The Peoples of Middle-earth (56 page)

4. Structurally and grammatically it differed widely from all other languages of the West at that time; though it had some features in common with Adunaic, the ancient 'native' language of Numenor. This gave rise to the theory (a probable one) that in the unrecorded past some of the languages of Men - including the language of the dominant element in the Atani from which Adunaic was derived - had been influenced by Khuzdul.

5. They had, it is said, a complex pictographic or ideographic writing or carving of their own. But this they kept resolutely secret.

6. Including their enemies such as Sauron, and his higher servants who were in fact partly of Numenorean origin.

7. [Like Gil-galad, Celebrimbor was a figure first appearing in The Lord of the Rings whose origin my father changed again and again. The earliest statement on the subject is found in the post-Lord of the Rings text Concerning Galadriel and Celeborn, where it is said (cf. Unfinished Tales p. 235):

Galadriel and Celeborn had in their company a Noldorin craftsman called Celebrimbor. He was of Noldorin origin, and one of the survivors of Gondolin, where he had been one of Turgon's greatest artificers - but he had thus acquired some taint of pride and an almost 'dwarvish' obsession with crafts.

He reappears as a jewel-smith of Gondolin in the text The Elessar (see Unfinished Tales pp. 248 ff.); but against the passage in Concerning Galadriel and Celeborn just cited my father noted that it would be better to 'make him a descendant of Feanor'.

Thus in the Second Edition (1966) of The Lord of the Rings, at the end of the prefatory remarks to the Tale of Years of the Second Age, he added the sentence: 'Celebrimbor was lord of Eregion and the greatest of their craftsmen; he was descended from Feanor.'

On one of his copies of The Return of the King he underlined the name Feanor in this sentence, and wrote the following two notes on the opposite page (the opening of the first of these means, I think: 'What then was his parentage? He must have been descended from one of Feanor's sons, about whose progeny nothing has been told').

How could he be? Feanor's only descendants were his seven sons, six of whom reached Beleriand. So far nothing has been said of their wives and children. It seems probable that Cele-brinbaur (silverfisted, > Celebrimbor) was son of Curufin, but though inheriting his skills he was an Elf of wholly different temper (his mother had refused to take part in the rebellion of Feanor and remained in Aman with the people of Finarphin).

During their dwelling in Nargothrond as refugees he had grown to love Finrod and " his wife, and was aghast at the behaviour of his father and would not go with him. He later became a great friend of Celeborn and Galadriel.

The second note reads:

Maedros the eldest appears to have been unwedded, also the two youngest (twins, of whom one was by evil mischance burned with the ships); Celegorm also, since he plotted to take Luthien as his wife. But Curufin, dearest to his father and chief inheritor of his father's skills, was wedded, and had a son who came with him into exile, though his wife (unnamed) did not.

Others who were wedded were Maelor, Caranthir.

On the form Maelor for Maglor see X.182, $41. The reference in the first of these notes to the wife of Finrod Felagund is notable, since long before, in the Grey Annals, the story had emerged that Felagund had no wife, and that 'she whom he had loved was Amarie of the Vanyar, and she was not permitted to go with him into exile'. That story had in fact been abandoned, or forgotten, but it would return: see the note on Gil-galad, p. 350.

These notes on Celebrimbor son of Curufin were the basis of the passages introduced editorially in the published Silmarillion, p. 176 (see V.300-1), and in Of the Rings of Power, ibid. p. 286.

But in late writing (1968 or later) on the subject of Eldarin words for 'hand' my father said this:

Common Eldarin had a base KWAR 'press together, squeeze, wring'. A derivative was *kwara: Quenya quar, Telerin par, Sindarin paur. This may be translated 'fist', though its chief use was in reference to the tightly closed hand as in using an imple-ment or a craft-tool rather than to the 'fist' as used in punch-ing. Cf. the name Celebrin-baur > Celebrimbor. This was a Sindarized form of Telerin Telperimpar (Quenya Tyelpinquar).

