Unseen JRRT Hobbit Pic

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

I think 'elfin' must be correct given the origins of the word 'elf' and other uses of it (it was aelf in old English and is the root of names such as Alfred).

The Old English word was normally spelled ælf or sometimes elf.

Etymological dictionaries claim that the form Elfin was invented by Edmund Spencer in his Fairie Queen, and from that point became a common adjectival form. Spelling was not nearly so fixed as now in Spencer’s day.

In older tales it is the word fairy that is generally used, not elf. And looking through such older tales as I find, even those that mention elves do not happen to use adjectival forms. My memory is that both elfin and elven were formerly in use by different authors. And Tolkien again and again makes a big deal that the form dwarves with a v is his own invention, but never claims to have invented the form elven.

So I take it that my memory is correct and that elven was a reasonably common form which Tolkien preferred to elfin. But dictionaries then used by proof-readers listed elfin as the preferred form to use, whence Tolkien’s difficulties.

Even now elven is still in common use but dwarves and dwarvan is mostly limited to references to Tolkien’s work, except in translations from the Norse by the poet W. H. Auden who used dwarves because of his respect for Tolkien’s work.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by jallanite

Even now elven is still in common use but dwarves and dwarvan is mostly limited to references to Tolkien’s work

It seems that at least in the US fantasy and RPG industries, "dwarves" has become the standard form, of course due to Tolkien's influence.

[Huinesoron]

Poking through old threads for entertainment, I took a look at the Tengwar briefly discussed here, and they're really weird.

To save people visiting the Daily Mail:



The actual translation of the Tengwar here is pretty dull:

Esgaroth
Esgaroth

Above Esgaroth upon the long lake

Smaug the magnificent
King of the dragons of the north

Broadly speaking, it's written in the Westron convention, as used in the Book of Mazarbul pictures. But that 'broadly' covers a multitude of quirks:

-The first 'Esgaroth' is almost readable as English; that cross-bar on the E isn't from any form of Elvish! Tolkien also used a Z/SS for S, and put a lovely curl into the final TH letter, all to make it look more English. He's also chosen to use 'o' to mean, uh, O, which doesn't seem to be his normal use - as far as I can tell, as a vowel it is almost universally U.

-The second 'Esgaroth' is a more standard rendering on the same word. That 'c' symbol for E is still highly unusual, but he's switched to an S rather than a Z, and gotten rid of the curl on the TH. What are we seeing here? Was this one the first written, with the 'first Esgaroth' an attempt to make it look like English (maybe for use as a label)? Or was the 'first Esgaroth' first, as its position might suggest - which implies this comes from Tolkien's actual development of the Tengwar?

-'Above Esgaroth upon the Long Lake' is my English gloss, but the words here are written phonetically. The actual transcription looks like 'uhbuv Esgaroth [identical to 'second Esgaroth'] uhpon the Long Lák'. 'Uh' is the letter written as upside-down e in the IPA; I think it's a schwa. 'The' is a single character, which is standard for the Westron convention - but the vowel use is still all 'wrong'! It's consistent with the 'Esgaroth's, but not with any later text.

-'Smaug the Magnifisent / King of the dragons of the North'; this is the text found elsewhere in English, and supports the idea that Tolkien was planning to write Elvish border text onto some of his 'Hobbit' pictures. Generally this follows the same style as the rest of the page; it looks like the AU symbol (an A with a curl above) is elsewhere rendered AW, but we can assume that's phonetically identical. The most interesting letters are actually the two S: Tolkien usually draws these as curls, but originally wrote both as a 'u' shape with a diagonal line affixed, and then changed the first one to the more familiar curl.

In conclusion: if you read Tengwar, this is a really weird experience.

hS