Quote:
Originally Posted by Galin
Here are the names (not even sure if I found every variation, but anyway) of Celeborn and Galadriel as found in the drafts of The Lord of the Rings:
Tar and Finduilas
Aran and Rhien
Galdaran and Galdrin
Galathir and Galadhrien
[and resuming with
Galadriel's name]
Galdrien
Galadrien
Galadriel
Are each of these variant forms to be explained internally? Again I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, especially if done for fun, but when I said (above) mountain of inconsistencies -- fan-made inconsistencies -- if we are going to add draft texts for The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit?), them I'll repeat what I said above but change mountain to "mountain range".
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Who's getting rained on? This looks like a challenge! I shall leave
mindil to handle their theory and instead return to mine:
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Tar and Finduilas are probably a Gondorian marginal note in the Red Book. 'Tar' is obviously abbreviated from 'Alatariel', while Finduilas is the
other woman of the House of Finarfin. Obviously Gondorian legend associated both names with Lorien, and ultimately assigned 'Tar' as the male name; the Red Book told them the true story, and a helpful scribe noted the 'Gondorian names' in the margin. On his first pass, Tolkien thought they were a correction!
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Aran and Rhien suggest that the Lorien portion of the Red Book was damaged; 'Rhien' is Tolkien's tentative reading of '-riel', all he could see of Galadriel's name. Similarly, Aran is '-o[b]orn'. Perhaps this is why he took the marginal note as his initial names!
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Galdaran and Galdrin: the latter is another attempt to read 'Galadriel'. 'Galdaran' is best understood in light of:
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Galathir and Galadhrien: 'Galathir' is a perfectly good name for a Sinda; quite likely Tolkien found it, assumed it meant the same person as '-aran', and attempted to use that fact to reconstruct the name in the previous item. Luckily, he then found an undamaged instance of the name 'Celeborn', avoiding the whole blind alley.
The remaining 'Galadriel' variants are just more attempts to reconstruct her name from the damaged portions. The fact that it took so long suggests he might ultimately have found her in a different source - possibly somewhere later in 'The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King'.
~hS had a Russian document autotranslate as 'the bathroom of the chemical safety system' today, so is all about translation mishaps