The Peoples of Middle-earth (16 page)

He also referred in this letter to the adoption by the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain of the language of the Men of Dale, in which they gave themselves names, keeping their true names in their own tongue entirely secret (see p. 71).

*

For the notes to this concluding section of the chapter see pp. 82 ff.

The third text ('F 3') was a typescript with the title The Languages of the Third Age, above which my father wrote 'Appendix I'. No other of the many texts that followed has any mention of its being an

'Appendix'.

This text F 3 represents in some degree a new departure. The first part of the work (that preceding the discussion of 'Translation') was reduced to not much more than a third of its length in F 2, and while my father had F 2 in front of him he turned also to the curious 'Foreword' F* that I have given on pp. 19 ff., and made a good deal of use of it, as has been mentioned already.

At this stage he had not changed his view that the Exiled Noldor retained their own language in Beleriand (see p. 62, $5), and the

'Telerian' speech (which in F 2 was originally called 'Lemberin') is confined to a few names. Thus the conception in F 2, $18, was in essentials preserved, although there entered here the more complex account of the Elvish peoples of Mirkwood and Lorien: There were also Elves of other kind. The East-elves that being content with Middle-earth remained there, and remain even now; and the Teleri, kinsfolk of the High Elves who never went westward, but lingered on the shores of Middle-earth until the return of the Noldor.(1) In the Third Age few of the Teleri were left, and they for the most part dwelt as lords among the East-elves in woodland realms far from the Sea, which nonetheless they longed for in their hearts. Of this kind were the Elves of Mirkwood, and of Lorien; but Galadriel was a lady of the Noldor. In this book there are several names of Telerian form,(2) but little else appears of their language.

The extremely puzzling feature of the original version, that the language of the Numenoreans was Noldorin (for the Edain in Beleriand learned that tongue and abandoned their own) was at first retained in F 3; and thus the account of the Common Speech remained unchanged, becoming if anything more explicit (cf. F 2, $$9-10, 13):

The language of the Dunedain in Numenor was thus the Elvish, or Gnomish speech ... After the Downfall of Numenor, which was brought about by Sauron, and the ending of the Second Age, Elendil and the survivors of Westernesse fled back eastward to Middle-earth. On the western shores in the days of their power the Numenoreans had maintained many forts and havens for the help of their ships in their great voyages; and the chief of these had been at Pelargir at the mouths of the Anduin in the land that was after called Gondor. There the language of the Edain that had not passed over Sea was spoken, and thence it spread along the coastlands, as a common speech of all who had dealings with Westernesse and opposed the power of Sauron. Now the people of Elendil were not many, for only a few great ships had escaped the Downfall. There were, it is true, many dwellers upon the west-shores who came in part of the blood of Westernesse, being descended from mariners and wardens of forts set there in the Dark Years; yet all told the Dunedain were only a small people in the midst of lesser Men.

They used therefore this Common Speech in all their dealings with other folk and in the government of the wide realms of which they became the rulers, and it was enriched with many words drawn from the tongues of the Elves and the Numenorean lords. Thus it was that the Common Speech spread far and wide in the days of the Kings, even among their enemies, and it became used more and more by the Numenoreans themselves; so that at the time of this history the Elvish speech was spoken by only a [added: small] part of the people of Minas Tirith, the city of Gondor, and outside that city only by the lords and princes of fiefs.

The account of the origin and spread of the Common Speech as it appears in Appendix F (RK p. 407) had, in point of actual wording, been quite largely attained - and yet still with the fundamental difference, that the Numenoreans themselves spoke an Elvish tongue, and Adunaic does not exist.

Probably while this text was still in the making, my father retyped a portion of it, and it was only now that Adunaic entered, or re-entered, the linguistic history. Making similar changes at the same time to the previous text F 2 (see p. 54, note 4), he wrote now that it was the lords of the Edain who learned the Noldorin tongue, and that

'in Numenor two speeches were used: the Numenorean (or Adunaic); and the Elvish or Gnomish tongue of the Noldor, which all the lords of that people knew and spoke'. In the passage just given he altered the words that I italicised to: 'There [at Pelargir] the Adunaic, the Mannish language of the Edain, was spoken, and thence it spread along the coastlands...', the remainder of the passage being left unchanged. No further light is cast on this matter in the texts of 'Appendix F', and it remains to me inexplicable.

There is not a great deal more that need be said about the part of the text F 3 that deals with the languages. For the language of Orcs and Trolls my father followed F 2, $$16 - 17, but for that of the Dwarves he turned to F* (p. 21, $10), and repeated closely what he had said there. But at that point, still following this text ($11), he turned now to the subject of alphabets ('Of the alphabets of the Third Age something also must be said, since in this history there are both inscriptions and old writings ...'), and repeated what he had said in F*

as far as 'the Runes, or cirth, were devised by the Elves of the woods'.

Here he left the earlier text and continued as follows (the forerunner of the passage in Appendix E, RK pp. 395, 397):

... the Runes, or Cirth as they were called, were first devised by the Danians (far kin of the Noldor) in the woods of Beleriand, and were in the beginning used mainly for incising names and brief memorials upon wood, stone, or metal. From that beginning they derive their peculiar character, closely similar in many of their signs to the Runes of the North in our own times. But their detail, arrangement, and uses were different, and there is, it seems, no connexion of descent between the Runes and the Cirth. Many things were forgotten and found again in the ages of Middle-earth, and so it will be, doubtless, hereafter.

