The Peoples of Middle-earth (14 page)

See further under $9 below.

$9. It is an extraordinary feature of this account that there is no suggestion that the Numenoreans retained their own Mannish language, and it is indeed expressly stated here that 'The language of the Dunedain was thus the Elvish Noldorin'. This is the explanation of the statement discussed under $7 that the Men of the Three Houses learned Noldorin and abandoned their ancestral tongue (as has been mentioned already in note 4 above, the emendation to F 2, whereby it was reduced to 'the lords of these houses learned the Noldorin speech', was made at the same time as the rough alterations of the text here and in $13 whereby Adunaic was introduced as the language of Numenor).

I am altogether at a loss to account for this, in view of Faramir's disquisition to Sam cited under $7. Moreover, in the anomalous

'Foreword' that I have called F' my father had said (p. 21, 58):

'Now those languages of Men that are here met with were related to the Common Speech; for the Men of the North and West were akin in the beginning to the Men of Westernesse that came back over the Sea; and the Common Speech was indeed made by the blending of the speech of Men of Middle-earth with the tongues of the kings from over the Sea.' This is not very clearly expressed, but the implication seems clear that the Numenorean language that entered into the Common Speech was a Mannish and not an Elvish tongue. One seems to be driven to the explanation that my father when writing the present account had actually shifted away from his view that the Mannish language of the Three Houses was the common speech of Numenor; yet what does that imply of all his work on Adunaic and The Drouwing of Anadune in 1946?

In the footnote to $9 the tenth king of the Northern Line is named Earendil, not as in Appendix A (RK pp. 318, 320) Earendur; see p. 189.

It was undoubtedly here that the name Westron arose (apparently devised by my father on the analogy of the old form southron, itself an alteration of southern); the F 1 text as originally written had Westnish throughout (note 6 above). Westron occurs only once in the actual narrative of The Lord of the Rings, in the chapter Lothlorien, where Legolas says 'this is how it runs in the Westron Speech' (FR p. 353), and this was a late change from 'the Common Speech', made to the typescript following the fair copy manuscript: see VII.223 and 235 with note 48.

$10. In Faramir's account (see under $7) the Common Speech was expressly said to be 'derived from the Numenoreans': changed by time, it was nonetheless directly descended from 'that speech which the Fathers of the Three Houses spoke of old'. In fact, in corrections made to the completed manuscript of that chapter, the conception was changed to the extent that Faramir now says: 'The Common Tongue, as some call it, is derived from the Numenoreans; for the Numenoreans coming to the shores of these lands took the rude tongue of the men that they here found and whom they ruled, and they enriched it, and it spread hence through the Western world'; and he also says that 'in intercourse with other folk we use the Common Speech which we made for that purpose' (VIII.162). Of this I said (ibid.): 'Here the idea that the Common Speech was derived from "that speech which the Fathers of the Three Houses spoke of old" is denied'; but by 'the rude tongue of the men that they here found' Faramir may have meant language that in the course of millennia had become greatly altered and impoverished, not that it bore no ancestral kinship to that of the Numenoreans.

In Appendix F as published the section Of Men (RK p. 406) begins: 'The Westron was a Mannish speech, though enriched and softened under Elvish influence. It was in origin the language of those whom the Eldar called the Atani or Edain, "Fathers of Men"...' And further on in this section my father wrote of the great Numenorean haven of Pelargir: 'There Adunaic was spoken, and mingled with many words of the languages of lesser men it became a Common Speech that spread thence along the coasts ...'

All these conceptions differ somewhat among themselves, but as is often the case when comparing varying texts of my father's one may feel unsure whether the differences do not lie more in differing emphasis than in real contradiction. In the present text, however, it is perfectly clear that the Common Speech was in origin one form of the skein of Mannish speech that extended from the North (Dale, Esgaroth, and the old lands of the Rohirrim) southward down the vales of Anduin (see $23); that this particular form was centred on the Numenorean haven of Pelargir ($10); and that it was for this reason much influenced by the Numenorean language - but that language was the Elvish Noldorin as it had evolved in Numenor.

