New interview with Christopher Tolkien

[William Cloud Hicklin]

In short, Gandalf was never considered by Tolkien when he wrote the bit about f at the end of names, nor should he have been. Like the Dwarves he bears a name understood to be adapted to Weston both in the original imagined tale and in the English translation.

Why do you persist in ascribing to me statements I've never made and opinions I've never advanced? OF COURSE the bit on terminal F in App F refers to the Elvish tongues.

"Adapted to Westron" is all well and good- except that Westron nowhere appears in the book (save a couple of "actual" hobbit-names presented in App F); the CS is feigned to have been turned into English.

However, Gandalf is not an English name, not even an Old English name. Tolkien is just being inconsistent (or nonrigorous). He could after all make mistakes! Just recall the self-created mess he had to dig himself out of regarding Thror-Thrain.

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Just perhaps related -although I have no idea what JRRT's scholarly opinion was on the matter - might be the theory that in at least some regional OE pronunciations no distinction was made between voiced and unvoiced fricatives: [s] and [z], [f] and [v] were interchangeable (think of the slightly but not wholly stagey "Zummerzet" accent)