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56-449: The Etymologies may refer to: The Etymologies (Tolkien) , a 1930s word-list for his Elvish languages Etymologiae , also called The Etymologies , written by Isidore of Seville, c. 625 AD Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title The Etymologies . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change

112-441: A dream that his father was anxiously searching for something, and that he had "realized in horror that it was The Silmarillion ." In Ferré's view, he should be thought of as "a writer in his own right, and not only as an 'editor' of his father's manuscripts". He gives two reasons for this: that The Silmarillion reveals his own writing style and "the choices he made in 'constructing'" the narrative; and that he had to devise parts of

168-568: A great deal of material in the Middle-earth legendarium that remained unpublished in his lifetime. He had originally intended to publish The Silmarillion alongside The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, but it was rejected by his publisher. Parts of it were in a finished state when he died in 1973, but the project was incomplete. He once called his son his "chief critic and collaborator", and named him his literary executor. Christopher organised

224-464: A large Elvish vocabulary; this is of course a first requirement. I worked at it for months, and indexed the first two vols [of The Lord of the Rings ]. (it was the chief cause of the delay of Vol iii) until it became clear that size and cost were ruinous. He writes in a 1967 letter that while he is pleased that readers are so interested in the names used in The Lord of the Rings , they "often neglect"

280-491: A large quantity of legendarium manuscripts to his Oxfordshire home, where he converted a barn into a workspace. He and the young Guy Gavriel Kay started work on the documents, discovering by 1975 how complex the task was likely to be. In September 1975 he resigned from New College to work exclusively on editing his father's writings. He moved to France and continued this task for 45 years. In all, he edited and published 24 volumes of his father's writings, most of them to do with

336-462: A philologist and all my work is philological"; he explained to his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that this was meant to imply that his work was all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. ... 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." The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that it

392-503: A stage in Tolkien's development of his Elvish languages which precedes that assumed in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion . That in turn means, Hostetter writes, that The Etymologies cannot safely be used to draw conclusions about what "mature Sindarin" might be or for that matter what "mature Quenya" might be like. Some examples may illustrate how Tolkien worked with the "bases": Tolkien's manuscript of The Etymologies

448-542: A substantial body of addenda and corrigenda to the published text in Vinyar Tengwar issues 45 and 46. With The Etymologies unpublished, Tolkien stated in a 1956 letter that his plans for the "specialist volume" of legendarium materials, which he had hoped to publish alongside The Lord of the Rings , were largely linguistic. An index of names [not identical to The Etymologies ] was to be produced, which by etymological interpretation would also provide quite

504-831: A year and a half there he received his call-up papers for military service. He joined the Royal Air Force in July 1943 and at the start of 1944 was sent to South Africa for flight training. He gained his "wings" as a fighter pilot and was commissioned in January 1945. He was given a posting back in England in February 1945, at Market Drayton in Shropshire. In June 1945 he switched to the Fleet Air Arm . While still in

560-473: Is a stumbling-block and a source of much misapprehension." In the same foreword, while rebuffing Helms but without explaining why Helms's opinion was wrong, Christopher Tolkien admitted that the wisdom of publishing The Silmarillion with (unlike The Lord of the Rings ) no frame story , "no suggestion of what it is and how (within the imagined world) it came to be", was "certainly debatable". He added "This I now think to have been an error." He noted, too, that

616-455: Is a tremendous achievement and makes a worthy and enduring testament to one man's creative endeavours and to another's explicatory devotion. It reveals far more about Tolkien's invented world than any of his readers in pre- Silmarillion days could ever have imagined or hoped for." In April 2007, he published The Children of Húrin , whose story his father had brought to a relatively complete stage between 1951 and 1957, but then abandoned. This

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672-402: Is handwritten, with crossings-out, sometimes overwritten, scrawled, or so faint as to be almost illegible. Christopher Tolkien undertook the challenging task of transcribing it. After publication, the linguist Helge Fauskanger identified a list of probable errors in the transcription. Many of his suggestions were confirmed in 2003 and 2004, when Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne documented