$14. The statement (before revision) that the Dunlendings had forgotten their own tongue and used only the Westron conflicts with the passage in the chapter Helm's Deep, where the Men of Dunland cried out against the Rohirrim in their ancient speech, interpreted to Aragorn and Eomer by Gamling the Old (see VIII.21). In the revised form of the paragraph the Dunland tongue is said to have been

'wholly unlike the Westron, and was descended, as it seems, from some other Mannish tongue, not akin to that of the Atani, Fathers of Men'; cf. Appendix F (RK p. 407): 'Wholly alien was the speech of the Wild Men of Druadan Forest. Alien, too, or only remotely akin, was the language of the Dunlendings.' In an earlier form of Faramir's exposition cited under $7 he said that there was a 'remote kinship' between the Common Speech and 'the tongues of Rohan and of Dale and of Westfold and Dunland and other places', VIII.159.

$16. 'The Orcs had a language of their own, devised for them by the Dark Lord of old': in view of what is said in $7, 'the Eldar were at that time engaged in a ceaseless war with the Dark Lord of that Age, one greater far than Sauron', this may seem to refer to Morgoth; but cf. Appendix F (RK p. 409), 'It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years'.

$18. The entire conception of the relations of the Elvish languages in Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age as presented here was of course fundamentally altered by the emergence of the idea that the Exiled Noldor of the First Age adopted Sindarin, the (Telerian) language of the Eldar who remained in Middle-earth. Thus the language of the Elves dwelling west of the Misty Mountains is here Noldorin (see under $5 above), while the Lemberin (i.e. Sindarin) of Middle-earth is found among the Elves of Northern Mirkwood and Lorien. At the beginning of $19 names such as Lorien, Caras Galadon, Amroth, Nimrodel are cited as examples of Lemberin; whereas in Appendix F (RK p. 405, footnote) they are cited as

'probably of Silvan origin', in contrast to Sindarin, the language spoken in Lorien at the end of the Third Age. - With the present passage cf. that in the text F', p. 20, $7.

$20. It has been seen (note 10 above) that it was in the text F 1 that the threefold division of the Hobbits into Harfoots, Stoors, and Fallohides entered, whence it was removed, before F 2 was written, to stand in the Prologue. In the actual narrative of The Lord of the Rings there is no reference to Harfoots or Fallohides, but the Stoors are named once, in the chapter The Shadow of the Past, where Gandalf spoke of Gollum's family. The introduction of the name was made at a very late stage in the evolution of the chapter, when the passage read (cf. the oldest version of the text, VI.78): 'I guess they were of hobbit-kind; or akin to the fathers of the fathers of the hobbits, though they loved the River, and often swam in it, or made little boats of reeds'; this was altered to the final text (FR p. 62) by omitting the word 'or' in 'or akin', and by changing 'hobbits' to

'Stoors' and 'though they loved' to 'for they loved'.

$22. My father was writing of Hobbits as if they were still to be found, as he did in the published Prologue ('Hobbits are an unob-trusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today', &c., though altering present tense to past tense in one passage in the Second Edition, p. 17, note 13). Here indeed he attributed at least to some of them a lively interest in linguistic history.

$$22-3. In the footnotes to these paragraphs the more complex history of the Stoors can be seen evolving. In the footnote in F 1

(note 11 above) corresponding to that to $23 in F 2, concerning Gandalf's opinion about Gollum's origin, it is said that his people

'must have been a late-lingering group of Stoors in the neighbourhood of the Gladden' (i.e. after the Stoors as a whole had crossed the Misty Mountains into Eriador). In the footnote in F 2 (belonging with the writing of the manuscript) my father suggested rather that they were 'a family or small clan' of Stoors who had gone back east over the Mountains, a return to Wilderland that (he said) was evidenced in Hobbit legends, on account of the hard life and hard lands that they found in eastern Eriador.

