The Peoples of Middle-earth (17 page)

The Quenya was no longer a daily speech but a learned tongue, descended from ages past, though it was still used in courtesies, or for high matters of lore and song, by the High Elves, the Noldor whose language it had been in Eldamar beyond the Sea. But when the Noldor were exiled and returned to Middle-earth, seeking the Great Jewels which the Dark Power of the North had seized, they took for daily use the language of the lands in which they dwelt. Those were in the North-west, in the country of Beleriand, where Thingol Grey-cloak was king of the Sindar or Grey-elves.

The Sindar were also in origin Eldar, and kindred of the Noldor, yet they had never passed the Sea, but had lingered on the shores of Middle-earth. There their speech had changed much with the changefulness of mortal lands in the long Twilight, and it had become far estranged from the high and ancient Quenya. But it was a fair tongue still, well fitted to the forests, the hills, and the shores where it had taken shape.

In the fall of the Dark Power and the end of the First Age most of Beleriand was overwhelmed by the waters, or burned with fire. Then a great part of its folk went west over Sea, never to return. Yet many still lingered in Middle-earth, and the Grey-elven tongue in those days spread eastward; for some of the elven-peoples of Beleriand crossed the mountains of Lune (Ered Luin), and wherever they came they were received as kings and lords, because of their greater wisdom and majesty. These were for the most part Sindar; for the Exiles (such few as remained), highest and fairest of all speaking-peoples, held still to Lindon, the remnant of Beleriand west of the Ered Luin. There Gil-galad was their lord, until the Second Age drew to its end.

Nonetheless to Rivendell (Imladris) there went with Master Elrond many Noldorin lords; and in Hollin (Eregion) others of the Noldor established a realm near to the West-gate of Moria, and there forged the Rings of Power. Galadriel, too, was of the royal house of Finrod of the Noldor; though Celeborn, her spouse of Lorien, was a Grey-elf, and most of their people were of a woodland race.

For there were other Elves of various kind in the world; and many were Eastern Elves that had hearkened to no summons to the Sea, but being content with Middle-earth remained there, and remained long after, fading in fastnesses of the woods and hills, as Men usurped the lands. Of that kind were the Elves of Greenwood the Great; yet among them also were many lords of Sindarin race. Such were Thranduil and Legolas his son. In his realm and in Lorien both the Sindarin and the woodland tongues were heard; but of the latter nothing appears in this book, and of the many Elvish names of persons or of places that are used most are of Grey-elven form.

From the assured and perspicuous writing alone one might think that this belonged to the time of the Grey Annals and the Annals of Aman.

But it was by no means the last in the series of texts that finally issued in the published form of Appendix F.

Of F 4 there are only a few other points to mention. The origin of the Common Speech is here formulated in these words: There [at Pelargir] Adunaic was spoken, to which language the tongues of Men that dwelt round about were closely akin, so that already a common speech had grown up in that region and had spread thence along the coasts among all those that had dealings with Westernesse.

After typing the text my father added this sentence: Of the speech of Men of the East and allies of Sauron all that appears is mumak, a name of the great elephant of the Harad.

A carbon copy of F 4 is extant, and here my father in a similar addition named beside mumak also Variag and Khand (RK pp. 121, 123, 329).

Lastly, it was in F 4 that there entered the passage concerning the new race of Trolls that appeared at the end of the Third Age. Here the name was first Horg-hai, but changed as my father typed the text to Olg-hai (Olog-hai in RK, p. 410). The account of them did not differ from the final form except in the statement of their origin: That Sauron bred them none doubted, though from what stock was not known. Some held that they were a cross-breed between trolls and the larger Orcs; others that they were indeed not trolls at all but giant Orcs. Yet there was no kinship from the beginning between the stone-trolls and the Orcs that they might breed together;(5) while the Olg-hai were in fashion of mind and body quite unlike even the largest of Orc-kind ...

With this text and its successors the section On Translation was typed and preserved separately, and it is not possible to relate these precisely to the texts of the first section. Of these latter there are four after F 4, textually complex and not all complete, and for the purposes of this account it is not necessary to describe them.(6) Even if my father had not said so very plainly himself in his letters, it would be very evident from these drafts that the writing of an account that would satisfy him was exceedingly tasking and frustrating, largely (I believe) because he found the constraint of space profoundly uncongenial. In March 1955 (Letters no.160) he wrote to Rayner Unwin: 'I now wish that no appendices had been promised! For I think their appearance in truncated and compressed form will satisfy nobody'; and in the same letter he said:

In any case the 'background' matter is very intricate, useless unless exact, and compression within the limits available leaves it unsatisfactory. It needs great concentration (and leisure), and being completely interlocked cannot be dealt with piecemeal. I have found that out, since I let part of it go.

Even the final typescript of Appendix F was not a fair copy, but carried many emendations.

Two texts of the second section of Appendix F, On Translation, are extant, following the reduced version in F 3 (p. 76) and preceding the final typescript. They were evidently made at a late stage in the evolution of this appendix; and it was in the first of these, which may conveniently be called 'A', that my father reinstated a part of the detailed discussion of names in the original version that had been discarded in F 3. At this stage he very largely retained the name-forms found in F 2, in his discussion of Baggins, Gamgee, Cotton, Brandywine, Brandybuck; the word hobbit; the origin of Hobbit-names such as Tom, Bill, Mat; Meriadoc, Samwise. There are however some differences and additions,(7) notably in his account of the curious names found in Buckland (cf. RK pp. 413-14):

These I have often left unaltered, for if queer now, they were queer in their own day. Some I have given a Celtic cast, notably Meriadoc and Gorhendad. There is some reason for this. Many of the actual Buckland (and Bree) names had something of that style: such as Marroc, Madoc, Seredic; and they often ended in ac, ic, oc. Also the relation of, say, Welsh or British to English was somewhat similar to that of the older language of the Stoors and Bree-men to the Westron.

