list of Elvish word-roots

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and their Qenya and Noldorin derivatives datingfrom approximately the time at which work onThe Lord of the Rings was begun. While muchwas changed (including the very names of Qenyaand Noldorin respectively becoming Quenya andSindarin), this is the most complete vocabularyand word-derivation resource for the Elvish lan-guages. Other The History of Middle-earth vol-umes containing interesting material are SauronDefeated, which in the Epilogue contains thelongest published Sindarin prose selection in theform of a letter from King Elessar to Mayor Sam-wise Gamgee, and The War of the Jewels, whichcontains the essay, Quendi and Eldar, a detailedtreatment of the etymologies of the various words(quendi, edhel, etc.) for the Eldar and other racesof Middle-earth.

Additional material by Tolkien that is primar-ily of linguistic interest and did not find a placein The History of Middle-earth has been printedin recent years in the journals Parma Eldalam-beron18, edited by Christopher Gilson, and VinyarTengwar, edited by Carl Hostetter. These jour-nals appear sporadically. Parma Eldalamberonprinted two special issues in the 1990s contain-ing the Gnomish Lexicon and the Qenya Lexi-con, from about 1915, and the latest issue (Jan-uary 2002) contains information on the develop-ment of Gnomish through the 1920s as it becamecloser to what we know as Sindarin. Further in-formation can be obtained from Mr. Gilson’s website19. Vinyar Tengwar has most recently printedessays by Tolkien expanding on the material inQuendi and Eldar, including an interesting dis-cussion of the implications of “mind-speech” (orosanwe) among the Valar and Eldar. Again, youcan consult Mr. Hostetter’s web site20 for furtherinformation.

In the past, both journals have also presentedoriginal articles, Elvish poetry, analyses, lettercolumns, and so on. In more recent years, much

18For ‘The book of the elven tongues’. It is probable that thecorrect word should be Eldalambion. The first issue appearedin 1971; much has been learned since then.

19http://www.eldalamberon.com/parma9.html20http://www.elvish.org/VT/

activity of this kind has begun to take place onweb pages and Internet mailing lists. One verygood place to start is Carl Hostetter’s Resourcesfor Tolkienian Linguistics21, which contains a farmore complete listing of both primary and sec-ondary sources. Among its links, the most pop-ular is Helge Fauskanger’s Ardalambion22. Thissite contains a wealth of word lists, and excellentsummaries of what is known about the structuresof Quenya and Sindarin (and other Tolkien lan-guages as well), some of which were consulted atlength to prepare this article. Mr. Fauskanger ispreparing a series of lessons on Quenya that canbe downloaded from his site. Another site that willbe of considerable interest is Ryszard Derdzinski’sGwaith i-Phethdain23 (Fellowship of the Word-smiths), which contains a variety of useful materi-als and links, including extensive discussion of theElvish dialogues heard in Peter Jackson’s movies.

There are two mailing lists concerned withElvish and Tolkien linguistics. The more activeis the Elfling24 mailing list, operated by DorotheaSalo; less active (but no less erudite) is the moreheavily moderated Tolklang25 list. Both cover awide range of topics and their participants rangefrom beginners to lambengolmor of many years’standing. Be sure to read the FAQ before postingto either list!

21http://www.elvish.org/resources.html22http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/index.html23http://www.elvish.org/gwaith24http://www.terracom.net/˜dorothea/elfling.html25http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/misc/local/TolkLang/

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A Word ListsHerein are set forth all the Quenya and Sindarin words and phrases discussed in this article.

