Quote:
Originally Posted by Zigûr
I am of course assuming the Dwarves knew of Bombadil before they adopted Northern Mannish as their public naming language, however.
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Possibly the Dwarves knew of Bombadil before adopting Northern Mannish and possibly they didn’t. The name
Forn is presumably a current name for Bombadil originating among Dwarves who took names of translated Norse.
Quote:
Similarly, of course, the name 'Durin' was given to the Dwarven ancestor retroactively in the tongue of Northern Men long after Durin the Deathless' own time …
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In
The Peoples of Middle-earth (
HoME 12), page 304, J. R. R. Tolkien attributes the name
Durin to the Men of the North of the Second Age, and states the name was a word for ‘king’ in that language. But
Durin in Old No
rse is not related to a word for ‘king’ so far as I know. It may be from
dyrr ‘door’ and be intended to mean ‘Door Warden’ or from the stem
dúrr- ‘slumber, sleep’ and mean ‘Sleeper, Sleepy’.
In a note on this statement Christopher Tolkien notes that his father here seems to accept
Durin as the ‘real’ Mannish name of the Father of the Longbeards, but that name is a name derived from Old Norse, so it must be a translation. But I’m not sure that J. R. R. Tolkien did not, in this case, understand it as a genuine name meaning ‘king’ that by coincidence was the same as the genuine Old Norse Dwarf name
Durin.