Thus Bree, Combe, Archet, and Chetwood are modelled on British relics in English place-names, chosen by sense: bree 'hill', chet 'wood'. Similarly Gorhendad represents a name Ogforgad which according to Stoor-tradition had once meant 'great-grandfather or ancestor'. While Meriadoc was chosen to fit the fact that this character's shortened name meant 'jolly, gay'

in Westron kili, though it was actually an abbreviation of Kilimanac [> kali, Kalamanac].

The text A lacks the discussion (RK pp. 414-15) of the words mathom and smial and the names Smeagol and Deagol, and ends, at the bottom of a page, with this passage:

The yet more northerly tongue of Dale is here seen only in the names of the Dwarves that came from that region, and so used the language of Men there, and took their 'outer' names in that language. The Dwarvish names in this book and in The Hobbit are in fact all genuine Norse dwarf-names; though the title Oakenshield is a translation.

Thus the concluding passage in F 3 (see pp. 76 - 7) concerning the use of the word Gnomes and of the plural Dwarves is absent, but whether because my father had rejected it, or because the end of the A typescript is lost, is impossible to say.

In the second of these texts On Translation, which I will call 'B', he retained all this reinstated material from A, changing some of the name-forms,(8) and even extended it, going back to the original version F 2 again for a passage exemplifying his treatment of the true names in the language of the Mark. Here reappears material derived from F 2 $$54 - 5 concerning the real native name of Rohan Lograd, the translation of Lohtur by Eotheod and of turak 'king' by Theoden; and this is followed by the discussion of mathom, smial, Smeagol and Deagol - the only portion of this passage retained in the final form of Appendix F.

In B my father followed the passage given above from A ('The yet more northerly language of Dale ...') with a statement on the different treatment of the 'true' Runes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that derives from that in F* (p. 22, $11):

In keeping with the general method of translation here outlined, as applied to the Common Speech and other languages akin to it, in The Hobbit the Cirth were turned into Runes, into forms and values, that is, practically the same as those once used in England. But since the Cirth were actually of Elvish origin, and little used for writing the Common Speech (save by Dwarves), while many readers of The Hobbit found the matter of scripts of interest, in this larger history it seemed better to present the Cirth as well as the Feanorian letters in their proper shapes and use. Though naturally an adaptation by the translator of these alphabets to fit modern English has had to replace their actual application to the Westron tongue, which was very different from ours.

This is followed by the conclusion concerning Gnomes and Dwarves which is lacking in A.

In the final typescript, that sent to the printer, many changes entered that were not, as was almost invariably my father's practice when proceeding from one draft to the next, anticipated by corrections made to the preceding text: they seem in fact to have entered as he typed.(9) There is no suggestion in text B, for instance, of the footnote to RK

p. 414 warning against an assumption, based on the linguistic transposition, 'that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise'; nor of the removal from the body of the text of the detailed discussion of the word hobbit and the names Gamgee and Brandywine to a note at its end;(10) nor yet of the alteration of the passage (discussed on p. 77) concerning the word Gnomes so that it should apply to the word Elves, and the placing of it at the end of the text instead of preceding the discussion of Dwarves. Nothing could show more clearly the extreme pressure my father was under when, after so much labour, he at last sent Appendix F to the publishers. It seems to me more than likely that had circumstances been otherwise the form of that appendix would have been markedly different.

NOTES.

1. The apparent implication here that Teleri was the name exclusively of those of the Eldar who remained in Middle-earth was certainly unintentional.

2. A footnote at this point reads: 'Such as Thranduil and Legolas from Mirkwood; Lorien, Galadriel, Caras Galadon, Nimrodel, Amroth and others from Loth-lorien.'

3. For an account of this reinstatement of material from F 2 see pp.

80-1, with notes 7 and 8.

4. It must be admitted, however, that the statement in the chapter Of Maeglin in The Silmarillion (p. 136) that Idril Celebrindal

'was golden as the Vanyar, her mother's kindred' appears already in the original text (1951; see XI.316); and of course even if the re-use of the passage did precede the appearance of the idea of the

'golden Vanyar', it needed correction subsequently.

5. With this cf. the passage in F 2 concerning Trolls (p. 36, $17): 'the evil Power had at various times made use of them, teaching them what little they could learn, and even crossing their breed with that of the larger Orcs.'

6. There is scarcely anything in the last texts that calls for special notice, but it should be recorded that in the penultimate draft my father revealed the meaning of the sentence in the Black Speech uttered by one of the Orcs who was guarding Pippin in the chapter The Uruk-hai (TT p. 48): Ugluk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob bubhosh skai. At the end of the section Orcs and the Black Speech (RK p. 410) this text reads:

... while the curse of the Mordor-orc in Chapter 3 of Book Three is in the more debased form used by the soldiers of the Dark Tower, of whom Grishnakh was the captain. Ugluk to the cesspool, sha! the dungfilth; the great Saruman-fool, skai!

7. Where F 2 in the discussion of Baggins (p. 48) had Westron labin

'bag', and Labin-nec 'Bag End', the text A has laban, Laban-nec.

For the origin of 'hobbit' my father retained the form cubuc and Theoden's archaic cugbagu (p. 49), noting that it meant '"hole-dweller" (or "hole-builder")': see p. 69. He also gave here for the first time the Westron name for 'hobbits', nathramin, though later in the text the form banathin appears; and he provided the true name of Hamfast Gamgee: