Elves to Eldar?

[Aiwendil]

Doug:

Thanks. I never thought about moving to the Projects, but well, here I am. And already I've posted outside their scope! Maybe this question would have been better off in the Books Forum, but I think that it should (should, mind!) get some more intelligent responses here.

It's always good to see people interested in the project. And don't worry about posting outside its scope - better too many ideas than not enough.

Yeah, I thought that Eldar were only the elves who started the Great Journey, as opposed to the Avari, but the name translates as star people - oughtn't it be applied to all the Elves?

To which Inderjit replied:

No. Eldar was only applied to those who went on the journey, Doug.

Well, to be quite precise, Doug is half right. The term 'Eldar', 'Star people', was originally, prior to the Great March, applied to all Elves. However, when the first sundering occurred, the term 'Eldar' was used to distinguish those who set out from the 'Avari', 'The Unwilling', who refused. Subsequently, 'Eldar' was used only to refer to those that had set forth, and 'Quendi' was the generic term for Elves.

How the #%$@ do you pronounce the Þ character? Is it like a throaty th, in the opposite to dh, or what?!

It's simply the unvoiced 'th' sound, as in 'thorn', 'thought', or 'thunder'. In Old English that sound had its own letter, which has since fallen out of use. Old English also had a letter called 'erdh', which represented the voiced 'th' sound in 'then' or 'there'. In Modern English this has, of course, become 'th' as well; in Sindarin it's spelled with a 'dh' - Maedhros, Caradhras.