Parma Eldalamberon Volume 9 [9]

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
To -E or -NE ? - by Tom Loback
The Wedding of Tuor and Idril
Bird and Leaf - by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson
I Tyel Ehteliono ar Cosmoco - by Jorge Quiñónez
Runes
The New "Narqelion" - by Patrick Wynne
Back cover

Citation preview

THE BOOK OF EL VEN TONGUES Volume 3, Number 1

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Parma is a journal of linguistic studies of fantasy literature, especially of the Elvish languages and names in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is published whenever sufficient material becomes available. Submissions are welcome!

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STAFF and ARTISTS Christopher Gilson: Editor Patrick Wynne: Front Cover, 9, 10, 27,31,35,38 Torn Loback: 5. Silas Andrews: 34. Paula Marmor: 37 Adam Christensen: 1,20-21, Back Cover

CONTENTS

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To -E or -NE? On the Quenya Past Tense, by Torn Loback ..... . ............ .. 2 The Wedding of Tuor and Idril, Quenya Text by Torn Loback ... 5 Bird and Leaf, Image and Structure in Narqelion by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson ...... . . . ....... . ... 6

I Tyel Ehteliono ar Cosmoco, Quenya Poem by Jorge Quinonez ... 33 RUNES: Letters to Parma . .. . .. . ... . ... . ................. . .. 34 The New "Narqelion", Poem by Patrick Wynne ........... .... 39

Parma Retrospective ................... . ....... . . . ......... 40 Copyright © 1990 by Christopher Gilson. Individual articles and atrwork remain the property of their authors. The works of J.R. R. Tolkien published through 1983 are © by Gcorge Allen & Unwin, or else © by Frank Williamson and Christopher Tolkien as Executors of the Estatc of J.R.R. Tolkien. Submissions should be sent to the Editor, 300 North Civic Drive #304, Walnut Creek, CA 94596. Copies of Parma #9 are available @ $7.00 (including postage), payable to Christopher Gilson. PARMA ELDALAMBERON No.9 HAS BEEN PUBLISHED AS A LIMITED EDITION OF 100, OF WHICH THIS IS # ~

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 tirne; and probably karin, karne - although kame is not noted as PT in Etym. From the data in Etymologies, 3rd person present is marked by the -e addition to the original stem of the verb, while 3rd person PT is by dropping the -a and adding -e to an infinitive formed from the original stem in the following ways. For stems ending in vowel! consonant, in which the consonants are: d, e/k, b, p, t add the corresponding nasal before the consonant and -a after (i.e. nd, ne/nk, mb, mp, nt). To make 3rd person PT, replace -a with -e. There is some indication that the reverse of this may be true when the stem ends in a nasal (i.e. -m > -mb, as in TAM- > tamba) but the data is scarce and other factors and markers are involved (e.g. KHIM- > himya and not himba). The data also points to a transitive 3rd person PT formation using the infinitive + -ne as in ulyane, ortane, vintane. Ortane 'raised' is transitive (intransivive, 'risc') and ulyane is identified in Etym. as transitive PT. Both these verbs in their QL forms show transitive and intransitive forms which are different: oro- 'rise', orto- 'raise'; ulu-, ulto-. A problem arises as to how to distinguish 3rd person present from 3rd person PT in verbs like kare. I don't know, except that the initial vowel seems to be lengthened (6ne, kare, tine) for the PT. The only example of a long vowel in the present is in tape, where the PT is tampe. While there isn't an overall transi ti veintransitive division marked by -ne, there may be a difference in the conjunction of transivitive formed by infinitive + -ne. Back formation of 6ne, ontane and uIle, ulyane would give:

By Tom Loback That was the question Pat Wynne casually asked me, amidst many other things in a recent letter. Whether one or the other was to be used as the Past Tense (hereinafter: PT) marker, and when. Although I hadn't done much work in Quenya in well over a year, a quick look at my handy-dandy Quenya verb list revealed numerous examples from The Lost Road's "Etymologies" and The Monsters and the Critics' "Secret Vice". PT marker -ne appears consistently attached to verb stems ending -r, and after infinitives ending -a. The -a + -ne in ulyane and ortane suggested a transitive connection which implied the staggering possibility of a basic division in the conjugation of a Quenya verb - one set of conjugations for transitive, one for intransitive - for a verb that could be either. It looked as if I had stumbled onto something of a key to Quenya conjugation that could reconcile and simplify verb forms from different periods. At first glance it seemed regular as a flight of stairs - I was deliriously happy. A breakthrough! However, as my investigation along these lines went on, little kinks appeared here and there which I thought would eventually be resolved until finally, on p. 72 of Lost Road, big as a Balrog was kare, in the PT and transitive, with no -ne marker. The two towers of my theory of transitive/intransitive parallel conjugation, once proud and high, now crashed down in ruin. After a day or so of despondent thoughts and another of swearing never to look at Elvish again, but to study something more useful like Tibetan or Esperanto, I took another look at the data. And 10 and behold, there was the answer to the original question. As seen in the chart on page 3, -ne is a PT marker, and likely for 1st person PT as in tam in, PT tamne; tirin,

1st present 1st past 3rd present 3rd past

in trans. on in onne one 6ne

trans. ontin ? onte ontane

intrans. ulin uine ule ulle

trans. ulyin ulyne uiye ulyane

If -ane does mark transitive PT, then that colors

the possible translation of the poems in "A Secret

2

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9

STEM

1st person 1st person present tense past tense

TIR- watch KAR- make LAV A (QL) TUR- power PUS- stop

tirin I watch tirne karin I make karne ? lavin I lick turin I wield turne

WAN- depart MER- wish PHAR- reach TAM- knock tamin Itap TAK- fix TAP- stop TEK- make a mark TIN- sparkle

3rd person 3rd person present tense past tense

-lave -licked (RGEO) pustane ? blowing

vanne merne? farne? tamne

LED- go HAT- (SKAT- break asunder) lirin I chant LIR- sing RED- scatter rerin I sow SED- rest serin I rest SUK- drink sukin I drink TUK- draw tukin I draw TUL- come tulin I come TYAL- play tyalin I play KYAB- taste tyavin I taste N(Y)AR- tell nyarin I tell NUT-tie nutin I tie SYAD- cleave hyarin I cleave KAWA stoopkawin I bow (from QL) ONO- beget

infinitive

pusta- to stop (trans. and intr.) vanya- go

mere

take tape teke tine

he fastens he stops tampe writes it glints tine (Me) shining lende went hante

farya- suffice tamba- to knock tanke tampa ? stopper tint a- ? to kindle tintina it sparkles

rende *suke (N sag) *sunke (N sunc) tule came (LR, p. 47)

one ontane ulle (intr.) ulyane (tr.) vinte vintane ortane lifted

ULU- pour WIN-, WINDORO- up; rise

3

onta- beget ulya- pour vinta- fade orta- rise, raise

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9

Vice" which show numerous forms of it. It indicates that "voice", dependent on word order may be involved. For example in:

In both cases, the subject is being acted upon. This would indicate they are in the passive voice. But the verb agrees with the object, plural in both examples, which becomes the subject in the passive voice. In English this can be seen in the following examples:

ondoli losse karkane and vea falastane the subject does not agree with the verb, if the subjects are ondoli (pI.) and vea (sg.) But if the voice is reversed, there is an implied subject as a causative agent.

active voice Tom took Pat Chris and Tom took Pat Tom took Pat and Chris

'(something) snarled white rocks' '(something) foamed sea'

passive voice Pat was taken by Tom Pat was taken by C. and T. P. and C. were taken by Tom

However in Quenya, the subject and verb agree so the subject must be the plural in both cases, and the word order a concession to rhyme scheme, while the voice reversal is marked by the -0. So that normal word order gives:

RGED shows the liberty taken with word order in poetry versus normal usage with (pp. 58, 59): Varda ... maryat .•. ortane Varda ..• ortane ..• maryat

16tefalmari falastaner vea taurelasselindon laustaner suru

It is clear that ortane is singular and agrees with Varda, its subject. I venture this applies to the PT in "Secret Vice" also, so that:

In Vinyar Tengwar 5, p. 5, Chris Gilson's letter indicates the possibility of -ro marking the passive voice, but I would think the -r is a plural marker and -0 the voice marker. So that

i lunte linganer and i suru laustaner

tyulmin .. ' f i sUru laustaner

which are seemingly singular subjects with seemingly pI. verbs, should be literally translated as: 'The boat was hummed (by the masts, etc.)', 'the wind was noised ( by the masts, etc.)' Likewise, MC, p. 214:

would be in normal word order: tyulmi laustaner i sUru

16mi sangane = 'thronged clouds' tellume lungane = 'weighted heaven' tollalinta ruste = 'crumble hills'

with voiced reversed, in normal word order: tyulmin laustanero i suru with poetic license:

so that the passage might read (as the punctuation also indicates), 'Who shall see: thronged clouds, weighted heaven crumble hills'. This can also be seen in another version of this poem, MC, pp. 220, 223: Yean falastanero lotefalmarinen 'Sea was foamed blossom-waves-by'

i suru laustanero tyulminen It is clear that -ne has its functions in Quenya through Etym. and MC What impact this has on the so-called late Quenya of LotR and afterwards is unclear to me as I have not tried to apply it to anything beyond RGED. I suspect the grammatical function remains consistent, with some change in the system of marking it.