The Cirth in their older and simpler form spread far and wide, even into the East, and they became known to many races of Men, and developed many varieties and uses. One form of the old Cirth was used among Men of whom we have already spoken, the Rohirrim and their more northerly kindred in the vale of Anduin and in Dale. But the richest and most well-ordered alphabet of Cirth was called the Alphabet of Dairon, since in Elvish tradition it was said to have been arranged and enlarged from the older Cirth by Dairon, the minstrel of King Thingol in Doriath. This' was preserved in use in Hollin and Moria, and there mostly by the Dwarves. For after the coming of the Noldor the Feanorian script replaced the Cirth among the Elves and the Edain.

In this book we meet only the Short Cirth of Dale and the Mark; and the Long Cirth of Moria, as they were called at this time; for though the Dwarves, as with their speech, used in their dealings with other folk such scripts as were current among them, among themselves and in their secret memorials they still used the ancient Alphabet of Dairon. A table is given setting out the Short Cirth of Dale and the Mark; and the Long Cirth of Moria in the form and arrangement applied to the Common Speech. [The following was subsequently struck out: A list is also given of all the strange words and the names of persons and places that appear in the tale, in which it is shown from what language they are derived, and what is their meaning (where that is known);] and also the English Runes in the forms that were used for the translation of the Cirth in The Hobbit.

The first devising of the Runes by 'the Danians (far kin of the Noldor) in the woods of Beleriand' (where F* has 'the Elves of the woods') is found also in the two texts given in VII.453-5, where the origin is attributed to 'the Danian elves of Ossiriand (who were ultimately of Noldorin race)'. The old view that the Danas or Danians (Nandor) came from the host of the Noldor on the Great March was changed in the course of the revision of the Quenta Silmarillion, when they became Teleri from the host of Olwe (X.169-70; cf. the use of the old term Lembi in F 2, p. 61, $3).

The final section of F 3, On Translation, presents a very greatly reduced form of that in the original version, and loses virtually all of the exemplification and discussion of the 'true' names from which the

'translation' was made: the sole Westron names that survived were Carbandur (Rivendell) and Phuru-nargian (Moria). The new text had indeed the structure and much of the actual wording of Appendix F, but it was a good deal briefer; and the published text represents a re-expansion, in which some of the old material had been reinstated, if in altered form.(3) But since no new material was introduced in F 3, there is no need to give more account of this part of it.

The text ends with a return to the conclusion of F*, pp. 23-4, $$12-13:

In conclusion I will add a note on two important modern words used in translation. The name Gnomes is sometimes used for the Noldor, and Gnomish for Noldorin. This has been done, because whatever Paracelsus may have thought (if indeed he invented the name), to some Gnome will still suggest Knowledge. Now the High-elven name of this folk, Noldor, signifies Those who Know; for of the Three Kindreds of the Elves from their beginning the Noldor were ever distinguished both by their knowledge of things that are and were in this world and by their desire to know more. Yet they were not in any way like to the gnomes of learned theory, or of literary and popular fancy. They belonged to a race high and beautiful, the Elder Children of the world, who now are gone. Tall they were, fairskinned and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, save in the golden house of Finrod; and their voices knew more melodies than any mortal speech that now is heard. Valiant they were, but their history was grievous; and though it was in far-off days woven a little with the fates of the Fathers, their fate is not that of Men. Their dominion passed long ago, and they dwell now beyond the circles of the world, and do not return.

The naming of 'the golden house of Finrod' (later Finarfin) seems to have been the first mention of this character that marked out the third son of Finwe, and his children.

In a later (in fact the penultimate) text of the section On Translation my father still retained this passage, even though by that time he had decided against using Gnome, Gnomish at all in The Lord of the Rings (as being 'too misleading'), and introduced it with the words 'I have sometimes (not in this book) used Gnomes for Noldor, and Gnomish for Noldorin'. Perhaps because the passage now seemed otiose, in the final text he still retained a part of it but changed its application: the word to be justified was now Elves, used to translate Quendi and Eldar. In my discussion of this in 1.43-4 I pointed out that the words

'They were tall, fair of skin and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, save in the golden house of Finrod [Finarfin]' were originally written of the Noldor only, and not of all the Eldar, and I objected that

'the Vanyar had golden hair, and it was from Finarfin's Vanyarin mother Indis that he, and Finrod Felagund and Galadriel his children, had their golden hair', finding in the final use of this passage an 'extraordinary perversion of meaning'. But my father carefully remodelled the passage in order to apply it to the Eldar as a whole, and it does indeed seem 'extraordinary' that he should have failed to observe this point. It seems possible that when he re-used the passage in this way the conception of the golden hair of the Vanyar had not yet arisen.(4) Despite the great contraction in F 3 of the original version, my father repeated the long last paragraph of F* concerning dwarves and dwarrows (pp. 23 - 4, $13) almost in its entirety, omitting only his remarks on his liking for irregular plurals, and introducing the Westron name Phurunargian of Moria. With the words 'and has been so since their birth in the deeps of time' this text ends.

The next typescript, F 4, still called The Languages of the Third Age but changed to The Languages and Peoples of the Third Age, followed the major revision of 1951. My father's long experimentation with the structure and expression of this Appendix now issued in his most lucid account of the Elvish languages, in which the terms Sindar and Sindarin at last appeared, and the acquisition of the Grey-elven tongue by the exiled Noldor.

Besides this Common Speech there were, however, many other tongues still spoken in the West-lands. Noblest of these were the languages of the Western Elves (Eldar) of which two are met: the High-elven (Quenya) and the Grey-elven (Sindarin).