The Peoples of Middle-earth (15 page)

'The thee used by Sam Gamgee to Rose at the end of the book'

refers to the end of the Epilogue (IX.118): 'I did not think I should ever see thee again'. At this stage only the first version of the Epilogue was in being (though these words are used in both versions): see IX.129, 132.

On a loose page associated with my father's later work on this Appendix my father wrote very rapidly:

Where thou, thee, thy appears it is used mainly to mark a use of the familiar form where that was not usual. For instance its use by Denethor in his last madness to Gandalf, and by the Messenger of Sauron, was in both cases intended to be contemptuous.

But elsewhere it is occasionally used to indicate a deliberate change to a form of affection or endearment.

The passages referred to are RK pp. 128-30 and p. 165; in Denethor's speeches to Gandalf there are some occurrences of 'you'

that were not corrected.

$39. For Westron Carbandur (F 1 at first Karbandul, note 18) Appendix F has Kamingul (RK p. 412).

$41. With the Noldorin word lhann, said here to be the equivalent

'of Westron suza as used in Gondor for the divisions of the realm, cf.

the Etymologies, V.367, stem LAD, where Noldorin lhand, lhann

'wide' is cited, and also the region Lhothland, Lhothlann, east of Dorthonion (see XI.60, 128).

$42. The Westron name Rasputa 'Hornblower' is only recorded here (F 1 Rhasputal, note 21 above). Since it is said ($13) that the Common Speech was 'much enriched with words drawn from the language of the Dunedain, which was ... a form of the Elvish Noldorin', it is perhaps worth noting that the stem RAS in the Etymologies (V.383) yields Quenya rasse, Noldorin rhaes 'horn', with citation of Caradras. - In Appendix F (RK p. 413) the name Tuk is said to be an old name 'of forgotten meaning'.

$43. For the name Porro, not found in The Lord of the Rings, see pp.

87-8, 92.

$45. The 'classical' titles of the heads of the Brandybuck family given in the second footnote to this paragraph do not appear in The Lord of the Rings, but see pp. 102 - 3. Cf. Appendix F (RK p. 413): 'Names of classical origin have rarely been used; for the nearest equivalents to Latin and Greek in Shire-lore were the Elvish tongues, and these the Hobbits seldom used in nomenclature. Few of them at any time knew the "languages of the kings", as they called them.'

$46. Apart from the opening sentence nothing of this paragraph remained in Appendix F, and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins' true name Hamanullas was lost.

$47. Much information is given here on Hobbit family-names that was subsequently lost, notably the true Westron name of Baggins and its supposed etymology; other names (Brandybuck, Cotton, Gamgee), discussed in the notes that conclude Appendix F, differ in details of the forms. On the name Gamgee see the references in the index to Letters, and especially the letter to Naomi Mitchison of 25

April 1954 (no.144, near the end), which is closely related to what is said here and in Appendix F.

$48. In the note at the end of Appendix F it is said that the word for

'Hobbit' in use in the Shire was kuduk, and that Theoden used the form kud-dukan 'hole-dweller' when he met Merry and Pippin at Isengard, which in the narrative (TT p. 163) is 'translated' by Holbytla(n), though no rendering of this given. In the present passage, both in F 1 (see note 31) and in F 2, the meaning 'hole-dweller' is given for holbytla and for the real Westron and Rohan words (cf. also p. 10). In view of the etymology of bytla (bylta), for which see VII.424, VIII.44, one would expect 'hole-builder', but this only occurs in fact at an earlier point in Appendix F (RK

p. 408): the word hobbit seems to be 'a worn-down form of a word preserved more fully in Rohan: holbytla "hole-builder" ' (see further p. 83, note 7).

My father's remarks in the footnote to this paragraph on his association of the words 'hobbit' and 'rabbit' are notable.

$49. In Appendix F (RK p. 414) Meriadoc's true name was Kalimac, shortened Kali; but nothing is said of the true names of Frodo or Peregrin.