Suru laustanero taurelasselindon 'wind was noised with/by forest-of-Ieaves'

4

The ~b~'''G- 0

~o~ • .ro~,- F~ v.~ ~ '-~E4J ~ 13Gol' o f J.psrT"LE5 ..J(: • QUEAJ"" ~ A~O :I.l..U.JMIU~OAl BY r. I CJ a3dC.~ • Cf S''l • F

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 calls QL for "Qenya Lexicon". He gives evidence that this word-list was begun in 1915, and it would appear from the portion of QL he reveals (to explain the names in Lost Tales), that it is in fact a glossary of the same language or dialect of Elvish in which the poem Narqelion is composed. 1 There is another self-consistent body of Elvish words, part of which we can associate chronologically with the external dating of Narqelion. These are the three poems Oilima Markirya (OM2), Nieninque and Earendel included in Tolkien's essay "A Secret Vice". These must be consistent with each other to the extent that Tolkien could introduce them by saying: "I will offer some pieces of verse in the one language which has been expressly designed to give play to my own most normal taste ... and which has had a long enough history of development to allow of this final fruition: verse." (Monsters & Critics, p. 212). That we can connect one of these poems with QL, and hence with Narq. seems to follow from a parallel to Christopher Tolkien's argument that his date of 1915 for the beginning of QL "is supported by some of the statements made in the first layer of entries about certain figures of the mythology, statements that are at odds with everything that is said elsewhere, and which give glimpses of a stage even earlier than the Lost Tales." (LTl, App.) For he notes in tum about the poem Nieninque (SV, n. 9): "The maiden Nieliq(u)i, Nielikki appears (only) in the earliest form of the mythology, The Book of Lost Tales, where she is the daughter of the Valar Orome and Vana." So in terms of currency of story element, at least, we have reason to suppose that the "mythology" Tolkien refers

Image and Structure in Narqelion by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson

We might consider a measure of the believability of an invented language to be how well we can communicate with it, or at least understand new sentences in it. From this perspective the Elvish in The Lord of the Rings has never been a very good test. The longest text therein is Namarie, Galadriel's "final farewell" to Frodo at the edge of Lorien, of which remarkably "he did not understand the words", though they "remained graven in his memory, and long afterwards he interpreted them, as well as he could". This Quenya song (Ai! laurie Ian tar lassi s6rinen, . .. ) is given along with a close English rendering CAh! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, .. .') which must represent Frodo's later interpretation. So we know from the outset what the song means, and if we want to recover a real sense of what it was like for Frodo to sit down at the end of his adventure and work out its meaning "as well as he could", we must imagine a reader who skips all the translation and after reading The Lord of the Rings goes back to Galadriel' s Quenya trying to interpret it based on other Elvish words encountered in the story and appendices. In this sense it was a particularly delightful treat to open the pages of Mythlore #56 a little over a year ago to find (on page 48) a score of lines of fresh High-elven poetry "unspoilt" by any pre-existing translation into English. To be able in a fashion to follow in the footsteps of Frodo, or at least philologically to share his imagined delight at discovering a meaning conveyed directly by that magical tongue, was an experience we found worth waiting for, and would like to share.

1 The entries are arranged by roots, which lR.R. Tolkien explains in a note at the beginning of QL: "Roots are in capitals, and are not words in use at all, but serve as an elucidation of the words grouped together and a connection between them." These groupings reflect the relationships of words within Qenya according to their derivation by construction within the contemporary language (of Tol Eressea) or by descent from words so related in the past. Thus under root HELE the words helke (noun), helka (adjective), hilkin (verb), halkin (participle), arc related to each other essentially in the same manner as English frost, frosty, freezes, frozen (though literally 'icc', 'ice-cold', 'it freezes', 'frozen'). These roots may serve where convenient as a focal point for the implications or connotations of the imagery of related words, and we will allude to some in our discussion as we proceed.

Narqelion is dated "Nov 1915 / March 1916". Christopher Tolkien mentions, in the Appendix to The Book of Lost Tales, a small book "concerned with the language called, in the book, Qenya," which he therefore

6

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 to in "A Secret Vice" is the very mythology in Lost Tales. And it would follow then that the "language" he refers to is the same as the language in QL and Narqelion. But we need not restrict our search for clues to the meaning of the poem to these contemporary (and therefore more certain to be consistent) sources of linguistic information. Indeed we can note off the bat, following Humphrey Carpenter's lead,2 that words like lasse 'leaf, sanga 'throng', rama 'wing', lasselanta 'autumn', Eldamar 'Elvenhome', i 'the', aida 'tree', and noldo 'wise one' = 'Elf of the Second Kindred', span the virtual entirety of Tolkien's conception of Elvish.

aldea 'tree-shadowed' aldeon 'avenue of trees' alalme 'elm' The place-name Alalmin6re 'Land of Elms' is in QL also. It is "one of the provinces of Inwin6re" where Kortirion is located, and thus where the Lost Tales themselves were narrated. And in each of the 1915, 1937 and 1962 versions of the poem "Kortirion among the Trees" (LTl, ch. I comm.) this alalmi-n6re is the setting. The word lasselanta 'the Fall, Autumn' occurs in QT (LTl, s.v. Gar Lossion), and in Etymologies under DA T -, DANT - with noun lanta 'a fall' and verb-stem lanta- 'to fall'. The juxtaposition of words derived from alalmi- 'elm' and lant- surely alludes to falling from the elm-tree in autumn. The next line supplies the obvious subject: Line 2:

The familiar Elvish word lasse 'leaf occurs in QL s.v. Gar Lossion. The form lasser in the poem is not the same as the plural lassi 'leaves' in Namarie, but it does seem probable that" leaves arc falling from the elm". The following group (LTl, s.v. S u Ii m 0) is therefor noteworthy:

Like the latter-day Frodo of our imaginations, we begin by surveying the poem for its more readily apparent images. The title of the poem is the single word Narqelion. This is glossed as 'fire-fading, autumn' in "The Etymologies" (Etym.) under both its ancestral bases, NAR- 'flame, fire' and KWEL- 'fade, wither'. The allusion of this word is presumably not only to the lowering angle and diminishing heat of the Sun (Anar) during autumn, but also to the concurrent occasion that many leaves become fire-like in

SUH(Y)U, SUFU 'air, breathe, exhale, puff su 'noise of wind' sulime 'wind' Sulimi, -0 'Vali of Wind' = Manwe & Varda

Etymologies base THO- 'puff, blow' also has derivatives in Q suya- 'breathe' and sule 'breath'. 3 The last seems

color before falling, andfading. Line 1:

Ne-sume lasser pinea

3 Tolkien wrote a "good deal on the theory of sundokarme or 'base-structure'," according to the introduction to "The Etymologies", Lost Road, p. 343. While we must await its publication for a full explanation. we can observe that the "primitive stems or 'bases'." which supply the headings for entries in Etym., are not quite the same kind of linguistic entity as the "roots" that head groups of words in QL. In the earlier "lexicon" the words connected together by a root are all Qenya, and the form of the root focuses on the forms of these derivatives. Thus the sin SIRI 'flow' reflects those in ~indi, ~ire, ~irima and the one in SORO 'eagle' those in ~or, ~orne, iornion, S"oron tu r. Nothing in the form of the root indicates their first

N-alalmino lalantila

The stem alalmi- is surely 'elm'. The following grouping occurs in QL (LTl S.v. Aldaron): ALA 'spread' aida 'tree' 2 See J. R. R. Tolkien, A biography (London, 1977), pp. 75-6, for his description and (somewhat inaccurate) text of lines 5-8 of the poem.

7

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 to equate with thule (sule) 'spirit', the name of the 9th letter of the Tengwar, in the sense that spirit is the breath of life. If belonging with these words then, ne-sume may mean something like 'in a gust of wind', as the occasion or cause of the falling leaves. Paul Nolan Hyde observes (in Mythlore #56, p. 50) the resemblance between pinea and pinilya. The latter occurs in the first stanza of the first version of 0 iii m a Markirya (OMl):

(the Gnomish name of Turambar's sword) it is noted that QL gives this weapon the name Sangahyando 'cleaver of throngs', the first component sanga 'throng' from root SANGA 'pack tight, press'. And note Inmi sangane 'the clouds gather' in OM2, line 22. The leaves falling then, are ve sangar *'Iike throngs', and indeed throngs of warriors pressed together as armies or separated into bands by battle are equally evoked: the leaves gathered on the trees to be scattered in drifts by the wind. The following selection from the derivatives of the QL root VORO is given under the entry Bronweg, which itself is cognate4 , the Gnomish equivalent of the Qenya

Kildo kirya ninqe pinilya wilwarindon 'A white ship one saw, small like a butterfly, .. .'

proper name at the head of the list: Voronwe 'the faithful' vor, voro 'ever' voronda 'faithful' vorima 'everlasting', etc.