Quenya Word Listalda treeanar sun

Anar caluva tielyanna The sun will shine on your pathanna gift

Anna malollo A gift from a friendavanie Has passed away

Eldalambi-centa An enquiry into Elvish tonguesEldalambion Of the elvish tongues

elen starelen sila A star is shining

elen siluva a star will shineeleni silar stars are shining

esse nameEt Earello Endorenna utulien From out of the great sea to Middle-earth I have come

i parma the bookKAL- Light

Kenta Inquiry/examinationlaica green, bright

Laice Parmar Green Bookslaiquendi green-elves

lambe language, tonguelambengolmor language loremasters

lanta fallslasse leaflume time, hour

lumenna omentielvo upon the timemalo friend

malollo from a friendmalor friendsmante ate

mata eatsmelda beloved

Meldon DavidNamarie Farewell

Namarie malonyain Farewell to my friendsNamarie, malonyar Farewell, my friends

Namarie, malor Farewell, friendsnar fire, flame

numen westomentie meeting of ways

omentielva our meetingosanwe mind-speech

palantir far-seer

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parma bookparmalva our book (thine and mine)parmalya thy book

parmanya my bookparmanyallo from my book

parmar booksparmaron essi names of books

parmat a pair of booksparmo esse a book’s name

quendi elvesquetta word

quetta i parmallo a word from the booktie path

TIR- watch, seeTiran i eleni I am watching the stars

TUL- comeutulie has comeutuvie has found

utuvienye I have foundutuvienyes I have found it

vane passed away

Sindarin Word Listadan man

amon hillaran Gondor King of Gondor

aran Gondor ar Hır i Mbair Annui king of Gondor and Lord of the Western Landsbair lands, dwellings

balan valabeth words

calen green, brightcelebrin silvery

Celebrindal silver-footcent examination, inquiry

certh runecirth runes

cuio mae live welldaro stop!

Daur a Berhael, Conin en Annun! Eglerio! Noble and Halfwise, Princes of the West!dun west

dunadan west-manedain menedhel elf

edhel-lam elf-languageedhil elvesedro! open!

eglerio glorify them!el+mellyn elf+friends

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elenath host of starselvellyn elf-friends

emyn hillsen the (sing. gen.)

Ennyn Durin Aran Moria Doors of Durin Lord of Moriaered mountains

ered e·mbar nin mountains of my homeErnil i Pheriannath Prince of the Halflings

eryd mountainsfanui+dol cloudy+headfanuidhol cloudyhead

Fennas nogothrim, lasto beth lammen Gateway of (the) dwarf-folk, hear my tongue’s wordgaladh tree

gelaidh treeshedhellem (concerning) elf-tongues

i thei Varanduiniant the Baranduin (Brandywine) bridge

i(n) the (plural)lam(m) language

lass leaflasto hear!

lasto beth lammen hear my tongue’s wordlhaw ears

mado eat!mae well

mae govannen well metmbair dwellings (with nasal mutation)medi to eat

mellon friendmellyn friends

Minno mellyn a mae mado enter, friend, and eat wellnaur fire, flame

o from, of, concerningorch orcorod mountain

ost city, fortressOst-in-Edhil fortress of the elves

parf bookParth Galen Green lawnpedo mellon speak, friend

per halfper+sael half+wiseperedhil half-elves

perf booksPerf Gelin Green Books

Perhael Samwise, half-wiseperian Halfling, hobbit

periannath the race of halflingspeth word

Pinnath Gelin Green Ridges

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Suilad Greetingstal foot

Tarmund Royal Bulltaur High, lofty, noble

vellyn friends (with lenition)yrch orcs

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Answers to the Exercises1 Quenya: Calacirya (no c between vowels in Sindarin); Taniquetil (qu sound); Morimaite (t betweenvowels). Sindarin: Galadriel (no initial g in Quenya); Calenardhon (dh sound); Balrog (initial b).Gandalf is not an Elvish name — like the Dwarves’ names, it is Norse, representing the Northernmannish language of Dale — although it could pass for Sindarin in form.

2 Anna malollo.

3 Probably Tıran i eleni.

4 The sun will light (i.e. shine) upon (-nna) your (-lya) path.

5 gelaidh (trees); emyn (hills); mellyn (friends); edhil (elves, as in Ost-in-Edhil, the fortress of theNoldor of Eregion).

6 Celebrindal

7 Because it is the direct object of the verb lasto, ‘hear’.

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