It was a frequent name among the Teleri, who in addition to navigation and ship-building were also renowned as silversmiths. The famous Celebrimbor, heroic defender of Eregion in the Second Age war against Sauron, was a Teler, one of the three Teleri who accompanied Celeborn into exile. He was a great silver-smith, and went to Eregion attracted by the rumours of the marvellous metal found in Moria, Moria-silver, to which he gave the name mithril. In the working of this he became a rival of the Dwarves, or rather an equal, for there was great friendship between the Dwarves of Moria and Celebrimbor, and they shared their skills and craft-secrets. In the same way Tegilbor was used for one skilled in calligraphy (tegil was a Sindarized form of Quenya tekil 'pen', not known to the Sindar until the coming of the Noldor).

When my father wrote this he ignored the addition to Appendix B in the Second Edition, stating that Celebrimbor 'was descended from Feanor'; no doubt he had forgotten that that theory had appeared in print, for had he remembered it he would undoubtedly have felt bound by it. - On the statement that Celebrimbor was 'one of the three Teleri who accompanied Celeborn into exile' see Unfinished Tales, pp. 231-3.

Yet here in the present essay, from much the same time as that on Eldarin words for 'hand' just cited, a radically different account of Celebrimbor's origin is given: 'a Sinda who claimed descent from Daeron'.]

8. They did not, however, appear in the inscriptions on the West Gate of Moria. The Dwarves said that it was in courtesy to the Elves that the Feanorian letters were used on that gate, since it opened into their country and was chiefly used by them. But the East Gates, which perished in the war against the Orks, had opened upon the wide world, and were less friendly. They had borne Runic inscriptions in several tongues: spells of prohibition and exclusion in Khuzdul, and commands that all should depart who had not the leave of the Lord of Moria written in Quenya, Sindarin, the Common Speech, the languages of Rohan and of Dale and Dunland.

[In the margin against the paragraph in the text at this point my father pencilled:

N.B. It is actually said by Elrond in The Hobbit that the Runes were invented by the Dwarves and written with silver pens.

Elrond was half-elven and a master of lore and history. So either we must tolerate this discrepancy or modify the history of the Runes, making the actual Angerthas Moria largely an affair of Dwarvish invention.

In notes associated with this essay he is seen pondering the latter course, considering the possibility that it was in fact the Longbeard Dwarves who were the original begetters of the Runes; and that it was from them that Daeron derived the idea, but since the first Runes were not well organised (and differed from one mansion of the Dwarves to another) he ordered them in a logical system.

But of course in Appendix E (II) he had stated very explicitly the origin of the Runes: 'The Cirth were devised first in Beleriand by the Sindar'. It was Daeron of Doriath who developed the

'richest and most ordered form' of the Cirth, the Alphabet of Daeron, and its use in Eregion led to its adoption by the Dwarves of Moria, whence its name Angerthas Moria. Thus the inconsistency, if inconsistency there was, could scarcely be removed; but in fact there was none. It was the 'moon-runes' that Elrond declared (at the end of the chapter A Short Rest) to have been invented by the Dwarves and written by them with silver pens, not the Runes as an alphabetic form - as my father at length noted with relief. I mention all this as an illustration of his intense concern to avoid discrepancy and inconsistency, even though in this case his anxiety was unfounded. - For an earlier account of the origin of the Runes see VII.452-5.]

9. [At this point the text in manuscript ends, and the typescript takes up.]

10. As things went ill in Moria and hope even of escaping with their lives faded the last pages of the Book can only have been written in the hope that the Book might be later found by friends, and inform them of the fate of Balin and his rash expedition to Moria - as indeed happened.

11. Cases were the reduction of double (long) consonants to single ones medially between vowels, or the alteration of consonants in certain combinations. Both are exemplified in the Third Age colloquial tunas 'guard', i.e. a body of men acting as guards. This was a derivative of the stem run watch, guard + nas people: an organized group or gathering of people for some function.

