Elves, Sindarin and Quenya
Speaking about peoples and their languages we must turn to The
Silmarillion first, where their origin, appearance and manners as well
as the history of Middle-earth are described.
ELVES
In the second volume called The Two Towers we find the following list
of rational beings inhabited Middle-earth:
Learn now the lore of Living Creatures !
First name the four, the free peoples:
Eldest of all the elf-children;
Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;
Ent the earthborn, old as a mountain,
Man the mortal, master of horses.
So first of all we should speak about the Elves, who were the immortal children of Iluvatar-Eru -the creator of Arda - the earth. According to Tolkien's chronology, in the Early days of Arda this folk became divided into several branches: those, who went West ( the Eldar) and those, who stayed in the East (the Avari). Later on the Eldar in their turn became divided into several clans. The first one, led by their king Ingwë, was called the Vaniar or the Fair Elves and they never set foot upon Middle-earth again but remained in the Blessed Realm of Valinor. Next came the Noldor or the Deep Elves, Finwë was their king. Most of them returned to Middle-earth and founded there new kingdoms. The third were named Telery and they had two lords: Elwë Singollo and his brother Olwë. But not all of their kin came to Valinor for they were lost upon the long road or turned aside and wished to stay in the starlit spacious lands of Middle-earth. These three clans of the Elves got the name of the Elves of Light or the High Elves, and those who remained in Middle-earth were named the Grey Elves or the Elves of Twilight. Of all the tongues and dialects of the Elves two are found in The Lord of the Rings: the High-elven or Quenya, the Grey-elven or Sindarin.
Quenya
The High-elven was an ancient tongue of Eldamar beyond the Sea, the first to be recordered in writing. It was no longer a birth-tongue but had become, as it were, the Elven-Latin, still used for ceremony, and for the high matters of lore and song, by the High-Elves, who had returned in exile to Middle-earth at the end of the First Age.
Sindarin
The exiles dwelling amongst the more numerous Grey-Elves had adopted the Sindarin for daily use; and hence it was the tongue of all the Eldar and Elf-lords that appear in this history." [Appendix F]
Roots of Quenya and Sindarin
In The Silmarillion Tolkien gives us a list of Quenya and Sindarin elements in geographical and proper names with a detailed commentary upon it. And in Appendix E to The Lord of Rings we find a vast commentary upon the two elven scripts - the Cirth and the Tengwar - rules of pronunciation and spelling, owning to which we can judge about the sound system and word-building in Quenya and Sindarin. Dealing with the languages Tolkien created one should keep in mind that the author had been a devoted student of Germanic languages while studying at Oxford. That is why in the tongues he invented there can be traced many roots of Gothic, Old Norse, Welsh and English, Finnish and Icelandic origin.
Among Quenya and Sindarin words there are quite a lot reminding us of the Old English. Here are several examples of the such: OE eor e (earth) (country, home, native land) corresponds to the Quenya Arda (realm) or the Sindarin dor (land).
The Quenya Eldar - the name given by the Elves to their kindred, meaning "the Star People" - was undoubtedly derived from the OE ‘lda/yelda (people) though Tolkien claims that Eldar and its Sindarin equivalent Edhil corresponding to Eledh were derived from the ancient Elvish words el and elen, meaning " star" or even from their earliest form ele (exclamation "behold!" made by the Elves when they first saw the stars).
Most of the names and titles of persons, places and things are in Sindarin and Quenya Elvish such as Arnor, Aragorn, Elessar, Elendil, Arwen, Denethor and Galadriel. Quenya was the ceremonial language of both the Eldar and the Dunedain, and many of the Rangers and Stewards of Gondor took Sindarin names following an ancient tradition.
The royal names of Gondor's kings were in Quenya as the names of the faithful monarchs in Numenor.
"Aragorn is the name compound from elements that are highly evocative for a philologist who has studied European languages. The first syllable ar is one of the most pregnant monosyllabic words of the OE language. It is glossed in early texts in four ways, three of which are correlative: as a person, as a quality of character and as a personal action. As a person it is glossed as, "nuntius, angelus, apostolus, minister". As a quality of character - "honor, dignitas, gloria, magnificentius". As a personal action - " gratia, misericordia, beneficium, favor". While the middle syllable of Aragorn could be thought of as a kind of possessive infix, much more likely the last two syllables should be taken as agorn, alluding to OE agan (to possess) and the verb agangan (to pass by unnoticed, to travel quickly)."
In both Quenya and Sindarin the root ar means "royal, high,noble".
In the context with all those associations we begin to acquire a fuller understandind of the name of Arwen. The second syllable of her name wen corresponds to the OE wyn (joy, hope) and cwen (queen). Thus its meaning can be understood as "the joy of ar" or "the high hope" or "noble queen". It also has the meaning of prospect, conviction, belief, expectation.
Few of the words in The Lord of the Rings have Gothic roots and very often they coincide with the OE words having the same meaning. Thus the Gothic band (bonds) corresponds to the Sindarin band and its Quenya equivalent mbando (jail, duress). In The Silmarillion we find the same root in the name of the Black Lord's fortress Angband, whose first syllable ang means "iron".
More words originate from Welsh, such as Sindarin duin "river" - dwyn "to carry", Quenya mel "love" - melys "sweet", Quenya laurë "gold" (Laurelin - the Gold Tree of the Valar) - aur"gold", Sindarin lin "pond" - llyn "lake", Sindarin loth and Quenya lote (Lothl˘rien - the realm of Lady Galadriel) - blodenyn " flower". [7, David L. Jeffry]
The Elves were fair and noble people, wise and skillfull, possessing great knowledge of handicrafts and art. They were thought about as magicians or even wizards by other races. Their realms in Middle-earth - Rivendell or Imladris and especially Lothlórien - though diminished, were yet places with a different sense of time, places of light, harmony and "no stain". The elven tongues were tuneful and pleasant to listen, to. While being in Lorien Sam Gamgee, the gardener, says, "I feel as if I were inside a song". [2]
"The Lord of the Rings is a work of art which develops an acute sense of fall, the dissipation of the strength and power of Lothlórien, a Lothlórien largerly recalled in powerful and mysterious utterances of its ancient tongues. But it is the language that most powerfully preserves the traces and pattern in the leaf of the world's first forest." [13]
Sindarin Links
Sindarin - The noble tongue
Encyclopedia of Arda: Sindarin
Sindarin Poems by Ryszard Derdzinski
Tolkien Lord of the Rings :Style, Language and Poetry is very, very, very happy to be hosted by
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