Bibliographical Abbreviations
Etym. – The Etymologies (in LR:347-400)
GL – The Gnomish Lexicon (in Parma Eldalamberon #11)
Letters – The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
LotR – The Lord of the Rings
LR – The Lost Road
MC – The Monsters and the Critics
MR – Morgoth’s Ring
PM – The Peoples of Middle-earth
QL – The Qenya Lexicon (in Parma Eldalamberon #12)
RGEO – The Road Goes Ever On (second edition)
RS – The Return of the Shadow
SD – Sauron Defeated
UT – Unfinished Tales
VT – Vinyar Tengwar
WJ – The War of the Jewels
This analysis was originally published in Tyalië Tyelelliéva #18.
Shortly afterwards, another analysis appeared in Vinyar Tengwar #43.
The authors of the latter analysis were able to draw on various other
Tolkien manuscripts that occasionally throws some light on the more
obscure features of the Quenya text. Some information from this article
has been added – in brackets and with red letters[1] – to my own analysis.
Otherwise, my original published text remains virtually unaltered. Those
who want to compare this study to the Vinyar Tengwar article may
download a PDF version of the relevant issue from this URL:
http://www.elvish.org/VT/sample.html
(
обратно)
1. Introduction
J.R.R. Tolkien was a man of faith, and in subtle ways his beliefs and
philosophical notions were reflected in his narratives. "
The Lord of
the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,"
he noted in 1953, "unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the
revision" (Letters:172). Still there are no direct or explicit
references to Christianity or Catholicism in LotR, or for that matter in
The Hobbit or
The Silmarillion. It has, however, long been known
that Tolkien made a Quenya translation of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew
6:9-13). This, of course, does not mean that he planned to insert this
prayer into his invented world; the long ages of Middle-earth supposedly
far predated the time of Jesus, so this would be historically impossible
even within the fictional context. Rather we should see this translation
as a confirmation of Tolkien’s statement that to him, it was the
invented languages and not the fictional history that was the primary
thing: "The invention of languages is the foundation. The
stories were
made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me
a name comes first and the story follows" (Letters:219).
Some have contended that Tolkien’s languages are so inextricably bound
up with his fiction that they literally would not make any sense if
removed from the Middle-earth setting, the languages
as such being
dismissed as nothing but figments of "literary art". Such a view,
however, seems to represent a sad diminishing of Tolkien’s efforts, as
well as a profound lack of appreciation for the infinite flexibility of
Language. On occasion, Tolkien himself might modestly dismiss his
languages as "nonsense" or a "mad hobby" (MC:239, Letters:8), but in
reality he did know the nature and potential of his work: He noted about
his languages that they "
have some existence, since I have composed
them in some completeness" (Letters:175, emphasis added). Hence they
could in principle be used to translate any text, even if the text as
such had no direct connection to the narratives or the invented world.
And as can now be seen, Tolkien
did produce at least one such
translation: a Quenya version not only of the
Pater Noster or Lord’s
Prayer, but also of the
Ave Maria or Hail Mary. The two are written
consecutively and may well be considered one work. This is presently the
sole known example of Tolkien rendering into one of his languages a text
not originating with himself.
Why did Tolkien translate these prayers? It seems quite unlikely that he
actually
used the Quenya versions in his own worship. In
Vinyar
Tengwar #32, where Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne presented their
own Quenya version of the Lord’s Prayer (made before they got to see
Tolkien’s translation), Hostetter in his editorial observed:
"Translations of the Lord’s Prayer have enjoyed a long tradition as
representative texts for use in side-by-side comparisons of various
languages." But since Tolkien apparently never made any efforts to have
his Quenya-language Lord’s Prayer published, it does not seem that he
intended it to be a general "sample" of the language. Most likely he
wrote down these texts for no more profound reason than his own
amusement – which should not, however, be taken as an indication of a
frivolous attitude towards these prominent religious texts. The
translation as such was probably serious enough, all the more so since
these prayers would be important to Tolkien as a Catholic.
Quenya texts as substantial as this one rarely appear. If we limit the
scope to what is more or less LotR-style Quenya, the only substantial
texts (as opposed to isolated words or short or unconnected sentences)
that have been available so far number no more than three or four. They
are
Namárië in LotR (and RGEO:66-67), the latest version of the
Last
Ark poem in MC:221-222,
Fíriel’s Song in LR:72, and
Cirion’s Oath
in UT:305, 317. Fíriel’s Song is not even quite LotR-style Quenya, and
Cirion’s Oath consists of only two sentences. The addition to our corpus
of the 73-word Lord’s Prayer/Hail Mary text, which may even be
post-LotR, must therefore be seen as an important event, justifying a
quite thorough analysis.
The analysis here offered is organised into three parts. The first,
relatively brief part will simply establish a
Text to be analysed. In
this case, Tolkien’s handwriting is luckily quite legible and
unambiguous, with only a few uncertain points (such as the distribution
of spaces). I will (summarily) try to justify the readings I prefer,
often based on examples of Quenya that were published earlier.
The next part, the
Syntactical/Analytical Commentary, will match the
texts with typical English versions and analyse the Quenya versions word
by word, but yet within the textual context: This is where observations
regarding syntactical relationships within the text will be set out.
The
Lexical/Etymological Commentary constitutes the final and by far
the longest part of this analysis, providing detailed studies of the
individual words, organised alphabetically. Here I will discuss how
these words relate to material that has been published earlier, and try
to infer what history and etymology Tolkien may have imagined for the
various words and elements. Still, this is not to be taken as a
mini-version of a Quenya Etymological Dictionary; while I will sometimes
go into greater detail than a mere technical analysis of the text before
us might seem to warrant, I will try to maintain the connection with the
text itself. So to ensure easy referencing, nearly all of the
entry-heads cite the word in the exact form it has in this text,
including any inflectional or pronominal endings – which are then
discussed in that same entry, or in the case of endings occurring
repeatedly, cross-referenced to the entry for another word exemplifying
that suffix. (A few suffixed elements that occur
repeatedly in the
text are however given separate entries, if that seems convenient, but
no attempt is here made to be entirely consistent regarding such details
of the presentation. Hence you will find a separate entry for the
pronominal ending -
mma our, whereas the ending -
lya thy is
discussed in the entry for
esselya thy name.) The discussion of
various technical oddities will be worked into
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