If pinea means basically the same thing, then it might suggest the leaves seeming to dwindle in the distance, or perhaps more likely the gentleness or brevity of the particular "gust" that loosens the leaves from the tree. Line 3:

In Etymologies under the Primitive Qendian base nOR'endure' the adverbial sense is clarified for voro 'ever, continually'. Whatever attribute or condition umeai ascribes to the sangar (or the lasser by extension) the adverb voro asserts that it endures continually or is repeated faithfully. Perhaps since the poem is about "Autumn" it alludes to the seasonal recurrence of an aspect of the event.

Ve sangar voro umeai

For the use of the conjunction ve here compare the following phrases: ve malwm qaine 'like gulls wailing' (OM2, line 4)

Line 4: un6time ve nimar aldaron 'numberless as the wings of trees' (Namarie, 1. 3)

OIkta ramavoite malinai,

The word ramavoite as Paul puts it, "is glossed expressly" in QL (LT2 s.v. Alqarame):

In the Lost Tales vol. 2 Appendix entry for Gurtholfin RAHA: ra 'arm' rakta 'stretch out, reach' rama 'wing' ramavoite 'having wings'

consonants are different etymologically, even though this is proven by their Gnomish cognates: sfr, siriol, Sirion vs. thorn, thrond, Thorndor. But the groups of words in entries in the later "etymological dictionary" include Qenya, Noldorin, and often Telerin, Ilkorin and its dialects. The bases are formulated in terms of the primitive phonology, that of the prehistoric "Primitive Qendian" which is the ultimate source of each of these languages. So these same families of words arc found in Etym. under SIR'flow' (Q sir-, sire, siril; N sirio, sfr, Sirion) and THOR- 'come swooping down' (Q soron, sorne, sorni, Sorontar; N thor, thoron, Thorondor; Ilk. thorn, Thorntor). To help distinguish such systematic changes in presentation from occasional changes in conception we will follow these uses of the terms root and base.

It would seem to be the olkta specifically that has the wings, but whatever this means it is presumably the leaves moving in the wind that are like wings or winged creatures. Indeed throughout the corpus rama is used as metaphor more often than literally. In Etym. (s.v. LOK-) there is 4 Word-initial b survived from the primitive language in both Gnomish and Grey-elven, while it became v in Quenya.

8

PARMA ELDALAMBERON

No.9

ramal6ke 'winged dragon', with "real" wings. But in OM2 is "a white ship, vague as a butterfly" with ram ali tine 'the wings shining'. These butterfly wings are in fact the sails of the ship. And of course there is the opening of Galadriel's Lament, where the metaphor is remarkably close to the picture we are discovering in Narqelion: Ai! laurie Ian tar lassi surinen, yeni un6time ve nimar aldaron! 'Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!' The similarity is colored in by the next word malinaL This is a remarkably early occurrence of this element, which seems to enter the narratives with the name Malinalda, one of many names for the Tree Laurelin, in §16 of the Quenta Silmarillion of 1937 (Lost Road. part 2, VI, ch. 2). The contemporary Etymologies has the following Qenya words under SMAL- 'yellow': malina 'yellow' maIda 'gold' (as metal) malo 'pollen, yellow powder' malwa 'fallow, pale' ammale, ambale 'yellow bird, yellow hammer'

Ambale -

Alalme

We can note finally, following the etymological lead, that the yellow-hammer is a species of Old World bunting (Emberiza citrin ella) with a bright yellow head, throat and underparts. Its wings, back and tail are brown, with a chestnut rump. It is about 6 inches in length, the size of a large leaf. The yellow-hammer is one of only a few smaller yellow birds that are common in England. There arc also the siskin, black and yellow in patches; the wagtails, green or grey above and yellow beneath; the blue tit and great tit, with piebald heads and yellow bellies; and the goldfinch with a red face and brilliant yellow stripe along its wings. But only the yellow-hammer looks so much like an autumn leaf turning to yellow and brown.

The falling leaves then are yellow or golden. But also that they are "like throngs ever umeai" and an "olkta having wings" seems to suggest they resemble yellow birds in their flight through the air. For elaboration of this it would perhaps be reassuring to tum to the contemporary Kortirion among the Trees (we cite lines 75-85, a scene much like the one in question): Strange sad October robes her dewy furze In netted sheen of gold-shot gossamers, And then the wide-umbraged elm begins to fail; Her mourning multitudes of leaves go pale Seeing afar the icy shears Of Winter, and his blue-tipped spears Marching unconquerable upon the sun Of bright All-Hallows. Then their hour is done, And wanly borne on wings of amber pale They beat the wide airs of the fading vale And fly like birds across the misty meres.

Line 5:

Ai lintuilind(ov)a Lasselanta

The interjection ai! used at the beginning of Galadriel'~ Lament is rendered 'ah!' or 'alas!', expressing sorrow or regret over the passing of the years, perhaps mingled with melancholy admiration or wonder at the beauty of the falling leaves that signify it. The situation is not unlike and so the

9

PARMA ELDALAMBERON emotion probably the same here. To understand lintuilindova we start with the entry for Tuilere in LTl. which cites TUYU: tuile 'spring', literally 'a budding' - also collectively 'buds, new shoots, fresh green', Tuilere 'Spring', and several other words, as tuilindo '(spring-singer), swallow'. Etymologies has TUY- 'spring, sprout' as the base of tuilindo 'swallow', which it says is "(for *tuilelindo 'spring-singer')" giving the primitive form from which it was simplified. Cf. lindo 'singer, singing bird', under LIN-. In the LTl entry for Tinwe Linto, it is said that "under root TINI are tinwe 'star', tint '(silver) spark', etc., and also lintitinwe 'having many stars', the first element being a multiplicative prefix Ii-, lin·." The same prefix is mentioned in Etym. under LI· 'many': "lin· prefix 'many', as lintyulussea 'having many poplars', lindornea 'having many oaks'." There are several parallels then for rendering lintuilind(ov)a as *'having many swallows'. The common or barn swallow (Hirundo rustica), a cosmopolitan species with a steel-blue back and reddish chestnut throat, long pointed wings and swift curving flight, is famous for two things. First, it is popularly regarded as a harbinger of summer, as is implicit in the proverb: Mfa chelidon ear ou poid. One swalowe maketh not sommer (1. Heywood after Aristotle). Thus the swallow "sings in the spring" in both a passive and causative sense, whence the meaning of the Elvish name and, we must suppose, an irony not only in the many swallows (glancing at the proverb), but also in the incorporation of an allusion to tuile 'spring' in the description of Fall. (The significance of this will emerge later in our discussion of the structure of the poem.) Secondly, the swallow has a forked or swallow-tail. And by analogy this feature is used to describe not only other animals, such as the swallow-tail(ed) kite, hummingbird, or butterfly, but also plants as the swallow-tail(ed) willow (for its seed), or man-made objects like a swallow-tail( ed) flag or coat. In line with the last group it has sometimes been applied to the traditional broad arrowhead, with two backwards pointing barbs, or an arrow with such a head. Line 6:

No.9

alludes to true arrows for its metaphor, there is the general shape of birds in flight to consider, with head as point, wings as barbs, and tail as shaft of an arrowhead. If it alludes to another plant in the forest scene, then perhaps Paul's suggestion (Op. cit.) that ·nin· here may relate ultimately to Gnomish nfn'tear', Noldorin nfll plural of nen 'water', might point us to the water-plantain family, and the genus Sagittaria, of which the common European species S. sagittifolia has leaves shaped like an arrow-head and is so called. The arrow shape results from the generally ovate or elliptical form of the water plantain (A Ii sma plantago) having in the Sagittaria the addition of two drooping lobes or what we might liken to "swallowtails".

