I'm probably not qualified to say anything in here, but Gimli doesn't sound elvish at all (at least in the way Elf names were when Tolkien settled Quenya, Sindarin & predecessors). He imagined the name 'Gimli' in 1917, and it was supposed to be elvish. Doesn't that show by itself how much he changed his mind about things before coming to a later version of his work? (And, subsequently, makes the Lost Tales even more unreliable?)
|