The Peoples of Middle-earth (60 page)

Galadriel was born in the bliss of Valinor, but it was not long, in the reckoning of the Blessed Realm, before that was dimmed; and thereafter she had no peace within. For in that testing time amid the strife of the Noldor she was drawn this way and that.

She was proud, strong, and self-willed, as were all the descendants of Finwe save Finarfin; and like her brother Finrod, of all her kin the nearest to her heart, she had dreams of far lands and dominions that might be her own to order as she would without tutelage. Yet deeper still there dwelt in her the noble and generous spirit (ore) of the Vanyar, and a reverence for the Valar that she could not forget. From her earliest years she had a marvellous gift of insight into the minds of others, but judged them with mercy and understanding, and she withheld her good will from none save only Feanor. In him she perceived a darkness that she hated and feared, though she did not perceive that the shadow of the same evil had fallen upon the minds of all the Noldor, and upon her own.

So it came to pass that when the light of Valinor failed, for ever as the Noldor thought, she joined the rebellion against the Valar who commanded them to stay; and once she had set foot upon that road of exile, she would not relent, but rejected the last message of the Valar, and came under the Doom of Mandos.

Even after the merciless assault upon the Teleri and the rape of their ships, though she fought fiercely against Feanor in defence of her mother's kin, she did not turn back. Her pride was unwilling to return, a defeated suppliant for pardon; but now she burned with desire to follow Feanor with her anger to whatever lands he might come, and to thwart him in all ways that she could. Pride still moved her when, at the end of the Elder Days after the final overthrow of Morgoth, she refused the pardon of the Valar for all who had fought against him, and remained in Middle-earth. It was not until two long ages more had passed, when at last all that she had desired in her youth came to her hand, the Ring of Power and the dominion of Middle-earth of which she had dreamed, that her wisdom was full grown and she rejected it, and passing the last test departed from Middle-earth for ever.

The change to s had become general among the Noldor long before the birth of Galadriel and no doubt was familiar to her.

Her father Finarfin, however, loved the Vanyar (his mother's people) and the Teleri, and in his house p was used, Finarfin being moved by Feanor neither one way or the other but doing as he wished. It is clear nonetheless that opposition to Feanor soon became a dominant motive with Galadriel, while her pride did not take the form of wishing to be different from her own people. So while she knew well the history of their tongue and all the reasons of the loremasters, she certainly used s in her own daily speech. Her Lament - spoken before she knew of the pardon (and indeed honour) that the Valar gave her - harks back to the days of her youth in Valinor and to the darkness of the years of Exile while the Blessed Realm was closed to all the Noldor in Middle-earth. Whatever she may have done later, when Feanor and all his sons had perished, and Quenya was a language of lore known and used only by the dwindling remnant of the High Elves (of Noldorin descent), she would in this song certainly have used s.

The s was certainly used in Beleriand by nearly all the Noldor.(15) And it was in this form (though with knowledge of its history and the difference in spelling) that Quenya was handed on to the loremasters of the Atani, so that in Middle-earth it lingered on among the learned, and a source of high and noble names in Rivendell and in Gondor into the Fourth Age.

The essay is followed by three 'notes'. Note 1 is a substantial development of the words in the essay (p. 332) 'The change was ... based primarily on phonetic "taste" and theory', which is here omitted.

Note 2, given below, is an account of Elvish name-giving that differs in some important respects from the earlier and far more complex account in Laws and Customs among the Eldar, X.214-17. Note 3 is the long account of the names of Finwe's descendants.

Note on Mother-names.

The Eldar in Valinor had as a rule two names, or essi. The first-given was the father-name, received at birth. It usually recalled the father's name, resembling it in sense or form; sometimes it was simply the father's name, to which some distinguishing prefix in the case of a son might be added later when the child was full-grown. The mother-name was given later, often some years later, by the mother; but sometimes it was given soon after birth.

For the mothers of the Eldar were gifted with deep insight into their children's characters and abilities, and many had also the gift of prophetic foresight.

In addition any of the Eldar might acquire an epesse ('after-name'), not necessarily given by their own kin, a nickname -

mostly given as a title of admiration or honour. Later some among the exiles gave themselves names, as disguises or in reference to their own deeds and personal history: such names were called kilmessi 'self-names' (literally names of personal choice).(16)

The 'true names' remained the first two, but in later song and history any of the four might become the name generally used and recognized. The true names were not however forgotten by the scribes and loremasters or the poets, and they might often be introduced without comment. To this difficulty - as it proved to those who in later days tried to use and adapt Elvish traditions of the First Age as a background to the legends of their own heroes of that time and their descendants (17) - was added the alteration of the Quenya names of the Noldor, after their settlement in Beleriand and adoption of the Sindarin tongue.

The names of Finwe's descendants.

Few of the oldest names of the Eldar are recorded, except those of the four leaders of the hosts on the Great Journey: Ingwe of the Vanyar; Finwe of the Noldor; and the brothers Elwe and Olwe of the Teleri. It is not certain that these names had any

'meaning', that is any intentional reference to or connexion with other stems already existing in primitive Eldarin; in any case they must have been formed far back in the history of Elvish speech. They consist each of a stem (ing-, fin-, el-, ol-) followed by a 'suffix' -we. The suffix appears frequently in other Quenya names of the First Age, such as Voronwe, generally but not exclusively masculine.(18) This the loremasters explained as being not in origin a suffix, though it survived in Quenya only as a final element in names, but an old word for 'person', derivative of a stem EWE. This took as a second element in a compound the form we; but as an independent word ewe, preserved in Telerin as eve 'a person, somebody (unnamed)'. In Old Quenya it survived in the form eo (( ew + the pronominal suffix -o 'a person, somebody'), later replaced by namo; also in the Old Quenya adjective wera, Quenya vera 'personal, private, own'.