Sagitta ria -

Alisma

For the interpretation of suyer we have already seen that QL SUHYU, SUHU, SUFU 'air, breathe, exhale, puff has derivative so 'noise of wind', and that Etym. THU· 'puff, blow' has Q suya· 'breathe'. It would seem then that we have either the noise of arrowheads moving through the air or rustling in the breeze. Also compare the base SUS·

Piliningeve suyer nalla qanta

Compare the Etymologies entry: "PILIM· Q pilin (pilindi) 'arrow'." There is also the name pilinehtar for a black rush-like plant drawn by Tolkien. If piliningeve

10

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 'hiss' with its derivative surya 'spirant consonant'. Etymologieshas Primitive Quendian base KW A T-, under which the Qenya word qanta 'full' is glossed expressly. This is related to the verb in Galadriel's question: Si man i yulma nin ena.ww1uva? 'Who now shall refill the cup for me?' Line 7:

According to LTl "a very early entry" in QL describes Eldamar as "the rocky beach in western Inwin6re (Faery)" and says that "upon this rock was the white town built called K6r." K6r is in turn identified in QL as "the ancient town built above the rocks of Eldamar, whence the fairies marched into the world." Another "early entry" describes Kormas as "the new capital of the fairies after their retreat from the hostile world to Tol Eressea, now InwinDre. It was named in memory of K6r and because of its great tower was called also Kortirion." Eldamar is said to be in "western" Faery probably in the sense that the Inwir left their old home in K6r to go "into the world" to rescue the Gnomes and then "retreated" part-way to their new home in Kormas, and the island where they now dwelt was eastern Faery, in effect. The significance of Eldamar (literally 'Elfhome') is thus not only the nostalgia it evokes, from the point of view of one situated in InwinDre, but perhaps also its association with the west, with the golds and reds (kuluvai ya karnevali) of sunset. The form V' at the beginning of this line appears to be a contraction of the conjunction ve 'like, as'. While the meanings of ematte and sinqi are not readily apparent, we may still surmise in very general terms that the red and golden autumn leaves described in the preceding lines are here said to be "like (some thing or action) in Eldamar."

Kuluvai ya karnevalinar

There is a QL root KULU 'gold' with "derivatives", though Christopher Tolkien does not list any when he explains (LTl, App.) that the name Kulullin is not among them. This is the cauldron where the liquid light of Laurelin was gathered, and from which it was watered. Under the entry for the tree-name we are told that "QL has laure 'gold (much the same as kulu)', laurina 'golden'." Under that for Ilsalunte we are told that QL has ilsa "the mystic name of silver as laure of gold", and these words ilsa and laure are the ones used for the silver and gold included in the alloy tilkal made by Aule (LTl, ch. 4). A manuscript footnote says they "are the 'magic' names for ordinary telpe and kulu." We should also compare Parma Kuluinen 'the Golden Book' - "the collected book of legends, expecially of Ing and Earendel", according to a QL entry described in LT2, ch. 6 (30), and as Parma Kuluina this is the reputed source of "The Book of Lost Tales" from which "The Quenta" was drawn in turn (Shaping of Middle-earth, ch. 3). In the first version of Oilima Markirya we see kirya kalIiere kulukalmalinen 'the ship shone with golden lights' (lines 7-8). Thus kulu- can refer to 'gold' as substance or attributively to 'gold' as color. Which of these is the more "basic" is left unresolved, and in Etymologies Tolkien is still hesitant. In The Father Christmas Letters the Arctic phrase ya rato nea is rendered 'and I hope it will be soon'. In OM], line 20, the word karnevaite is translated 'amid red skies'. In OM2, line 31, this becomes nu karne vaiya 'under red skies'. Etymologies under base KAR' AN- 'red' has Q karne 'red'. To summarize we can conclude that qanta kuluvai ya karnevalinar means something like "full of golden and reddish colors", naturally a reference to the various yellows, oranges and reds of the autumn leaves. Line 8:

Line 9:

San rotser simpetalla pinqe,

For the adverb san compare the beginning of the poem Earendel: San ninqeruvisse lutier kiryasse EarendiI or yea 'Then upon a white horse sailed Earendel, upon a ship upon the sea' Under the appendix entries for Rothwarin in LT2 and Solosimpi in LTl, we have the following QL roots and derivatives: ROTO 'hollow' rotse 'pipe' r6ta 'tube' ronta, rotwa 'hollow' rote Ie 'cave'

V'emaUe sinqi Eldamar.

11

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 SIPI 'whistle, pipe' simpa, simpina 'pipe, flute' simpise 'piping' simpetar 'piper'

ranar 'in the moon gleaming', in OM2, line 16, and we have already mentioned line 33 with assari silde '(on) bones gleaming'. In explanation of the name Hisilome 'Shadowy Twilights', LTl informs us that QL root HISI gives hise, histe 'dusk', Hisinan 'Land of Twilight'. In line 21-22 of OMI we have hism nie 'dropped tears of mist', and in line 12 of OM2 kalma histane 'the light fading'. Under Etymologies base KHIS-, KHITH'mist, fog' occur Q hiswe 'fog', and our very word hiswa 'grey'. In chapter 4 of LTI we learn of Tinjang Warble, whom Eriol hears playing his flute at night, and Vaire calls Timpinen. About this name the Appendix says: "The entry in GL is: 'Tinfing or Tinfang the fluter (surnamed Gwarbilin or Birdward), a fay; cf. Q timpinen a fluter (Timpando, Varavilindo)'." In the context of rotser simpitalla of the prior line, there is probably an evocation of timpinen 'a fluter' here by use of the word timpe. But the Appendix also tells us that the name Timpinen "stands in QL as the only derivative of a root TIFI," while the following stands in contradistinction to it:

The form rotser then is probably the plural of rotse 'pipe', just as lasser is the plural of lasse 'leaf in line 2, and simpetalla must refer to the whistling or piping sounds made by the rotser. Paul Nolan Hyde (in Mythlore #56, p. 51) notes a possible connection of pinqe with pinea *'small' of line 2, or with pike 'blinking' (Le. shining unsteadily) in OM2, lines 32-33, uri nienaite hise pike assari silde 'a bleared sun blinking on bones gleaming', and pika- 'lessen, dwindle' in the notes to OM 3. The physically small dimension suggested by these words is here applied to the sound of the pipes. Compare "thin" in line 58 of the earliest Kortirion among the Trees: Already stoops to hear the secret player Pipe out beyond the tangle of her forest dreams The long thin tune that still do sing The elvish harebells nodding in ajacinth ring Line 10:

TIPI: tim pe 'fine rain' timpine 'spray', etc.

Sulimarya sildai, hiswa timpe

Again we have a word connected with QL root SUHYU, SUHU, SUFU 'air, breathe, exhale, puff and PQ base THU- 'puff, blow', in particular with forms in the stem sulim-, like sulime 'wind', Sulimi 'Vali of Wind', Manwe Sulimo 'the Breather' (Silm. Index). With sildai we can compare the fact that "Under the root SILl QL gives a long list of words beginning with Sil 'Moon' and all with meanings of whiteness or white light" (LT I). Etymologies has the following PQ bases and Qenya derivatives:

Thus hiswa timpe is explicitly 'fine grey rain', a light obscuring vapor, a drizzle at dusk. But a mist or fine rain can cause stars to shimmer just as Timpinen's flute-playing can. Compare lines 24-26 and 35-38 of Over Old Hills and FarAway: And the stars were about him, and blinked to his tune Shimmering blue like sparks in a haze, As always they shimmer and shake when he plays. His slim little body went fine as a shade, And he slipped through the reeds like a mist in the glade; And he laughed like thin silver, and piped a thin note, As he flapped in the shadows his shadowy coat.

SIL- variant of THIL; 'shine silver' Q silme 'light of Silpion, tsilver' Q silma 'silver, shining white' (adj.) Related is S'ILIP whence Q Silpion THIL- (variant of SIL) Q Isil 'the Sheen' = the Moon

Line 11:

San sirilla ter i-aldar:

Once again we encounter the adverb san 'then'. In the

The closest comparable form to sildai seems to be silda-

12

PARMA ELDALAMBERON explanation of the Gnomish river-name Sirion the following group from QL is cited:

"There often would Dairon sit upon a tussock or a tree-root and make music while Tinuviel danced thereto, and when she danced to the playing of Dairon more lissom was she than Gwendeling, more magical than Tinfang Warble neath the moon, nor may any see such lilting save be it only in the rose gardens of Valinor where Nessa dances on the lawns of never-fading green." (p. 10, emphasis added.) Lilting is of course a perfectly good English word, though used here in a somewhat remarkable way, alluding to the movement of the dancing rather than the cadence of the music that accompanies it. For lie there is Etym. base LI- 'many', whence Q lie 'people', the plural suffix -IL and prefix Iin- mentioned above. Compare losse!.i!:. telerinwa "white people of the shores of Elfland" (Nieninque. line 7), and Eldalie 'the people of the Elves' (Shaping of Middle-earth. ch. 3. § 2). Noldorinwa is the adjectival form of Noldo 'Gnome' (LTl. s.v. Noldoli), so lilta lie noldorinwa = *'dance people of the Gnomes'.

SIRI 'flow' sindi 'river' sire 'stream' sirima 'liquid, flowing' Etymologies expands on this a bit, with a derivative Q siril 'rivulet' very reminiscent of sirilla. But perhaps it is safer to render this word somewhat generically as 'flowing' - which may tum out to be precisely what it means. Back in chapter 4 of LTl, Aule fashioned some of the tilkal he had made into four fetters that were named "Ilterendi for they might not be filed or cleft." The prefix iI- is a negative, as in I1korin, "the Elves that never saw the light of Kor", so *terendi refers to being 'filed or cleft'. The Appendix contrasts with this the QL root and derivatives:

Line 13:

TERE tereva 'piercing' teret 'auger, gimlet'

'Omalingwe Iir' amaldar

For the first part of omatingwe we can first observe the name of the Vala 'Omar "who knows all tongues" (LTl. ch. 2); "whose voice is the best of all voices, who knoweth all songs in all speeches" (ch. 3). With this compare Etym. base OM- and derivatives, Q oma 'voice'. oman, amandi 'vowel'. In Earendel the phrase i lunte tinganer is translated "the boat hummed like a harp-string". With lunte 'ship' in LTl (s.v. I1salunte), we deduce that tinga- = *'to hum like a harp-string'. Also note PQ base LlNG- 'hang' with Q tinga- 'hang, dangle'. A connection between these distinct concepts might be found in the following Etymologies entry:

What the action of both a file and an auger have in common is to get to the far side of an obstacle without going around or moving it, i.e. getting "through" the obstacle by cleaving a gap or boring a hole. And Etym. does give the Qenya prepositions tere, ter 'through' under TER-, TERES'pierce'. We know that aIda is 'tree', so apparently i-aldar = 'the trees'. To summarize, we can say that the hiswa timpe / san sirilla ter i-aldar = 'fine grey rain then flowing through the trees'. Line 12:

No.9

Lilta lie noldorinwa

LIN- (originally GLIN) 'sing' Q Iinde 'air, tune' Q !indo 'singer, singing bird' Q lomelinde 'nightingale' Q Iindele 'music'

Etymologies has the entry "LlLT- 'dance'. Q Iilta'dance'." This gloss is remarkably isolated from our poem, yet surely is the appropriate meaning. Compare lines 47-49 of Kortirion among the Trees: The holy fairies and immortal elves That dance among the trees and sing themselves A wistful song of things that were, and could be yet.

This has a note added: "Cf. Laurelin (g.sg. Laurelinden), but this also taken as 'hanging-gold' (g.sg. Laurelingen): see LING." Thus omalingwe suggests the "hum of voices" and also perhaps that they "hang" in the

Also compare the following sentence from LT2. ch. 1:

13

PARMA ELDALAMBERON air, reminiscent of LaureHn whose "boughs were hidden by long swaying clusters of gold flowers like a myriad hanging lamps of flame, and light spilled from the tips of these and splashed upon the ground with a sweet noise." (LTl, ch. 3) For Hr' note the following QL group (s.v. Lindelos):

sinqi found in line 8, but that does not take us very far. The first element of laiqaninwa appears in LT1 under the explanation for the second element of Tari-Laisi, the name of Vana as "mistress of life". LA Y A 'be alive, flourish' laire 'meadow' laiqa 'green' laito, laisi 'youth, vigour, new life'

URI 'sing' Hn 'melody' lindele 'song, music' lirit 'poem' lirilla 'lay, song' Lirillo (the Vala Salmar-Noldorin) Lindelokte 'singing cluster, laburnum'

Under the Appendix entry for Nielluin LTl also mentions ninwa 'blue', in explication of the names for the star Sirius "given in QL as Niellune or Nierninwa". Thus laiqaninwa means *'greenish blue', or something like it. And one naturally thinks of the darker "evergreen" colors of the pine, yew, or holly.

This partly connects with the Etymologies entry LINgiven above, and partly with LIR- 'sing, trill' whence Q Iirin 'I chant'. It might be that amaldar contains the word maIda 'gold' (as metal), mentioned in the discussion of line 4 above, used metaphorically here. But it seems more likely from the context that the word contains aIda 'tree' and begins with the Qenya prefix am- 'up', given under PQ base AM- and probably implied as a possibility by the form of the QL root AM(U) 'up(wards)', explaining Amon Gwareth in L T2 . Use of the prefix is variously illustrated by ampende 'upward slope' (s.v. PEN-); ampano 'building, wooden hall' from base PAN- 'place, set, fix in place' (especially of wood)'; or amaurea 'dawn, early day' in the notes to OM 3, presumably derived from aure 'day(light)', LotR App. D. So am- can indicate something that tends towards or is the result of an upward motion or direction. And am-aIda probably means 'a tall tree' or conceivably 'the upper part of a tree, treetop'. Thus the phrase Iir' amaldar seems to mean something like 'sings in the tall trees' or 'in the singing treetops'. Compare KTl, lines 23-27:

Line 15:

N-alalmino Iya lanta lasse

We have seen already that alalmi- is 'elm' and lasse 'leaf. There is a verb lanta- 'to fall', an homophonous noun lanta 'a fall', and an adjective as well, as in lanta-ranar 'in the moon falling' or lante no lanta-mindon 'falling upon fallen towers' from OM2, lines 18 and 28 respectively. The form Iya is unusual for Quenya. No other word begins with the consonant combination Iy. But analogous combinations ty, ny, hy do occur at the beginning of words, though infrequently: tyalie 'play', nyare 'tale', hyando 'cleaver'. Perhaps Iy is just the rarest of all. The combination does occur internally at the beginning of suffixes, specifically the 2nd person singular endings in hiruvam'thou shalt find' (Galadriel's Lament, line 16) and Anar kaluva tie!yanna! 'The sun shall shine upon your path' (VT, pt. 1, ch. 1, p. 22 and n. 3). That Iya is a separate-word form of this -lya- 'your' seems to be a possibility.

Sing of thy trees, old, old Kortirion! Thine oaks, and maples with their tassels on, Thy singing poplars; and the splendid yews That crown thine aged walls and muse Of sombre grandeur all the day Line 14:

No.9

Line 16:

Torwa pior rna tarasse:

The name Silpion for the Silver Tree is said to mean 'Cherry-moon' (LT2. ch. 3, comm. § 2, S.v. Bansil). Concerning the second element, the Appendix adds that a group in QL includes the following:

Sinqitalar laiqaninwa.

We can note that sinqitalar seems to be cognate with

14

..

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 meaning of torwa boils down to whether there is a noun in tor- with a quality appropriate to our context here. One such candidate for the base is TOR- 'brother', with Qenya derivatives:

pio 'plum, cherry' piukka 'blackberry' piosenna 'holly', etc.

Lost Tales, vol. 2, also mentions rna 'hand' (s.v. Ermabwed) as one of "many derivatives" of the QL root MAHA. For tarasse compare the following from LTl (s.v. Qalrne-Tari):

toron, torni 'brother' otorno 'sworn brother, associate' otornasse 'brotherhood' An adjective torwa might thus mean 'brotherly' or 'filial'. It is said that "usually of the blood-kinship was used

TAHA: ta 'high' tara 'lofty' tari 'queen', etc.

onoro", which is also glossed as 'brother' under base NO'beget', and means etymologically "of one kin". The implication is that toron can have a broader meaning than this, the sort that makes one think say of Henry V, act 4, scene 3:

The phrase pior rna tarasse looks to mean something like "cherries in a lofty hand", or more loosely "fruit held aloft" . The derivative suffix -wa found in torwa also appears in hiswa 'grey' in line 10, in noldorinwa 'Gnome' (adjective) in line 12 and laiqaninwa in line 14, which we saw could contain ninwa 'blue', for which we can cite no further certain connections. But in the Qenya Lexicon we find various other adjectives in -wa for which we can, e.g. under the roots KALA 'shine golden', MELE 'love', FINI, lSI, SAHA/SAHY A, DYELE, ROTO 'hollow', mentioned respectively under entries Galmir, Nessa, Finwe, Eldarissa, Sari, Melko, Rothwarin in the Appendices to Lost Tales: Adjectives kalwa 'beautiful' rnelwa 'lovely' finwa 'sagacious' iswa, isqa 'wise' saiwa 'hot' yelwa 'cold' ronta, rotwa 'hollow'

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers: For he to day that sheds his blood with me, Shall be my brother: be he ne're so vile, This day shall gentle his Condition. And in the context of the poem one thinks, perhaps, of how the "leaves go pale / Seeing afar the icy shears / Of Winter, and his blue-tipped spears / Marching unconquerable upon the sun" (KTl, lines 78-81). If the phrasing lanta lasse / Torwa pior rna tarasse means 'falling leaf like a brother, cherries held aloft', the metaphor may be suggesting that the falling or fallen lasse is "like a brother" 10 the pior not yet fallen. This imagery of military brotherhood in the hopeless battle against Winter, seems to continue that suggested in a general way by sangar 'throngs' and pilin'arrow' in lines 3 and 6.