Later, there entered the story that many Stoors remained in the lands between Tharbad and the borders of Dunland: this was an addition to the Prologue (FR p. 12) made when the text was close to its final form (cf. p. 11), and no doubt the footnote to $22 was added at the same time.

In Appendix A (RK p. 321) the return to Wilderland by some of the Stoors is directly associated with the invasion of Arnor by Angmar in Third Age 1409:

It was at this time that the Stoors that had dwelt in the Angle (between Hoarwell and Loudwater) fled west and south, because of the wars, and the dread of Angmar, and because the land and clime of Eriador, especially in the east, worsened and became unfriendly. Some returned to Wilderland, and dwelt beside the Gladden, becoming a riverside people of fishers.

These Stoors of the Angle who returned to Wilderland are distinguished from those who dwelt further south and acquired a speech similar to that of the people of Dunland: see the section Of Hobbits in Appendix F, RK p. 408 and footnote.

$25. The name Brandywine emerged very early in the writing of The Lord of the Rings (VI.29-30 and note 5), but the Elvish name first appeared in the narrative in work on the chapter Flight to the Ford (VII.61; FR p. 222), where Glorfindel, in a rejected draft, spoke of

'the Branduin (which you have turned into Brandywine)' (the word

'have' was erroneously omitted in the text printed). In F 1, and again at first in F 2, my father repeated this: 'older names, of Elvish or forgotten Mannish origin, they often translated ... or twisted into a familiar shape (as Elvish Baranduin "brown river" to Brandywine).' But in revision to F 2 he rejected this explanation, saying that the Elvish name of the river was in fact Malevarn ('golden-brown'), transformed in the Hobbits' speech to Malvern, but that this was then replaced by Brandywine - this being exceptional, since it bore no relation in form to the Elvish name. This idea he also rejected, and in the final form of $25 went back to the original explanation of Brandywine, that it was a characteristic Hobbit alteration of Elvish Baranduin.

In the passage of Flight to the Ford referred to above the name of the river appears in the manuscript as Branduin, changed to Baranduin, and then to Malevarn (VII.66, note 36). It is surprising at first sight to see that Malevarn survived into the final typescript of the chapter, that sent to the printer, where my father corrected it to Baranduin; but the explanation is evidently that this typescript had been made a long time before. Glorfindel's use of Baranduin or Malevarn is in fact the only occurrence of the Elvish name of the river in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings.

$27. In Appendix D (RK p. 389) Yellowskin is called 'the Yearbook of Tuckborough'.

$37. It is often impossible to be sure of my father's intention in the usage of 'thou, thee' and 'you' forms of address: when writing rapidly he was very inconsistent, and in more careful manuscripts he often wavered in his decision on this insoluble question (if the distinction is to be represented at all). In the case of the chapter The Steward and the King, referred to here, the first manuscript (see IX.54) is a very rapidly written draft from which no conclusion can be drawn; while in the second manuscript, a good clear text, he decided while in the course of writing the dialogue between Faramir and Eowyn against showing the distinction at all. The 'sudden change' to which he referred here (but in F 1 he wrote only of 'the intrusion of thou, thee into the dialogue') is possibly to be seen in their first meeting in the garden of the Houses of Healing, where Faramir says (RK p. 238): 'Then, Eowyn of Rohan, I say to you that you are beautiful', but at the end of his speech changes to the

'familiar' form, 'But thou and I have both passed under the wings of the Shadow' (whereas Eowyn continues to use 'you'). In the following meetings, in this text, Faramir uses the 'familiar' forms, but Eowyn does not do so until the last ('Dost thou not know?', RK

p. 242); and soon after this point my father went back over what he had written and changed every 'thou' and 'thee' to 'you'. In the third manuscript (preceding the final typescript) there is no trace of the

'familiar' form.

I record these details because they are significant of the (relative) date of the present text, showing very clearly that when he wrote this earliest form of what would become Appendix F he had not yet completed the second manuscript of this chapter.