But tudnas, though it was often retained in 'correct' spelling, had been changed to tunnas and usually was so spelt: tunas which occurred in the first line of the preserved three pages was 'incorrect' and represented the colloquial. (Incidentally this nas is probably an example of the numerous loanwords from Elvish that were found in Adunaic already and were increased in the Common Speech of the Kingdoms. It is probably < Quenya nosse or Sindarin nos, 'kindred, family'. The short o of Elvish became a in such borrowed words.)

12. [The three pages were reproduced in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1979, no.23 (second edition, 1992, no.24).]

13. Exceptions are a few words in a debased form of the Black Speech; a few place-names or personal names (not interpreted); the warcry of the Dwarves. Also a few place-names supposed to be of forgotten origin or meaning; and one or two personal names of the same kind (see Appendix F, p. 407).

14. The sherd of Amenartas was in Greek (provided by Andrew Lang) of the period from which it was supposed to have survived, not in English spelt as well as might be in Greek letters. [For the sherd of Amenartas see H. Rider Haggard, She, chapter 3.]

15. The first song of Galadriel is treated in this way: it is given only in translation (as is all the rest of her speech in dialogue). Because in this case a verse translation was attempted, to represent as far as possible the metrical devices of the original - a considered composition no doubt made long before the coming of Frodo and independent of the arrival in Lorien of the One Ring. Whereas the Farewell was addressed direct to Frodo, and was an extempore outpouring in free rhythmic style, reflecting the overwhelming increase in her regret and longing, and her personal despair after she had survived the terrible temptation. It was translated accurately. The rendering of the older song must be presumed to have been much freer to enable metrical features to be represented. (In the event it proved that it was Galadriel's abnegation of pride and trust in her own powers, and her absolute refusal of any unlawful enhancement of them, that provided the ship to bear her back to her home.) [Cf. the passage in a letter from my father of 1967 cited in Unfinished Tales, p. 229; Letters no.297, at end.]

16. [This refers to the last six lines (which include the interpretation of the inscription on the tomb) of the chapter A Journey in the Dark, beginning '"These are Daeron's Runes, such as were used of old in Moria," said Gandalf', which in the three-volume hardback edition of The Lord of the Rings alone appear on that page.]

17. Possibly observed by the more linguistically and historically minded; though I have received no comments on them.

18. [This refers to the end of Appendix F, I ('Gimli's own name ...'), cited above, p. 296.]

19. In later times, when their own Khuzdul had become only a learned language, and the Dwarves had adopted the Common Speech or a local language of Men, they naturally used these

'outer' names also for all colloquial purposes. [Khuzdul is in this case spelt with a circumflex accent on the second vowel.]

20. [At the same time as the alterations shown were made to the text of this passage my father wrote in the margin: 'But see on this below - they were derived from a long lost Mannish language in the North.' See pp. 303-4, and note 23 below.]

21. The references (in Appendix A [beginning of III, Durin's Folk]) to the legends of the origin of the Dwarves of the kin known as Longbeards (Khuzdul Sigin-tarag, translated by Quenya Anda-fangar, Sindarin Anfangrim) and their renowned later 'mansions'

in Khazad-dum (Moria) are too brief to make the linguistic situation clear. The 'deeps of time' do not refer (of course) to geo-logical time - of which only the Eldar had legends, derived and transmuted from such information as their loremasters had received from the Valar. They refer to legends of the Ages of Awakening and the arising of the Speaking Peoples: first the Elves, second the Dwarves (as they claimed), and third Men.

Unlike Elves and Men the Dwarves appear in the legends to have arisen in the North of Middle-earth. [This note continued as follows, but the continuation was subsequently struck out.] The most westerly point, the place of the birth or awakening of the ancestor of the Longbeards, was in the traditions of the Third Age a valley in the Ered Mithrin. But this was in far distant days.