Related Nouns kale 'morning', kalrna 'daylight' rneles(se) 'love' fin ie, finde 'cunning' isse 'knowledge, lore' sa 'fire' Yelin 'winter' rotse 'pipe', rota 'tube', rotele 'cave'

Line 17:

Tukalia sangar urneai

There is a PQ base TUK- 'draw, bring' with derivative verb Q tukin 'I draw'. If we have adjectival tuka- *'drawn' or *'drawing' here, then the second element might be found in LTl under the entry for Ungwe Lianti, Ungweliant(e), the great spider Gloomweaver: LI + ya 'entwine' lia 'twine' liante 'tendril' liantasse 'vine'

The suffix means 'full of, or possessing a quality like' the corresponding noun(s). The adjective suffix is "generic" in the sense that it does not seem to relate directly to any particular noun-forming suffix. So the question of the

15

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 characterizing the Autumn, and may contain prefix Ii-, lin= 'many'. We note therefore first of all the entry for Valin or 'Land of the Gods' in the LTl Appendix, where the following QL root is given:

Perhaps it is through some metaphoric image like that in draw-string or drag-net that tukalia alludes to the sangar 'throngs' being drawn to the pior in the previous line, if as in line 3 the subsequent nlmavoite implies that the sangar are flocks of birds. Line 18:

NO 'become, be born' nore 'native land, nation, family, country' -nor "the form in compounds" nosta- 'give birth' nosta 'birth, birthday' nostale 'species, kind' nosse 'kin, people'

Olkta ramavoite karneambarai

We have seen for line 7 that karne means 'red'. The word ambar occurs in Oilima Markirya 2, line 3: nive qimari ringa am bar translated "pale phantoms in her cold bosom". This is a difficult line to interpret fully, but ringa = 'cold'. And in Etymologies we have AM'mother' whence Q amil or amme 'mother' and AM- 'up': usually in form amba-, whence amba 'up(wards)', amban 'upward slope, hill-side', etc. So it seems plausible that one or both of these identical sounding bases led to am b a *'bosom, breast', whence am bar 'in (her) bosom'. Now Paul has pointed out that ambar also means 'doom, fate' and 'earth, world', the former (in Turambar 'master-doom') spanning the whole corpus. Still neither of these can be the explanation of ambar in OM2, so we are faced with a three-way homophony under any interpretation. But in the context of ramavoite 'having wings' the combination of karne 'red' + amba 'bosom' + -ra in karneambarai *'red-breasted' with reference to a species of bird, seems too good not to be true. Now there is more than one species of common English bird with a karne amba. The kingfisher has red underparts. The redstart has a russet-red breast and a conspicuous red tail (OE steort). The stonechat, with its cry like clinking pebbles, has an orange breast. The chaffinch and bullfinch have pinkish cheeks and breast. And the linnet has a bright red breast with a distinctive touch of red on its crown. But most famous of the "red-breasted" birds is surely the one known affectionately as robin, the robin redbreast (Erithacus rubecula), with its orange-red face and breast and olive-brown upper parts. 5 Line 19:

This same entry says that d6r is the equivalent Gnomish form of Q nore, and under the entry for Dor Faidwell 'Land of Release' we are told that Gnomish d6r was historically derived from an earlier form ndor-. When we further notice occasional QL roots like MALA (MBALA) '(crush), hurt, damage' whence Q Malkarauke = GL Balrog 'a kind of fire-demon', we see that already the earliest "conception" contains the idea that primitive nasal + stop combinations like nd, mb occurred at the beginning of bases, and were resolved to the pure nasal in Qenya but lost the nasal component in Gnomish. This internal historical development is further exemplified in Etymologies bases MBAD-, MBAKH-, NDAN-, NDER-, NGAN-, NGOL-, etc. But the situation was already more complicated than this. The notes on the names in "The Fall of Gondolin" give the Gnomish names of two of the kindreds of the Gondothlim, Nos Duilin "The Swallow" and Nos nan Alwell "The Tree", with nos clearly related to Q nosse 'kin, people'. And there is "the festival of Nost-na-Lothiofl or the Birth of Flowers" (LT2, ch. 3, p. 172), containing GL nost 'birth; blood, high birth; birthday' (s.v. Duilill) clearly equivalent to Q nosta. So again the explanation seems to be that nore was already conceived as an analogical merging of two originally separate bases *noand *ndor-, which became similar sounding in Qenya due to the change of word initial nd > n, as laid out in the Etymologies entries NDOR- 'dwell, stay, rest, abide', NO- 'beget' and ONO- 'beget'. Occasionally, as in the case of Endor, Endore 'Middleearth', the original d sound is retained when the base does not end up at the beginning of the Qenya word. Other examples include andune 'sunset' related to numen 'west'

Ai lindorea Lasselanta

We have seen in line 5 that ai = 'ah!' or 'alas!' and Lasselanta = 'Fall, Autumn', literally 'leaf-fall'. Parallel to lintuilinda in that line, lindorea here may be a word 5 This small European species is not to be confused with the much larger American robin (Turdus migratorius).

16

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 from NDU- 'go down, sink'; Elendil 'Elf-friend' related to nildo from NIL-, NDIL- 'friend'. This then is some of the background to suggesting that Iindorea contains the word nore 'native land, nation, family, country', etc. If it can mean both *'having many families' as well as *'having many countries', then Iindorea Lasselanta might refer not only to "Autumn in many lands" but "the Fall of many kinds of leaves". Line 20:

NAR- 'flame, fire' Q nar and nare 'flame', cf. Anar 'Sun' Q narqelion 'fire-fading', autumn Perhaps mintya mire means 'intense flame' or 'essential flame' or 'ultimate flame'. But in any case the line as a whole, nierme mintya nare qanta, probably means something like "in tears full of flame", depicting the leaves as falling in lamentation. We should note a textual difficulty that our translation seems to resolve. Paul gives nara in this line of his text of the poem, but on the next page (Mythlore #56, p. 49) where he lists the "only" 18 words from the poem "used or glossed anywhere else in the published corpus", he includes "nare (1. 20): glossed in The Lost Road (LR-374) as meaning 'flame', derived from the root NAR- ('flame, fire')." Paul's carelessness of marking long vowels in Elvish is practically his trademark, and need not concern us here. But the casual identification of nara, with narf. is quite puzzling. That 4 other words attested in precisely the form they have in Narq. have been left out of Paul's list, qanta, hiswa, lie, lanta, might be attributed to oversight in his process of cross-correlation, but the inclusion of nare in the list, where nare is indeed citable from the corpus, suggests that perhaps his text's nara is a misreading, and that an independent and correct reading of nare has led Paul to his comparison with the nare in Etymologies.

Nierme mintya mire qanta.

For nierme meaning something like "in tears" compare the following QL root (according to LT1. s.v. NieHqui and Nienna) and Etym. base: NYEHE 'weep' nie 'tear' nyenye 'weeping' Nieliqi, Nielikki, Nyelikki NEI- 'tear' Q nire, nie 'tear' Q nieninqe 'snowdrop' Q nite (*neiti-) 'moist, dewy' The word mintya is difficult. But the bases in Etymologies that might connect are easily cited: MI- 'inside' Q mi 'in, within' Q mir and minna 'to the inside, into' Q mitya adj. 'interior'

***

MINI- 'stand alone, stick out' Q mine 'one' Q minya 'first' Q minda 'prominent, conspicuous' Q mindo 'isolated tower'

To sum up what we have found so far, the following approximates the interpretation our imagined Frodo might devise if he were to combine the ideas that seem to lie behind the preceding groups of words or the specific meanings of those that seem to be included as such in the poem. A few words have been left untranslated even though we suggested a meaning, where the alternatives could not be succinctly conveyed.

We mentioned the base NAR- with respect to the title of the poem, and we can now cite the Qenya words in the entry since they include the second to the last word of the poem:

17

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 Autumn (Fire-fading) N-elm-no la-falling Ne-gust of wind leaves small Like throngs ever umeai Oikta having wings golden, Ah with many swallows Leaf-fall Arrow-inge-like whizzing nalla full Of golds and many reds As ematte sinqi Elvenhome. Then pipes whistling thin, Breath-rya gleaming, fine grey rain Then flowing through the trees: Dance people of the Gnomes Harp-hum of voices sings amaldar Sinqitalar greenish blue. N-elm-no (of) your(s) falling leaf Brotherly cherries in a lofty hand: Draw-thread throngs umeai Oikta having wings red-breasted Ah of many lands (kinds) Leaf-fall In tears mintya flame full.

the first 4 lines of the poem are an introduction into the mood of that first lamentful Ai. In grammatical terms, lines 1 to 4 are appositive 6 to the noun Lasselanta 'Leaf-fall' in line 5. They explain and elaborate the central sense of the noun Lasselanta, a simple Leaf-fall being expanded to From the elm falling in a small gust of wind, leaves like golden throngs on the wing, Ah manyswallowed Leaffall ... Let us start with a closer look at these lines.