728-416: Is important to remember that all of Tolkien's studies, the focus of his profession, was a concentration on the importance of the word. His profession as philologist and his vocation as writer of fantasy/theology overlapped and mutually supported one another". In other words, Flieger writes, Tolkien "did not keep his knowledge in compartments; his scholarly expertise informs his creative work." This expertise

784-538: The Green-elves ' Danian language: it consists of about "two dozen attested words" and a bit of phonological development, which indicates that its sound structure resembles that of Old English . Christopher Tolkien called The Etymologies "a remarkable document". He stated that his father "wrote a good deal on the theory of sundokarme or 'base structure' ... but like everything else it was frequently elaborated and altered". In explanation, he wrote that his father

840-522: The Proto-Indo-European language , "the kind most frequently cited in philological scholarship"—which depend considerably on Sanskrit, a major Indo-European language. Tolkien frequently denotes older roots with asterisks in accordance with the conventions of historical linguists, where they indicate reconstructed vocabulary with no historical attestation, like that of Proto-Indo-European—the "meaning-elements of an unrecorded proto-language of

896-502: The invented mythology of The Silmarillion , to provide a world in which his languages could have existed. In that world, the splintering of the Elvish peoples mirrored the fragmentation of their languages. The Etymologies is Tolkien's etymological dictionary of the Elvish languages, written during the 1930s. It was edited by Christopher Tolkien and first published in 1987 as the third part of The Lost Road and Other Writings ,

952-412: The philologist and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey , in his book The Road to Middle-earth , was "clearly reluctant to see [ The Silmarillion ] as other than a 'late' work, even the latest work of its author", i.e. that its text owes as much to Christopher Tolkien as to his father. Ferré records that, much later, in 2012, Christopher Tolkien admitted "I had had to invent some passages", that he had had

1008-408: The 12-volume History had done something that a putative single-volume edition of The Silmarillion with embedded commentary could not have achieved: it had changed people's perspective on Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, from being centred on The Lord of the Rings to what it had always been in Tolkien's mind: Silmarillion -centred. Noad adds that "The whole series of The History of Middle-earth

1064-526: The 1956 letter already mentioned, Tolkien notes that "many [fans] want Elvish grammars, phonologies, and specimens; some want metrics and prosodies — not only of the brief Elvish specimens, but of the 'translated' verses in less familiar modes, such as those written in the strictest form of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (e.g. the fragment at the end of the Battle of the Pelennor , V vi 124)." In short, Tolkien

1120-476: The Elvish languages of Danian, Doriathrin (a dialect of Ilkorin), Eldarin (the proto-language of the Eldar), (Exilic) Noldorin , Ilkorin, Lindarin (a dialect of Quenya), Old Noldorin, Primitive Quendian (the oldest proto-language), Qenya, and Telerin are listed. Absent from this list of languages is Sindarin , which Tolkien decided, soon after writing The Etymologies and the contemporaneous Lhammas , to make

1176-525: The Green Knight . Tolkien scholars have remarked that he used his skill as a philologist, demonstrated in his editing of those medieval works, to research, collate, edit, and comment on his father's Middle-earth writings exactly as if they were real-world legends. The effect is both to frame his father's works and to insert himself as a narrator. They have further noted that his additions to The Silmarillion , such as to fill in gaps, and his composition of

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1232-621: The Middle-earth legendarium. In 2016 Christopher won a Bodley Medal , an award that recognises outstanding contributions to literature, culture, science, and communication. He served as chairman of the Tolkien Estate , the entity formed to handle the business side of his father's literary legacy, and as a trustee of the Tolkien Charitable Trust. He resigned as director of the estate in 2017. Tolkien wrote

1288-569: The Rings throughout its 15-year gestation. He also redrew his father's working maps for inclusion in The Lord of the Rings . His father invited him to join the Inklings , a literary discussion group, when Christopher was 21 years old. His father called this "a quite unprecedented honour". He became a lecturer in English language at St Catherine's Society, Oxford in 1954. Away from his father's writings, he published The Saga of King Heidrek

