Gnomon's Guide

JRR Tolkien's most famous book, The Lord of the Rings, is rightly considered one of the masterpieces of the 20th century¹, and the trilogy of films made from it were major box office successes as well as cleaning up at the Oscars². One of the things that makes his imaginary world of Middle-earth so convincing is the depth of detail - the events portrayed in the book are set against a history going back thousands of years. There are different peoples with different cultures and different languages.

The languages are particularly important: Tolkien was a professional linguist. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and held positions as Professor³ of English in Leeds University and, later, Professor of Anglo-Saxon in Oxford. Tolkien invented a number of fictional languages for his immortal race, the Elves. His stories about the Elves and his Elvish languages grew together - he believed that linguists can't study a language in isolation from the culture that the language is used in. Tolkien's invented languages sound completely convincing and add to the realism of his world of Middle-earth.

There are two main branches of Elvish, which are called Quenya and Sindarin⁴. These look very different from each other - Quenya has long words with many strings of vowels, while Sindarin words are short and rely on the same sort of sounds as are found in Welsh. In fact Tolkien initially based Quenya on Finnish and Sindarin on Welsh, then modified each to make them more alike so that they could conceivably be two languages descended from the same proto-Elvish language.

A guide on how to pronounce the languages was included as an appendix to The Lord of the Rings; it applies to both languages. This is summarised here and expanded slightly in places to make it clearer for people who are not familiar with linguistic concepts.

The Alphabet

Tolkien imagined the Elvish languages written in their own Elvish script and he produced plenty of examples of Elvish inscriptions. When writing Elvish in our Western (Roman) alphabet, all the letters of the English alphabet are used except for j and z, which do not occur in either Elvish language⁵. In addition, Sindarin does not use q or x. Quenya uses b, d and g only in the combinations mb, nd and ng.

Although Tolkien used the letter K occasionally in both Sindarin and Quenya, he didn't like the Germanic feel it gave to the languages. He wanted his Elvish languages to serve the same role in Middle-earth as Latin does in our modern world - an archaic, learned language from a time in the past when people were civilised. Latin doesn't use the letter K, so Tolkien decided to replace K with C throughout Quenya and Sindarin. He missed a few, though, so we have Kirith Ungol rather than Cirith Ungol on a map in one edition of The Lord of the Rings, and Yavanna Kementari⁶, one of the Valar, in The Silmarillion.

Elvish Pronunciation

Vowels

The vowels are the same as in most European languages - Italian, Spanish, German, Latin - but different from English:

• a = ah
• e = eh, somewhere between the sound in pet and the sound in pane.
• i = ee
• o = oh
• u = oo
• y = like the slender u in the French word tu or the German ü in müsli. Similar to the English u in tune.
• oe in some older words = ö, the uh sound in French meuble or German möbel

An accent on a vowel (á é etc) indicates a long vowel. The sound of the vowel doesn't change but it is longer. A diaeresis (ä ë etc) is a reminder that the vowel is pronounced separately from the letters on either side of it. This would be the case anyway even if the diaeresis weren't used.

Combinations of two vowels are usually done by pronouncing each letter in turn:

• ui = oo-ee
• ai = ah-ee
• au = ah-oo
• ia = ee-aa or just ya
• ei = eh-ee

This means that the Saur in Sauron has the same vowel sound as the English word Sour, rather than Saw.

All the vowels should be pronounced, even the e at the end of a word. There are no silent vowels. So Arandore is 'aran-dor-eh'. Usually Tolkien puts a diaeresis (two dots) on the final e to remind us of this: for example, Alqualondë 'al-qua-lon-deh'.

Also remember that vowels are not influenced by the letters around them. The 'min' of 'Minas Tirith' (the capital city of Gondor) is pronounced 'meen' and is not changed by the 'a' of 'as' to 'migh-nass'.

Consonants

• Most of the consonants are pronounced exactly as in English.

• c and g are always hard. C is as in cat, never an s sound like in ceiling. So celeb (silver) is keleb. G is as in garden, never as in gin.