4

8 N -alalmino lalantila Ne-sume lasser pinea Ve sangar voro umeai O.kta ramavoite malinai, 12

The verbal form lalantila, ambiguously rendered above as "falling", appears to be a substantive (i.e. a word or group of words that functions in a sentence as a noun) rather than an indicative verb "falls" or "is falling". There are two reasons for this assumption. First of all, the subject of lalantila is plural: lasser 'leaves'. And elsewhere in the corpus when a plural noun is the subject of a indicative verb there is a plural marker (-r or -n) at the end of the verb form:

16

20 I-Eldar tulier. 'the Eldar have come' (LT!, ch. 5, p. 114) ondolin ninqaneron. 'the rocks lay white' (OM 1, line 11) But when the verb is substantive there is no plural marker: ondoli losse karkane 'the white rocks snarling' (OM2, 1. 15) famar sisilala 'the wings shining' (OM3. 1. 12) In principal this is because lalantila 'falling', while verbal

The poem Narqelion is a lament for Autumn. The two exclamations, Ai Iintuilind(ov)a Lasselanta and Ai Iind6rea Lasselanta, evoke the poet's emotions about the visible sign of the season, the Fall. They are the focal points of the poem, their close similarity in sound suggesting a sort of refrain, which is indicated in the text by the indentation of lines 1 to 4 and 9 to 17. Structurally then

6 Apposition is a construction where a noun or noun phrase is placed beside another as an explanatory equivalent, both having the same syntactic relation to the other elements in the sentence. Thus in The famous fantasy writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, was a philologist the subjects ].R.R. Tolkien and the famous fantasy writer are in apposition.

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON insofar as taking a subject, functions in the sentence like a noun, and it is the action as a whole that is a single "thing". Compare English the leaves falling lasts several weeks. Secondly lalantila ends with -la, which is one of several suffixes used to form the verbal substantive. The second version of Oilima Markirya displays this variety quite well, including falastaw:. 'surging', tin£. 'shining', ulmula 'mumbling', tuma'moving', qalunu:, 'heaving', etc. There are several more examples similar in form and function to ulmula in OM3. such as falastala 'surging', hlapula 'blowing', etc. There is another matter to explain about the verb stem lalanti-, namely the initial syllable la-. This reduplication of the initial consonant and vowel of the basic stem lant- 'to fall' is reminiscent of two derived verb stems in the notes to OM3:

No.9

same entry we find "*Utubnu name of Melko's vaults in the North: Q Utumno". The suffixes *-nu > -no in these two forms appear to be noun endings meaning 'thing that is underneath' and probably derive from the base NU-, given in Etymologies with Q. adverb nun 'down below, underneath' and preposition no 'under'. Utumno thus means something like "the Deep Underworld." And alalmino could refer to the ground or shady area underneath an elm-tree; hence n-alalmino = "towards the ground beneath the elms." This interpretation, while possible, may strike some as ad hoc; and since both na and no, like the majority of Quenya morphemes, have a wide variety of functions and meanings, it might be wise to explore other possibilities. The suffix -no is also used to form agent nouns. The clearest example from the Lost Tales is the name Angaino 'the oppressor' (ch. 4, p. 101), the great chain used to bind Melko. That the stem in this name is angaiis clear from related angaitya 'torment' in QL. Other examples occur in Etymologies, such as halatir(no) 'kingfisher' = 'fish-watcher' (s. v. SKAL- 'small fish') or samno 'carpenter, wright, builder' (s.v. STAB-). This last has related words sambe 'room, chamber' and samna 'wooden post', showing that the suffix can mean 'one who makes' or 'one who produces', as a carpenter is one who makes wooden posts. When we take into account the possible influence of the QL root NO 'become, be born' on this ending -no (and thus view a carpenter as one whose labor begets wooden posts and makes rooms come into being), we see that alalmino could have a derived meaning like 'elm-begetter' or 'elm-bearing', which could refer to a seed, or a forest, or a region where elm-trees grow. So perhaps we should also compare tauno 'forest' from root TAVA (LTl, s.v. Tavari). Of course what we require in context is a word with the passive sense of 'elm-begotten' or 'elm-born' that indicates the leaves come from the elm, rather than a word with the active sense of 'elm-begetter' or 'elm-bearer'. And this is where the contracted prefix n(a)- comes into play. In the note to line 23 of OM3 we are told of another grammatical function of na- that may pertain:

sisila- frequentative of sil- 'shine (white), fifiru- from fir- 'die, fade': 'slowly fade away' A frequentative verb is used to express the frequent or continuous repetition of an action. Thus the image of ramar sisilala 'the wings shining' suggests the flicker or shimmer of a flapping wing, a metaphor for the billowing sails of the fana kirya 'white ship', the shimmering consisting of a continuous series of briefer shinings. The idea of a repetitive sequence of briefer instances of the basic verbal notion brings with it the implication that the verbal process may take place over an extended period of time. This is the application in kale firirula 'the light fading' (I. 13), the series of partial fadings resulting in a slow fading away. Therefore the sense of lalanti- as frequentative of lant- 'fall' alludes to the slow fall of all the leaves as a series offallings of each leaf one by one, in their apparently random but cumulative Fall. The context alone makes it clear that n-alamino means something like 'from the elm' or 'around the elm'. But it is less clear how the structure of the word-form conveys this meaning. The prefix n- looks like a contraction of nabefore the a of alalmino. In Etymologies a preposition na 'to, towards' is given as a derivative of a base NA-. In partial translation this yields "towards the elm-no". The key to a possible interpretation of -no may be found under the Etymologies base TUB-, with the sense of 'deep' in its Qenya derivatives tumbo 'deep valley, under or among hills' and tumna 'lowlying, deep. low'. In that

Man kenuva lumbor na-hosta 'Who shall see the clouds gather' Conlinued on page 22

19

'~IYA

EARENDIL ELENION ANCALIMA!"

PARMA ELDALAMBERON hosta- 'gather, collect, assemble'. When the bare stem of the verb is used (as after 'see' or 'hear') as infinitive na- is prefixed if the noun is the object not the sUbject."

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suffix -nen pI. -inen, seen for example in alkantameren urio kalmainm'made it shine in the lights of the sun' (Earendel, lines 6-7). Both the Gnomish preposition and the Qenya suffix seem to convey a sense similar to the prefix in ne-sume, if it means 'in a breeze', referring to the immediate cause of the falling of leaves.

What this means is that with a sense of 'gather' as a transitive notion (someone gathering things), attaching nato the infinitive hosta- '(to) gather' indicates that the lumbor 'clouds' are the things gathered, rather than the someone doing the gathering. In other words, even though the image is the same, the literal implication of the Elvish syntax is different from that of the English, where clouds is the subject while the verb has the sense of 'gather' as an intransitive notion (things being gathered or gathering themselves). We suppose that one would say kenuvan eldar hosta loti 'I shall see elves gather flowers' vs. kenuvan loti na-hosta 'I shall see flowers to gather, flowers to be gathered'. How can we apply this to n-alalmino? Knowing how this prefix affects an infinitive, how would it affect an agent noun? Suppose we look at a paraUellike angaino. Insofar as this means 'oppressor' or 'tormenter', in a sentence such as man kenuva angaino 'who shall see the tormenter' it could be replaced with an equivalent infinitive phrase such as man kenuva ta angaitya 'who shall see it torment'. With the addition of the prefix na- the result would be man kenuva ta n-angaitya 'who shall see it being tormented'. Since the infinitive phrase ta angaitya corresponds to the agent noun angaino, it follows that ta n-angaitya corresponds to a form n-angaino, a recipient noun meaning 'one being tormented', or 'tormentee' if you will'? So if alalmino is whatever produces the elm, then n-alalmino would be that which is procuced by the elm: the lasser which are 'elm-begotten, elm-born'.

The adjective-forming suffix -ea, which occurs in pinea in line 2 and Iindorea in line 20, also seems to underlie the word umeai in lines 3 and 17. The word umea 'evil' is given as one of two "apparently later pencilled additions" to the Etymologies entry UGU-, UMU- ("negative stems"). But if we render the third line of the poem as a simile for the falling leaves "like throngs ever evil", it would seem to be a non sequitur. So let us take a closer look at how the suffix -ea tends to function, and perhaps we will find another way to interpret umeai. The following all occur in QL per LTl, s.v. Aldaron, Kaukareldar, Lindelos, Luvier, Nume, Lorien: Adjective aldea 'tree-shadowed' kaurea 'timid' Iindelea 'melodious' lurea 'dark, overcast' numea 'in the West' olorea'dreamy'

Noun aida 'tree' kaure 'fear' lin de Ie 'song, music' lure 'dark weather' nume 'West' olor, olore 'dream'

This is only a fraction of all the examples of this wordformation process, ubiquitous in Tolkien's conception. In the majority of cases the adjective in -ea corresponds to a noun ending in -e, and we can express the relationship in almost mathematical terms, e.g. that lurea = lure + -a. But the combination -ea has a life of its own in Qenya, and could be applied directly to other kinds of stem by analogy, as in aldea < aida. Or compare ulea 'pouring, flooding, flowing' from the root of verb .uJ.ya-, .ulle 'pour' without any intervening form *ule (Etym. s.v. ULU-). The meaning of the ending is fairly generic, 'full of or 'possessing (a quality like)', as the examples show. How does umea 'evil' fit into this pattern? Aside from the negative prefix u- said to mean "not, un-, in- (usually with bad sense)", the entry for UGU-, UMU- gives the Qenya verb uin, urn in 'I do not, am not', past tense ume. So it seems that either "mea derives from a verbal-noun sense of the past-tense stem ume 'not to have done, to have

There is no prefix or preposition comparable to that in ne-sume elsewhere in the Qenya corpus. But perhaps we can compare the Gnomish preposition in i-walt ne Vanion 'the luck of the Valar' (s.v. Valar). Here gwalt = 'good luck - any providential occurrence or thought', and the genitive construction does not refer to luck possessed by the Valar, but rather to the luck of a person that results from their actions, luck by means of the Valar. This ne may be related etymologically to the Qenya instrumental 7 Compare noun pairs in English like employer (agent) vs. employee (recipient); payer vs. payee.