1344-521: The Wise : "Translated from the Icelandic with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by Christopher Tolkien" in 1960. Later, he followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a lecturer and tutor in English language at New College, Oxford in 1963. In 1967 his father named him as his literary executor, and more specifically as his co-author of The Silmarillion . After his father's death in 1973, he took

1400-451: The book", noting that J. R. R. Tolkien had foreseen in a 1963 letter that the presentation of the stories "will need a lot of work ... the legends have to be worked over ... and made consistent ... and they have to be given some progressive shape." In 1981, the scholar of literature Randel Helms , taking that statement as definitive of Christopher Tolkien's editorial, indeed authorial, intentions: stated in terms that " The Silmarillion in

1456-514: The distant past". Hostetter, reflecting on half a century of Tolkienian linguistics, notes that in 1992 Anthony Appleyard used The Etymologies to attempt to systematise the grammar of Quenya for the first time. The linguist Arden R. Smith , in A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien , calls The Etymologies "the most valuable source of Elvish vocabulary", covering "about a dozen" Elvish languages. Christopher Tolkien Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020)

1512-559: The evidence he provided in the text and the appendices. He mentions that he has written a " commentary on the nomenclature for the use of translators "; and Desirable would be an onomasticon giving the meaning and derivation of all names and indicating the languages that they belong to. Tolkien adds, in the same letter, that he would find it "agreeable" to have a "historical grammar of Quenya and Sindarin . He at once states, however, that he does not "intend to engage in these projects, until my mythology and legends are completed". In

1568-555: The fifth volume of the History of Middle-earth . It is a list of roots of the Proto-Elvish language, from which he built his many Elvish languages , especially Quenya , Noldorin and Ilkorin. It gives many insights into Elvish personal and place names not explained anywhere else. The Etymologies does not form a unified whole, but incorporates layer upon layer of changes. It was not meant to be published. The Etymologies has

1624-446: The films, saying: "They gutted the book, making an action film for 15 to 25-year-olds." In 2008 he commenced legal proceedings against New Line Cinema , which he claimed owed his family £80 million in unpaid royalties. In September 2009, he and New Line reached an undisclosed settlement, and he withdrew his legal objection to The Hobbit films. Tolkien was married twice. He had two sons and one daughter. His first marriage in 1951

1680-507: The form of a scholarly work listing the "bases" or "roots" of the protolanguage of the Elves: Common Eldarin and Primitive Quendian. Under each base, the next level of words (marked by an asterisk) are "conjectural", that is, not recorded by Elves or Men (it is not stated who wrote The Etymologies inside Middle-earth) but presumed to have existed in the proto-Elvish language. After these, actual words which did exist in

1736-617: The linguistic processes that brought about the changes from a language to its descendants. Arden Smith writes that Tolkien usually started with a detailed historical phonology of a language; then he created part of its morphology, before scrawling "a mass of incomplete notes", not bothering to move on to syntax: "by that time he would have already started revising everything from the beginning." This means, Smith comments, that Tolkien scarcely created languages with grammar and lists of words at all. Instead, he created "outlines of [the] historical development" of his languages. Smith gives as an example

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1792-421: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Etymologies&oldid=1226207189 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages The Etymologies (Tolkien) From his schooldays, J. R. R. Tolkien

1848-649: The major language of the Elves in exile in Beleriand . As such it largely replaced Noldorin; eventually Tolkien settled on the explanation that after the Noldor returned to Beleriand from Valinor , they adopted the language used by the Sindar (Grey Elves) already settled there. He decided that the new Noldorin was just a dialect of Quenya , little changed from it, while the old Noldorin essentially became Sindarin, inheriting

1904-405: The masses of his father's unpublished writings, some of them written on odd scraps of paper half a century earlier. Much of the material was handwritten; frequently a fair draft was written over a half-erased first draft, and names of characters routinely changed between the beginning and the end of the same draft. He explained: By the time of my father's death the amount of writing in existence on

