-Turambar and the Foaloke - Etymological Archaeology

In honour of Tolkien Reading Day (which for me has become a Tolkien Reading Weekend), this posting is based on my current re-read I am doing with a group called The Tolk-Lings whose objective is to read the entire 12 volume History of Middle Earth - one chapter a week (anyone can join along!). We are now in the heart of the great epic tales that make up the second book of Lost Tales around Beren, Turin and the Fall of Gondolin.

In the course of this re-read I am paying very close attention to what I am calling "etymological archaeology" that is a structured examination of the very earliest strata of Tolkien's linguistic development of the languages that form the great languages (Quenya, Sindarin, etc) of the legendarium. Along with the re-read I am also casting a foresnic eye on the two accompanying works - The Qenyaqetsa and The Gnomish Lexicon both published through the excellent linguistic journals Parma Eldalamberon by the Elvish Lingustic Fellowship.

This week what struck me in the re-read of Lost Tales 2 -Turambar and the Foaloke - the earliest version of the Turin story that would later become the great epic works of Turin Turambar - was in a passage given by Christopher Tolkien in the notes to the chapter. Christopher writes that in the notes for the original story, he was able to decipher a pencil outline for a very early version of the Turin story that was NOT erased (one of the few cases when Tolkien did not erase the pencil layer!) -

"Tiranne and Vainoni fall in with the evil magician Kuruki who gives them a baneful drink. They forget their names and wander distraught in the woods. Vainoni is lost. She meets Turambar who saves her from Orcs and aids in search for her mother." (History of Middle Earth, Lost Tales 2, p.138)

Christopher calls this unerased pencil version "a layer in the Turin saga older even than the erased text underlying the extant version." We know that Tolkien began work on Turambar and the Foaloke in 1917.

In this pencil passage we have three names that do not survive into the finalized version of Turambar or any of the later works and thus are of interest from an archaeological etymology point of view. In the notes, Christopher makes parallels from the penciled names to the final ones in Turambar and the Foaloke:

Tiranne - Mavwin (Mother of Turin later Morwen)

Vainoni - Nienori (sister of Turin)

Kuruki - possibly the dragon Glorund/Glauring

(Lost Tales 2, p.139)

The sources of two of these names - Vainoni and Kuruki - do appear in another very early work of Tolkien based on his study and love of the Finnish National Epic The Kalevala. Thanks to the excellent work of Tolkien Scholar Verlyn Flieger we now have Tolkien's original story of Kullervo from 1914 and his essay on the Kalevala (found in Tolkien Studies 7). Flieger writes in her introduction how it was Tolkien's very focus on turning one of the stories from the Kalevala (Runos 31-36 Kullervo) into "a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris romances which chunks of poetry in between" (Flieger, p.211). Tolkien considered this work the very germ of the Silmarillion and it later became the basis for the story of Turin Turambar.

Through a combination of encountering the Kalevala (in Kirby's English translation of 1911) and finding a copy of C.N. Elliot's Finnish Grammar Tolkien became absorbed by study of the Finnish language and myth - indeed the very notebook that Tolkien started to use to sketch a Germanic/Gothic based language became the same note book that he sketched the more Finnish based "Qenya" language - one of the two key languages in the early parts of the legendarium (Parma 12, ix-x)

But before working on an original story based on Kullervo (which became Turin)- Tolkien rewrote the legend of Kullervo from the Kalevala - developing his own story with new characters (including a pre-Huan dog companion called Musta (A good Finnish name for a dog Blacky) and inventing new names for the characters. Flieger makes a note that some of these names echo or prefigure Tolkien's earliest efforts at his invented language - Qenya (Flieger, p.213).

So back to those three names from the early penciled version of Turin and the Foaloke

KURUKI

It is in Tolkien's retelling/reconstruction of Kullervo that we first find the name KURUKI (the evil magician). There is a list of names that accompanies the work that includes the names - KURUWANYO, KURU - The great black river of death. The notes for this indicate that Tolkien may have formed this name from the Finnish word for death - KUOLEMA (Flieger, p.244) Interestingly, there is a Finnish play called Kuolema written in 1903 by Arvid Jamefelt which has incidental music by the writers brother in law Jean Sibelius which is about death visiting a home. The word comes into the Qenya Lexicon where we find Tolkien has transformed the root of this word KURU to mean magic or wizardry with the name KURUVAR meaning wizard (PE 11, p.28). It also has associations with sin, wickedness and evil (CURDHU). Later in The Etymologies, this root KUR becomes "craft Q. KURWE craft, N CURW, CURU; CURUNIR wizard; cf Curufin, CF N CRUM, wile guile, CORW cunning, wily (Lost Road, p. 366) Interestingly there is an added entry "N CRUM was rejected; see KURUM" Lost Road, p. 366). KURUM is glossed as "N. CRUM the left hand, CRUM left, CRUMI left-handed Could there be an association one can draw between crafty, cunning and left-handiness - the idea of the left having a slightly sinister side (as in the very Latin word for left SINISTER and those nuns who used to whack left handed writers till they changed to their right hand?). So in its possible Finnish origin and its later early Qenya association we see Tolkien combining the idea of death (which indeed is what the "baneful drink" ultimately does for Turambar and Vainoni) and the idea of wizardry and cunning. Later of course the Istari Curunir (Saruman) is bound up very much with both evil and death.