$50. In the chapter The Road to Isengard the originator of pipe-weed in the Shire was first named Elias Tobiasson, and then Tobias Smygrave, before Tobias Hornblower emerged (VIII.36-7). Tobias remained to a late stage in the development of the chapter before he was renamed Tobold, though it is seen from the present text that my father for a time retained Tobias while asserting that the name (pronounced Tobias) was not in fact a 'translation' of Hebraic origin at all.

Bildad (Bolger) is not found in The Lord of the Rings (but see pp.

94, 96); while the abbreviated names Tom and Mat are differently explained in Appendix F.

$51. As with Tobias Hornblower, my father retained Barnabas Butterbur, despite what he had written in $50, but accounted for it on the grounds that Butterbur was not a Hobbit but a Man of Bree.

In Appendix F all discussion of the name of the landlord of The Prancing Pony was lost. The change of Barnabas to Barliman was made in very late revisions to the text of The Lord of the Rings (cf.

IX.78).

$58. These remarks on the history of the Hobbits' name of the Baranduin (see also $$25, 47) were further altered in the final note at the end of Appendix F.

This is the most detailed account that my father wrote of his elaborate and distinctive fiction of translation, of transposition and substitution.

One may wonder when or by what stages it emerged; but I think that this is probably unknowable: the evidences are very slight, and in such matters he left none of those discussions, records of internal debate, that sometimes greatly assisted in the understanding of the development of the narrative. It seems to me in any case most probable that the idea evolved gradually, as the history, linguistic and other, was con-solidated and became increasingly coherent.

Central to the 'fiction of authenticity' is of course the Common Speech. I concluded that this was first named in the Lord of the Rings papers in the chapter Lothlorien (dating from the beginning of the 1940s): see VII.223, 239. In the second of these passages my father wrote that the speech of the wood-elves of Lorien was 'not that of the western elves which was in those days used as a common speech among many folk'. In a note of the same period (VII.277) he said that

'Since Aragorn is a man and the common speech (especially of mortals) is represented by English, then he must not have an Elvish name'; and in another note (VII.424), one of a collection of jottings on a page that bears the date 9 February 1942 (at which time he was working on the opening chapters of what became The Two Towers) he wrote: Language of Shire = modern English

Language of Dale = Norse (used by Dwarves of that region) Language of Rohan = Old English

'Modern English' is lingua franca spoken by all people (except a few secluded folk like Lorien) - but little and ill by orcs.

In this, 'Language of Dale = Norse (used by Dwarves of that region)'

shows plainly that a major obstacle, perhaps the chief obstacle, to a coherent 'authentication' had by this time been resolved. When my father wrote The Hobbit he had of course no notion that the Old Norse names of the Dwarves required any explanation, within the terms of the story: those were their names, and that was all there was to it. As he said in a letter of December 1937, cited in the Foreword to The Return of the Shadow (p. 7): 'I don't much approve of The Hobbit myself, preferring my own mythology (which is just touched on) with its consistent nomenclature ... and organized history, to this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Voluspa ...' But now this inescapable Norse element had to be accounted for; and from that 'rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Voluspa the conception emerged that the Dwarves had 'outer names' derived from the tongues of Men with whom they had dealings, concealing their true names which they kept altogether secret. And this was very evidently an important component in the theory of the transposition of languages: for the Dwarves had Norse names because they lived among Men who were represented in The Lord of the Rings as speaking Norse. It may not be too far-fetched, I think, to suppose that (together with the idea of the Common Speech) those Dwarf-names in The Hobbit provided the starting-point for the whole structure of the Mannish languages in Middle-earth, as expounded in the present text.

My father asserted ($53) that he had represented the tongue of the Rohirrim as Old English because their real language stood in a relation to the Common Speech somewhat analogous to that of Old English and Modern English. This is perhaps difficult to accept: one may feel that the impulse that produced the Riders of Rohan and the Golden Hall was more profound, and that my father's statement should be viewed as an aspect of the fiction of authenticity -, for the idea of

'translation' had a further fictional dimension in its presentation as a conception established from the outset - which in the case of the Dwarf-names (and the Hobbit-names) it was most assuredly not.