1960-402: The phonology, grammar, and syntax that he had developed for Noldorin, whether or not they fitted their new context. Carl F. Hostetter called this a "fundamental conceptual change", noting that Sindarin has "a radically different history and by the nature of Tolkien's own process of invention a necessarily different grammar in detail than Noldorin." This means that The Etymologies encapsulate

2016-584: The process of editing his father's unpublished writings, "the real nature of Christopher Tolkien's work was a matter of debate, before a more simplistic consensus began to prevail." Christopher Tolkien explained in The Silmarillion 's foreword in 1977 "I set myself therefore to work out a single text, selecting and arranging in such a way as seemed to me to produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative." In Ferré's opinion, "This choice remains one of his [most] distinctive marks on

2072-405: The root GAT(H)- , Tolkien mentions the place-name "Garthurian", meaning 'a fenced realm' such as Doriath , or the secret Elvish city of Gondolin . She comments that this seems to imply that at the time of writing The Etymologies , Tolkien still imagined the tale of Lúthien and Beren "as Celtic/Arthurian ". In that case, Fimi writes, Tolkien was making a "historical pun" – given that Beleriand

2128-521: The root first and work forwards to the word; but if the word already existed, he worked backwards from there. Christopher Robinson gives as an example Elendil , founder of the Kingdom of Arnor . His name, The Etymologies reveals, unites el , meaning 'star', plural elen , with dil , 'friend', to give the meaning of "Elendil" as 'Star-lover'. The etymological development was always in flux as Tolkien ceaselessly tinkered with etymologies and

2184-499: The same way that his editing of The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays presented his father's essays as scholarly work. In 2001 Christopher Tolkien expressed doubts over The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson , questioning the viability of a film interpretation that retained the essence of the work, but stressed that this was just his opinion. In a 2012 interview with Le Monde , he criticised

2240-491: The service, he resumed his degree in April 1946; he was demobilised at the end of that year. He took his B.A. in 1948, and his B.Litt. in 1953 under the philologist Gabriel Turville-Petre . Tolkien was for a long time part of the critical audience for his father's fiction, first as a child listening to tales of Bilbo Baggins (published as The Hobbit ), and then as a teenager and young adult offering feedback on The Lord of

2296-415: The shape that we have it [a single-volume narrative] is the invention of the son not the father". Christopher Tolkien disagreed, stating in the foreword to the 1983 The Book of Lost Tales , that the outcome of his work had been "to add a further dimension of obscurity to The Silmarillion , ... about the age of the work ... and about the degree of editorial intrusion and manipulation (or even invention),

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2352-410: The story, both to fill gaps and when "threads were impossible to weave together". Christopher Tolkien's editing of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth , using his skill as a philologist, created an editorial frame for his father's legendarium, and for the books derived from it. Ferré comments that this presented his father's writings as historical, a real set of legends from the past, in just

2408-483: The subject of the Three Ages was huge in quantity (since it extended over a lifetime), disordered, more full of beginnings than of ends, and varying in content from heroic verse in the ancient English alliterative metre to severe historical analysis of his own extremely difficult languages : a vast repository and labyrinth of story, of poetry , of philosophy, and of philology ... To bring it into publishable form

2464-721: The text in his own literary style, place him as an author as well as an editor of that book. Christopher Tolkien was born on 21 November 1924 in Leeds , England, the third of four children and the youngest son of J. R. R. and Edith Tolkien ( née Bratt). He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford , and later at the Roman Catholic Oratory School near Reading . He won a place to study English at Trinity College, Oxford , still aged 17, but after

2520-518: The three "Great Tales" of the "Elder Days". Christopher edited some works by his father that were unconnected to the Middle-earth legendarium. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún appeared in May 2009, a verse retelling of the Norse Völsung cycle, followed by The Fall of Arthur in May 2013, and by Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary in May 2014. Vincent Ferré comments that early in

2576-440: The wake of a dispute surrounding the making of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy , he is said to have disapproved of the views of his son Simon. He felt that The Lord of the Rings was "peculiarly unsuitable for transformation into visual dramatic form", whilst his son became involved as an advisor with the series. They later reconciled, and Simon dedicated one of his novels to his father. Tolkien died on 16 January 2020, at