The first elements were often later explained as related to Quenya inga 'top, highest point' used adjectivally as a prefix, as in ingaran 'high-king', ingor 'summit of a mountain'; to Common Eldarin PHIN 'hair', as in Quenya fine 'a hair', finde 'hair, especially of the head', finda 'having hair, -haired'; and to the stem el, elen 'star'. Of these the most probable is the relation to inga; for the Vanyar were regarded, and regarded themselves, as the leaders and principal kindred of the Eldar, as they were the eldest; and they called themselves the Ingwer - in fact their king's proper title was Ingwe lngweron 'chief of the chieftains'.

The others are doubtful. All the Eldar had beautiful hair (and were especially attracted by hair of exceptional loveliness), but the Noldor were not specially remarkable in this respect, and there is no reference to Finwe as having had hair of exceptional length, abundance, or beauty beyond the measure of his people.(19) There is nothing known to connect Elwe more closely with the stars than all the other Eldar; and the name seems invented to go as a pair with Olwe, for which no 'meaning' was suggested. OL as a simple stem seems not to have occurred in Eldarin, though it appears in certain 'extended' stems, such as olos/r 'dream', olob 'branch' (Quenya olba); neither of which seems to be old enough, even if suitable in sense, to have any connexion with the name of the Ciriaran (mariner king) of the Teleri of Valinor.(20)

It must be realized that the names of the Eldar were not necessarily 'meaningful', though composed to fit the style and structure of their spoken languages; and that even when made or partly made of stems with a meaning these were not necessarily combined according to the normal modes of composition observed in ordinary words. Also that when the Eldar arrived in Aman and settled there they had already a long history behind them, and had developed customs to which they adhered, and also their languages had been elaborated and changed and were very different from their primitive speech as it was before the coming of Orome. But since they were immortal or more properly said 'indefinitely longeval' many of the oldest Eldar had names devised long before, which had been unchanged except in the accommodation of their sounds to the changes observed in their language as compared with Primitive Eldarin.

This accommodation was mainly of the 'unheeded' kind: that is, personal names being used in daily speech followed the changes in that speech - though these were recognized and observed. The changes from the Quenya names of the Noldor to Sindarin forms when they settled in Beleriand in Middle-earth were on the other hand artificial and deliberate. They were made by the Noldor themselves. This was done because of the sensitiveness of the Eldar to languages and their styles. They felt it absurd and distasteful to call living persons who spoke Sindarin in daily life by names in quite a different linguistic mode.(21)

The Noldor of course fully understood the style and mode of Sindarin, though their learning of this difficult language was swift; but they did not necessarily understand the detail of its relation to Quenya. At first, except in the few words which the great changes in the Sindarin form of Telerin in Middle-earth had left unaltered or plainly similar, none of them understood or were yet interested in the linguistic history. It was at this early period that the translation of most of their Quenya names took place. In consequence these translations, though fitted entirely to Sindarin in form and style, were often inaccurate: that is, they did not always precisely correspond in sense; nor were the equated elements always actually the nearest Sindarin forms of the Quenya elements - sometimes they were not historically related at all, though they were more or less similar in sound.

It was, however, certainly the contact with Sindarin and the enlargement of their experience of linguistic change (especially the much swifter and more uncontrolled shifts observable in Middle-earth) that stimulated the studies of the linguistic loremasters, and it was in Beleriand that theories concerning Primitive Eldarin and the interrelation of its known descendants were developed. In this Feanor played little part, except in so far as his own work and theories before the Exile had laid the foundations upon which his successors built. He himself perished too early in the war against Morgoth, largely because of his recklessness, to do more than note the differences between the dialects of North Sindarin (which was the only one he had time to learn) and the Western.(22)

The learning of the loremasters was available to all who were interested; but as the hopeless war dragged on, and after its earlier and deceptive successes passed through defeats and disasters to utter ruin of the Elvish realms, fewer and fewer of the Eldar had opportunity for 'lore' of any kind. An account of the years of the Siege of Angband in chronicle form would seem to leave neither place nor time for any of the arts of peace; but the years were long, and in fact there were intervals as long as many lives of Men and secure places long defended in which the High Eldar in exile laboured to recover what they could of the beauty and wisdom of their former home. All peace and all strongholds were at last destroyed by Morgoth; but if any wonder how any lore and treasure was preserved from ruin, it may be answered: of the treasure little was preserved, and the loss of things of beauty great and small is incalculable; but the lore of the Eldar did not depend on perishable records, being stored in the vast houses of their minds.(23) When the Eldar made records in written form, even those that to us would seem vol-uminous, they did only summarise, as it were, for the use of others whose lore was maybe in other fields of knowledge,(24) matters which were kept for ever undimmed in intricate detail in their minds.

Here are some of the chief names of Finwe and his descendants.

1. Finwe for whom no other names are recorded except his title Noldoran 'King of the Noldor'. His first wife was Miriel (first name) Perinde (mother-name). The names of her kin are not recorded. Her names were not translated. His second wife was Indis, which means 'great or valiant woman'. No other names are recorded. She is said to have been the daughter of King Ingwe's sister.