On the other hand, he knew very soon that the Rohirrim were originally Men of the North: in a note made at the time when his work on the chapter The Riders of Rohan was scarcely begun (VII.390) he wrote:

Rohiroth are relations of Woodmen and Beornings, old Men of the North. But they speak Gnomish - tongue of Numenor and Ondor, as well as [?common] tongue.

Taken with 'Language of Rohan = Old English' among the equations in the note cited above, from about the same time, it may be better not to force the distinction, but to say rather that the emergent 'transpositional' idea (Modern English - Old English - Old Norse) may well have played a part in my father's vision of Rohan.

In the present text it can be seen that as he penetrated more deeply into the logic of the theory he came up against complexities that were difficult to manage. For example, it seems clear that when he wrote in $25. that the Hobbits had 'twisted into a familiar shape' the Elvish name Baranduin, making out of it Brandywine, he had not taken into account the fact that the Hobbits would have had no such word as

'Brandywine' (whether or not they knew of brandy, $58). This realis-ation led to his avowal in $56: 'This translation had a disadvantage which I did not foresee. The "linguistic notes" on the origin of peculiar Hobbit words had also to be "translated" '; and in $58 he is seen ingeniously introducing the necessary 'third term' into the history of Brandywine: the 'picturesque perversion' of the river-name Baranduin by the Hobbits was to their real word Branduhim, which meant in their Westron 'foaming beer'. He could still say that Brandywine was

'a very possible "corruption" of Baranduin',,because Baranduin being an Elvish name was not translated; thus Brandywine must both

'imitate' the Hobbit word Branduhim, and at the same time stand in Modern English as a corruption of Baranduin.

It will be seen shortly that in the text of this Appendix next following my father moved sharply away from F 2, and removed almost all exemplification of true Westron names. It may be that at that stage he had come to think that the subtleties demanded by so close an examination of the 'theory' were unsuitable to the purpose; on the other hand it seems possible that mere considerations of length were the cause.

Note on an unpublished letter.

A long letter of my father's was sent for sale at auction on 4 May 1995

at Sotheby's in London. This letter he wrote on 3 August 1943, during the long pause in the writing of The Lord of the Rings (between the end of Book Three and the beginning of Book Four) that lasted from about the end of 1942 to the beginning of April 1944 (VIII.77-8). It was addressed to two girls named Leila Keene and Pat Kirke, and was largely concerned to answer their questions about the runes in The Hobbit; but in the present connection it contains an interesting passage on the Common Speech. My father made some brief remarks on the problem of the representation of the languages actually spoken in those days, and continued:

In some ways it was not too difficult. In Bilbo's time there was a language very widely used all over the West (the Western parts of the Great Lands of those days). It was a sort of lingua-franca, made up of all sorts of languages, but the Elvish language (of the North West) for the most part. It was called the Western language or Common Speech; and in Bilbo's time had already passed eastward over the Misty Mountains and reached Lake Town, and Beorn, and even Smaug (dragons were ready linguists in all ages)....

If hobbits ever had any special language of their own, they had given it up. They spoke the Common Speech only and every day (unless they learned other languages, which was very seldom).

The most notable point in this is the description of the composition of the Common Speech: 'a sort of lingua-franca, made up of all sorts of languages, but the Elvish language (of the North West) for the most part.' Allowance should perhaps be made for the nature of the letter (my father was not, obviously, writing a precise statement); but it certainly seems that as late as 1943, when half of The Lord of the Rings had been written, he had as yet no conception of the origin of the Common Speech in a form of Mannish language of the west of Middle-earth, and that Faramir's account of the matter (see p. 63), written nine months later, had not emerged. It may be that what he said in this letter ('the Elvish language (of the North West) for the most part') is to be associated with what he had written in the chapter Lothlorien, where he said (VII.239) that the language of 'the western elves' 'was in those days used as a common speech among many folk.'