VAINONI

The early pencilled version of Turin Turambar's sister Nienor/Niniel whose name means "mourning" or "tear maiden" Vainoni is close to the name Tolkien's uses in his original tale of Kullervo - WANONA (once mentioned as WANORA) which is a name of Tolkien's own creation - in the original Kalevala the sister in not named. Another suggestion of "water" might be in the Elvish stem of the name VAI - which is the name of the outer ocean - but that might be a bit of a stretch. In the Gnomish Lexicon, there are several words with the root GWAN meaning beautiful, fair and there is GWANN who is glossed as a Valsi of dancing, joy, spring, life and beauty (PE 11, p.44) - quite an ironic potential source for a character who meets such a tragic end.

TIRANNE

An elusive name that does not appear in any of the early Finnish works. Tiranne is the name for the mother who would later become Mavwin in Turambar and the Foaloke and in later versions Morwen (dark hair and tall - with the MOR the root for dark). This is a tricky one to source. In both the Qenya and Gnomish Lexicons the root TIRI is associated with watching, looking for, looking out for (PE 12, p.71) and one can certainly argue that Tiranne/Mavwin/Morwen spends a lot of her time waiting and watching for her husband, Urin/Hurin, who was captured in battle by Melkor as well as waiting for her son Turin. I have yet to find a link with this in Finnish. Tirana is the capital of Albania and I have yet to find any connections here!

So here we have three examples of names Tolkien constructed based on his very early work with the Kalevala and his love of Finnish - not just translating the Kalevala but using the phonology of Finnish and his "elvish craft" to construct new names - names that later found there way into the early versions of his legendarium. Luckily due to Tolkien not putting the eraser to this very early strata of the Turin story we are able to see some of his earliest thoughts and influences on the development of the legendarium - and I will be keeping a "Gwahir" eye on other ones throughout this study of The History of Middle Earth.

This entire blog post was written while listening to Dunedain Radio on the Middle Earth Network which is brilliant!

Sources Used:

Tolkien, J.R.R. The History of Middle Earth (volume 1) HarperCollins: 2002

Parma Eldalamberon XI - Tolkien J.R.R - The Grammer and Lexicon of the Gnomish Tongue The Tolkien Trust:1995

Parma Eldalamberon XII - Tolkien, J.R.R - Quenyaqetsa - The Qenya Phonology and Lexicon - The Tolkien Trust: 1998

The Story of Kullervo and Essays on the Kalevala by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Verlyn Flieger) in Tolkien Studies Volume 7, West Virgina University: 2010

To Have and To Have Not

This week's posting is based on one of my new 2011 activities of learning Finnish - to be ultimately able to read the epic works like the Kalevala. One of my "text books" for this is the actual grammar J.R.R. Tolkien used when he discovered Finnish - C. N. Eliot's Finnish Grammar. In a letter to W.H. Auden in 1955 Tolkien described his discovery of Finnish “It was like discovering a complete wine-filled cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavor never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me. . .”

Well, I am currently enjoying the same intoxication - it is indeed the Everest of language learning!

One of the things I most enjoy about learning and trying to "live inside" languages - is looking at parallels and patterns among seemingly disparate languages. And I have discovered a shared pattern in three of the languages I am studying/have studied over the years - Welsh, Russian and now Finnish and that is there is no seperate verb "to have" in these languages.

In Finnish one forms the the concept of "to have" with the verb to be (olla) together with the endings -lla/-lla which is the ending for the adessive case added to the word which indicates what the person has. So to say "I have" it would be Minulla on (lit There is to me....)

Meilla on nelja viikoa lomaa - We have four week's holiday

In Welsh, the construction is very similar...

Mae car gyda fi - I have a car (Lit - There is a car to me)
Mae digon o datws gyda fi - I have got pleny of potatoes

In Welsh, the possession is expressed by the word -gyda (in North Wales it is gan) which mean "with"

In Russian, the verb to be is again used in the construction to expressed the idea of "to have" - with the translation essentially being "by you there is...")