2632-493: Was "more interested in the processes of change than he was in displaying the structure and use of the languages at any given time", and that "the successive phases of their intricate evolution were the delight of their creator." GAT(H)- N gath (*gattā) cavern; Doriath 'Land of the Cave' is Noldorin name for Dor. Eglador = Land of the Elves. The Ilkorins called [?themselves] Eglath = Eldar . Rest of Beleriand

2688-527: Was a task at once utterly absorbing and alarming in its responsibility toward something that is unique. Christopher and Kay produced a single-volume edition of The Silmarillion for publication in 1977. Its success led to the publication of Unfinished Tales in 1980, and then to the far larger project of The History of Middle-earth in 12 volumes between 1983 and 1996. Most of the original source-texts that Christopher used to construct The Silmarillion were published in this way. Charles Noad comments that

2744-577: Was an English and naturalised French academic editor and writer. The son of the author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien , Christopher edited 24 volumes based on his father's posthumously published work, including The Silmarillion and the 12-volume series The History of Middle-Earth , a task that took 45 years. He also drew the original maps for his father's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings . Outside his father's unfinished works, Christopher edited three tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (with Nevill Coghill ) and his father's translation of Sir Gawain and

2800-530: Was called Ariador 'land outside'. N gadr , gador prison, dungeon; gathrod cave. Another name is Garthurian = Fenced Realm = N Ardholen (which was also applied to Gondolin ). [Added to this later:] Dor. gad fence; argad 'outside the fence', the exterior, the outside. Cf. Argador , Falathrin Ariador . [See AR , ÉLED, ӠAR, LED .] The Etymologies ; [material] added by Christopher Tolkien Dimitra Fimi notes that under

2856-520: Was founded, in her view, on the belief that one knows a text only by "properly understanding [its] words, their literal meaning and their historical development." Tolkien is best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , both set in Middle-earth . He created a family of invented languages for Elves , carefully designing the differences between them to reflect their distance from their imaginary common origin. He stated that his languages led him to create

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2912-409: Was in his biographer John Garth 's words "effusive about philology"; his schoolfriend Rob Gilson called him "quite a great authority on etymology ". Tolkien was a professional philologist , a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics . He was especially familiar with Old English and related languages. He remarked to the poet and The New York Times book reviewer Harvey Breit that "I am

2968-613: Was much more interested in words than in grammars. Thus The Etymologies is preoccupied with words, not with grammar: only a few Elvish phrases are included in the onomasticon . The organisation of The Etymologies reflects what Tolkien did in his career as a philologist. With English words, he worked backwards from existing words to trace their origins. With Elvish he worked both backward and forward, to create "fitting names" with appropriate meanings, and to devise suitable etymologies for them in Quenya and Sindarin. In theory he would create

3024-405: Was one of his father's earliest stories, its first version dating back to 1918; several versions are published in The Silmarillion , Unfinished Tales , and The History of Middle-earth . The Children of Húrin is a synthesis of these and other sources. It, along with Beren and Lúthien , published in 2017, and The Fall of Gondolin , published in 2018, constituted what J. R. R. Tolkien called

3080-581: Was originally the Arthurian -sounding Broceliand (derived from the forest of Brocéliande ) – and he was obliged to work backwards from there to invent some roots that fitted. Mark T. Hooker writes that the word-roots which Tolkien uses in The Etymologies owe something to Sanskrit , the ancient literary language of northern India. This influence may have been indirect, with much of Tolkien's direct inspiration being taken from reconstructed roots of

3136-544: Was to the sculptor Faith Lucy Tilly Faulconbridge (1928–2017). They separated in 1964, and divorced in 1967. Her work is featured in the National Portrait Gallery . Their son Simon Mario Reuel Tolkien is a barrister and novelist. He married Baillie Klass in 1967; they had two children, Adam and Rachel. In 1975 they moved to the south of France, where she edited her father-in-law's The Father Christmas Letters for posthumous publication. In

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