• f is normally the same as in English, but at the end of a word is pronounced v. So Nindalf (a marsh in northern Gondor) is pronounced nindalv. (Note that 'Gandalf' is not an Elvish name, so it is pronounced as you would expect with an f sound at the end.)

• r is rolled like in Spanish or Italian (or sometimes in Scotland)

• s is always as in sass. English often changes s to a z sound at the ends of words (eg toys, dogs) or between two vowels (eg miser), but Elvish doesn't. So Isildur has an ss sound in it.

• ng is like in the word finger, with a hard g sound, except when at the end of a word, where it is like in the word sing⁷.

• ch is the guttural sound in the Scottish word loch - it's a common sound in Irish, Scots Gaelic, German and many Eastern European languages.

• th and dh are the sounds that are represented in normal English by the letters th. These do not occur in most European languages but you will find them in Modern Greek (θ and δ). Elvish th is the unvoiced sound at the start of the English word 'thin' or at the end of the word 'bath'. Elvish dh is the voiced sound at the start of the English word 'this' or at the end of the word 'bathe'.

• lh and rh are sounds that occur in Welsh but not in English⁸. They are both unvoiced with a breathy sound:

  • lh - put your tongue into the position for a letter l, and whisper an 'h' sound.
  • rh - put your tongue into the position for the letter r as said by someone from Cornwall, America or Ireland, with the tongue curled back and almost touching the roof of the mouth. Then whisper an 'h' sound.

• ph is rare. Tolkien used it in early versions but later decided to use f instead. It is pronounced the same as f and has the same rule that it is pronounced v at the end of a word. For example, 'alph', a swan, is pronounced 'alv'.

• Double consonants are pronounced for longer. For example, the double m in Rammas is like the double m sound in the English 'Ram mass' rather than the single m sound in 'summon'.

Quenya in The Lord of the Rings

There are a few examples of Quenya in The Lord of the Rings:

Elen sí la lumenn' omentielvo! - a star shines on our meeting (Eh-lehn see la loo-men oh-men-tee-elvo). This is the standard greeting among High Elves and Frodo greets Gildor in this way when he meets him in the woods of the Shire.

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,

yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!

- Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind,

long years numberless as the wings of trees!

This would be pronounced as follows:

Ah-ee! lowree-eh lantar lassee soo-ree-nen,
Yeh-nee oonoh-teemeh veh rah-mahr al-dar-on!

These are the first two lines of Galadriel's lament, 'Namárië', sung as the travellers are leaving Lorien. Tolkien's ancestors were piano makers and his wife was a gifted pianist, but he himself seems to have been unmusical. He wrote many poems, but never sang. The one exception is 'Namárië'. Composer Donald Swann set it to music and played it for Tolkien, but Tolkien said that he had imagined it quite differently. He sang his version and Swann set that to music, publishing it in The Road Goes Ever On. The book also includes a full analysis of the Quenya of the poem.

At Aragorn's coronation, he recited two sentences of Quenya:

Et Eärello Endorenna utúlien. Sinome maruvan ar Hildinyar tenn' Ambar-metta


- Out of the Great Sea to Middle-earth I am come. In this place will I abide, and my heirs, unto the ending of the world.

Et Eh-ar-ello en-dor-enna ootoolee-ehn. See-no-meh mar-oo-van ar Heel-deen-yar tehn Ambar-mehtta.

This was originally said by Aragorn's ancestor Elendil when he arrived in Middle-earth, miraculously rescued from the destruction of Númenor. Elendil founded the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor, and his vow was repeated at the coronation of every king of these countries. In Peter Jackson's movie Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Aragorn sang the vow.

Some Sindarin Elements in Names

Sindarin was the normal everyday language of the Elves of Middle-earth. Despite this, there are very few examples in The Lord of the Rings of sentences in Sindarin. The language was, however, used for place names throughout the parts of Middle-earth featured in the book and it also used for the names of both Elves and many of the people of Gondor. The Gondorians looked up to the Elves as a more educated race, so they treated Elvish as a language of knowledge.

Sindarin forms the plural in a variety of ways, the exact details of which Tolkien never published. One way is by changing the vowels so Amon becomes Emyn, Orod becomes Ered.