У брата есть машина - (My) brother has a car (lit By brother is a car)
У вас есть чаи? Do you have tea? (By you is there tea)

So three languages no specific verb to have and each using a construction with the verb to be and either an ending or preposition construction.

Three languages each sharing a similar pattern and I am sure there are more (I believe Persian has a similar construction!). This is an ongoing investigation and like Bogie above I will be sleuthing out more connections in this exciting web of language!!! Suggestions please!!!!



Posted from Andrew Higgins IPAD asthiggins@me.com

Launch a Website - Read Tolkien Books

This week in the midst of launching a new website for the theatre I work at the Hackney Empire I got through two excellent books from the latest batch of books on Tolkien - The Frodo Franchise by Kristen Thompson and The Silmarillion Thirty Years On edited by Allan Turner. I enjoyed both very much and found some really good insights in each.

The Frodo Franchise is an in-depth analysis of the development he current Rings franchise from the movie and DVD's to website, games, and fan clubs that have sprung up. I especially love how that moment when Peter Jackson pitched the movie idea to New Line's Bob Shaye (after beiing forced by Mirimax to attempt to compress the movie into two parts - including cutting out completely Lorien and Galadriel) and after watching the preview reel Shaye said why two movies when Tolkien wrote three books - there is something almost mythic about this moment. Also the line of one of the Weinstein's (loveling depicted as trolls in one of the credits) saying - "do you have to have four hobbits?" just showed what PJ was up against. From a marketing point of view the online promotion and alliance with the fans now seems just commonplace (just look at the current marketing campaign for Cloverfield) and it will be interesting to sse how The Hobbit movie(s) will be promoted. Also, this book brought me to two web sites that has passed me by in the course of the movies - Lord of the Peeps and Figwit the Elf in Rivendell who thanks to the fans has become an online elf star (and made into a peep as well). Well worth a read a Thompson's blog is one I look at on a regular basis - especially as news on The Hobbit movies are starting to take off (as well as Ian Mckellen's excellent website where one can find any news and rumors of his Gandalf doings - the king of actors as his recent Lear in the UK showed)

On a different front - Walking Tree Presses The Silmarillon Thirty Years On is an excellent series of essays celebrating the thirty anniversary of the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977. The two essays that really had an impact on me (they are all very good) is Professor Michael Drout's very personal essay on what it was like to first read The Silmarillion when his parents were in the midst of a divorce and the idea of sadness and nostalgia (coming from the greek words nostos - "return home"/algos "pain."

My other fav article was Jason Fisher's Tolkien, Lonnrot, and Jerome - a really fascinating article about the role of Christopher Tolkien in forging together the vast source work of material Tolkien left at his death in 1973 into the published Silmarillion and comparing to the same process Lonnrot used in fashioning The Kalevala and Jerome used in The Vulgate Bible. This is a topic I first became interested in when I read Nagy's article in Jane Chance's Tolkien the Medievalist "The Great Chain of Reading" which relates that the various versions of some of the key cycles Tolkien developed (Beren, Turin, etc) were paralleling the various source works of the key myths and legends in different versions (lays, prose works, chronicles). What Christopher did is take these and develop a single narrative that became the "accepted story" of that specific cycle of legend - that is until he published in the 1990's The History of Middle Earth and we learned that actually there are many versions of the stories. Fisher who has an excellent blog called Lingwe - Musings of a Fish, also shows places in the story where Christopher actually had to write some of his own material (as in the chapter in the Silmarillion "The Ruin of Doriath") to give the story a unified narrative struture) Fisher as also done some great work on paralleling this to the creation of the Finnish epic The Kalevala - and he has made me take that CN Eliot Finnish Grammer I purchased for Ebay a year ago (the very 1915 edition Tolkien used to study Finnish) and start to "plod through some of the original" as JRR said.

It also got me thinking of another poet we all read and accept what is fixed in the literal poem as the "authorized story" - and that is Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey. In college I did some work on the various lies that the willy Odysseus uses when he returns to Ithaca (to the goatherder Eumeaus, his son Telemachos and finally wife Penelope) - in each he says he from Crete and analysis of the language and structure indicated that this might be an older part of the oral tradition of the Odyssey (also similar with the Proteus episode) - it would be interesting to look at how those forgers of the Homeric tradition in Athens put together these epics into what we now accept as the Iliad and the Odyssey - and can we do similiar with Gilgamesh and Beowulf?

Both two great reads and worth a read - now its on to three more Tolkien books and I am slogging my way through the new translation of War and Peace which is excellent.

NB: Picture from Patrick Wayne's excellent website of images from The Silmarillion