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#120590 01/20/04 07:14 PM
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Note: This question and discussion originally appeared on another message-board, and prompted a friend to suggest that it may be of interest to people here.
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In the film "The Two Towers", we see a village in the Westfold of Rohan being attacked by men in league with Saruman. These are men of Dunland, who live in the forests and hills in the Eastern part of Enedwaith.

The back story is that when the plains of Rohan were colonised by the Rohirrim, the previous occupants were displaced to the margins in the north and west. They maintained a hatred and resentment of the Rohirrim, whom they regarded as trespassers, hence their willingness to ally with Saruman against them.

The Dunland was a part of the realm of Gondor at its height, but we are told that it was of little concern to the Kings, and certainly the people were never assimilated.

The Rohirrim and their culture are portrayed in the book and films as something straight out of Beowulf - they are clearly a Germanic tribe similar to the Danes or the Saxons. They originally came from up the Great River, between the Gladden and the Carrock. Their language, like that of the other Northmen such as the Beornings and the men of Dale, is related to that of the men of the West, and hence to the Westron or Common Speech, which is represented as English in the book and films. The language of Rohan is clearly a North Germanic language - in fact the word "hobbit" originates from Rohan "holbytla", which would be recognisable to a speaker of a modern Scandinavian language as meaning "hole-builder".

Westron originated as a trading creole in the Numenorean colonies on the west coast, and its basic structure is that of Adunaic, the language of Numenor. The relationship with the languages of the Northmen therefore dates from before the exile, nearly 6500 years before the events of Lord of the Rings. Yet the relationship remains evident, suggesting a rate of divergence much slower than that in the real-world Germanic languages.

The language of the Dunlendings is described as alien, unrelated or only distantly related to that of Rohan or Gondor. The only word of their language recorded is "forgoil", their word for the people of Rohan, which Tolkien helpfully(?) glosses as "strawheads".

Now "forgoil" is immediately suggestive of the Irish/Scottish "fir gil" (= bright men) or "fir gall" (=foreign men). This raises the suspicion that the Dunlending raiders on the Westfold of Rohan are analogous to Celtic tribesmen displaced by Saxon migration to Britain from the 6th century. The name "Dunland" is not related to the Sindarin "Dunn" meaning west, but comes from the swarthy appearance of the inhabitants, just as the Welsh appeared swarthy to the English.

I did some searching on the web for strings "Dunlendings Celts" and "Dunlendings Celtic" and found a number of websites that tended to support the idea. In addition, some of them pointed out that the names of the villages Bree (Ir., Sc.: brí, bré - steep hillside), Combe (W.: cwm - valley), and Archet/Chetwood (W.: coed - forest) are Celtic. The relevance is that the race of hobbits known as Stoors lived for a time in Dunland, speaking the local language, before settling in Breeland and the eastern part of the Shire and adopting the Common Speech.

And a later correction: it was the men of Bree who originated in Dunland, and were the source of these Celtic names. The hobbits of Breeland lived in the village of Staddle, which is the only village of Breeland with an English name.


#120591 01/20/04 10:47 PM
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Well, Tolkien was a linguist of note. His understanding of the northern language group and the interrelationships between them are one of the things that has always let me overlook some of the more obvious shortcomings of LOTR.

The Silmarillion is worth a read!


#120592 01/21/04 10:38 AM
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wow. thanks for that hibernicus. I have always been intrigued by Barliman Butterbur's name. whence comes Barliman? is it just basically BarleyMan? as in brew-master?

and Cap: shortcomings? shortcomings? you must be thinking about the movie version...



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#120593 01/21/04 11:10 AM
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shortcomings? shortcomings? you must be thinking about the movie version

No, no. That was *long coming.

A fascinating piece of analysis - thanks hibernicus.


#120594 01/21/04 02:49 PM
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Nice posting, Hibernicus. I seem to remember that Tolkien felt that Finnish was the language that most influenced Quenya. Also, his mappings from realworld languages to his invented ones were not always one-to-one. He anglicized some words. (I'm trying to remember what the Westron word for Shire is.) When he was a child, Tolkien invented a language called Nevbosh (or new nonsense). Here's an example from his biography.

Das fys ma vel gom co palt 'Hoc
Pys go iskili far maino woc?
Pro si go fys do roc de
Do cat ym maino bocte
De volt fact soc ma taimful gyroc!

(Translation to follow.)


#120595 01/21/04 02:51 PM
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There was an old man who said 'How
Can I possibly carry my cow?
For if I were to ask it
To get in my basket
It would make such a terrible row!'



#120596 01/21/04 04:49 PM
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hey! we talked about Nevbosh a while back.

ah yes, roc.
here it is:
http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=animalsafari&Number=117067




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#120597 01/21/04 11:02 PM
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In reply to:

I'm trying to remember what the Westron word for Shire is


I know this - it's Sûza.

Tolkien maintained the conceit that he was the translator and not the author of LOTR and The Hobbit, and that his decision to represent Westron as English (and the language of Rohan as Anglo-Saxon) was so that the readers' experience of language would match that of the Hobbits. He therefore anglicised the personal names and place names of the Shire, with the exception of certain names from Buckland such as Meriadoc, which have a Welsh flavour to represent their Stoorish origin. He did, however, provide several examples in the Appendices to LOTR of the "original" Westron versions.

There is no doubt that the phonology of Quenya is very similar to Finnish. I don't believe there is any lexical commonality, however, and I have no idea whether the grammatical structure is similar.


#120598 01/21/04 11:15 PM
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I have just grabbed an English copy of the Kalevala, and was struck by the similiarities evident in names of Quenya characters and thos in the Kalevala. The extent of the infuence that Tolkien's love of Finnish had on Quenya may perhaps be expounded on in The Unfinished Tales. It's there that Tolkien explicitly states that the Istari were Maiar, and there are many little tidbits like that. There's at least 9 volumes of them, so there would be plenty to keep you occupied!



#120599 01/21/04 11:17 PM
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I know this

shows you what I know. I was going to say Eriador, or Beleriand...



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#120600 01/22/04 12:10 AM
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As I remember Quenya, and it's been a while, it's kind of agglutinative like Finnish.


#120601 01/22/04 02:23 AM
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Yeahbut® does it have forty-leven cases?


#120602 01/22/04 08:25 PM
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Barliman is just barley-man, an innkeeper, and Tolkien specified the bame should be translated. The translation guide at http://home.zhwin.ch/~bernaste/rings/guide_to_names.html gives some more details about his names than he gave in the Appendices.


#120603 01/22/04 10:56 PM
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that's a great site. thanks Jenet!



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