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON: No.9 done nothing, not to have been, to have been nothing'; or else it is derived directly from um(u)- 'do not, be not'. Simply put then, an 6mea person is one that docs or has done what should not be done, an 6mea thing has qualities things should not have. An 6mea action (or "naughty" deed) is one that comes to naught or is good for nothing. If the sense of 'evil' emerges as a special application of negativity, then it is surely possible that 6mea can also have a (morally) neutral meaning of 'not being, not doing'. And just as 61ea 'pouring' describes the ongoing process of a liquid in motion, so 6mea may describe an ongoing, progressive change: 'coming to naught, fading into nothing, passing away'. This makes sense in the context of the poem: Ve sangar voro 6meai *'like throngs [of leaves] that ever come to nothing (or pass away)'. We can recall lines 113 to 118 of KTl, where the trees "leave behind forever havens throng'd" with "crews" of falling leaves that are "sadly glimmering borne I Across the plumbless ocean of oblivion." One is reminded of the opening lines of Galadriel's Lament: "Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees! The long years have passed like swift draughts of the sweet mead ... " In the section on "Imagery" we have noted that Narqelion seems to compare the falling of leaves of autumn to birds: the yellow-hammer, the swallow, the robin redbreast. That many species of birds, the swallow in particular, are renowned for being migratory adds weight to interpreting 6mea as 'passing away'. Thus the line Ve sangar voro 6meai seems to bear a secondary implication: 'like flocks [of birds] ever passing away', an allusion to their migrating south in the autumn. There is an interesting clue to the derivation of the word olkta (lines 4 and 18), in that the i is marked with double dots above, or diceresis, which indicates that it begins a separate syllable from the initial o. This is unusual, for oi is normally a diphthong in Qenya, pronounced as one syllabic. This is comparable to the difference in English between the two-syllable oi of coincidence and the diphthong oi of coinage. And like the former where co- continues to be pronounced separately because it is recognized as a distinct element prefixed to the rest of the word incidence, so also in the case of o"ikta the explanation could be that 0- is a separable prefix. There is indeed a prefix like this derived from the base W 0'together' in Etym. The prefix is used to define individuals

as part of a group, as in u.torno 'sworn brother, associate' (s.v. TOR- 'brother'); something that is a group in nature, as .ll.tornasse 'brotherhood' and olassie 'collection of leaves, foliage' (in The Letters of l.R.R. Tolkien, letter #211); or the instrument or agency of a grouping, as 2vesta 'contract, compact, treaty' (s.v. WED- 'bind'). There is in the Quenya corpus thus far published no root or stem beginning ik- or ic- (or even ih-), but we know from the word ektele 'fountain' derived from QL root KELE 'flow, trickle, ooze' (s.v. Kelusindi) that kt can come from earlier t k. 8 Thus ikta may represent etymological *it-ka. Now there is a stem ita- mentioned in the Silmarillion Appendix under ril 'brilliance', where it says: "Idril's name in Quenya form was Itarille (or Itarilde), from a stem ita- 'sparkle'." Though various explanations are given for the alternative form of this elfmaidens name, Idhril = Q Irilde, the only earlier information on the form Idril is from the Gnomish Lexicon (LT2, s.v. Cam an-Idrisaith), with the words: idra 'dear, precious' idra 'to value, prize' idri (fd) 'a treasure, a jewel' idrit 'sweetheart' idrisaith 'excessive love of gold and gems and beautiful and costly things'

The suffix -ka is used to form adjectives, as in helka 'icecold' (fn. 1) and iska 'pale' (LTl, s.v. Isil). It also occurs as a noun ending in velka 'flame' (s.v. Melko), karka 'fang, tooth, tusk' (Ln, s.v. Karkaras), and other words. In the noun circa 'sickle' (as in Valacirca 'the Sickle of the Valar', Eldarin name for the Big Dipper), -ka is used to form an instrumental noun from the verb kir- 'cut, cleave': circa = 'cutter, cleaver' (cf. the QL root KIRI 'cut, split', LT2, s.v. Cris IIbranteloth). Thus a noun ikta from earlier *it-ka could mean 'sparkler, thing that sparkles, a spark', and o"ikta would therefore mean 'a collection of sparks, a coruscation'. When we consider Gnomish idri, fd 'a treasure, a jewel' it is tempting to assume an even more specific definition of ikta as 'a jewel' (compare the use of sparkler as an English 8 See Etymologies entry KEL- for a subsequent confirmation of this tk > kt shift, with additional change of kt > ht, not seen in the earlier materials, so that ektele becames ehtele.

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON colloquialism for diamond or gem), and thus oikta would mean 'a collection of gems, a treasury of precious jewels'. Whether one considers oikta ramavoite to be 'a winged coruscation' or 'a treasury of jewels borne on wings', the image conveyed is clear: the brightly colored, wing-shaped leaves falling from the elm-trees seem to glitter as they tumble through the air. Oikta ramavoite is appositive to both lasser and san gar in the preceding lines. Sometimes Quenya uses a noun in apposition to make a comparison, as in lines 13-14 of OM]:

No.9

being cited in this form with the contrast of singular maW:. 'handy, skilled' and plural maW. in Etym. s.v. MA3-, as well as the plural noun Wanwavoisi beside the adjective wanwavoite 'windy' (LTl, s.v. Sulimo). What this seems to mean is that (1) pinea 'small' modifies sume 'gust, breeze' rather than lasser 'leaves'; (2) ramavoite 'having wings' modifies oikta 'collection of jewels, treasury'; and (3) malinai 'yellow' modifies san gar 'throngs' rather than oikta or ramavoite. The word order might suggest that the leaves were perceived in some way as small. And in the case of having wings, even if the possessor is single the wings are plural, and might conceivably go with the plural yellow. But keeping these possible implications in mind, the literal meaning of these lines can be rendered in prosaic English as follows:

Kaivo i sapsanta Rana numetar, 'As a corpse into the grave the moon went down in the West;'

N-alalmino lalantila Ne-sume lasser pinea Ve sangar voro umeai Oikta ramavoite malinai, Ai Iintuilind( ov)a Lasselanta

Here kaivo i sapsanta, literally 'a corpse into the grave', is appositive to Rana 'the moon', but it is glossed 'as a corpse into the grave' even though ve 'like, as' is not present in the Elvish. Thus Ve sangar voro umeai / Oikta ramavoite can be translated, 'Like throngs ever passing away as a treasury of jewels borne on wings,.9

Begotten of the elm falling one by one Leaves in a small gust of wind Like golden throngs ever coming to naught As a treasury of jewels borne on its wings, Ah! ha:ving many swallows Fall ...

One final point to be made about the structure of these first lines of the poem, regards the use of singular vs. plural in the adjectives, pinea 'small' (sg.), umeai 'becoming nothing' (pl.), ramavoite 'having wings' (sg.), and malinai 'yellow' (pl.) We deduce that umeai is a plural adjective from the context, where it seems to be modifying the noun sangar 'throngs', while inferring that adjectives in a lexicon like lurea, numea would normally be cited in the singular. That pinea is singular and malinai plural seems to follow. For ramavoite we can complement its

This brings us to piliningeve which we have connected with pilin 'arrow'. There being no obvious connection to any base or root suggested by the sequence -ngev- we are inclined to interpret this word as pilininge-ve. Compare the formation of andave, which is clearly derived from adjective anda 'long' (Etym. s.y. ANAD-), and occurs in The Lord of the Rings in the sentence And a v e laituvalmet! which Tolkien translates 'long we will praise them' in Letter #230. In other words and ave means 'long' in an adverbial sense, like for a long time. So we suppose that piliningeve is an adverb modifying suyer which we saw could be a form of the verb suya- 'breathe'. For breathe referring to noise in the air, cf. Twelfe Night, act 1, scene 3:

9 An alternative way of interpreting the syntax here that may make sense in Elvish idiom, if perhaps not being intuitive to an English speaker, depends on the fact that umeai is ultimately a form of the verb 'to be', and we can paraphrase it as a verbal adjective 'not being, being nothing, becoming nothing, ceasing to be' = 'passing away'. But this suggests that while on the one hand sangar umeai can mean 'throngs ceasing to be' = 'throngs ceasing to exist' (or 'throngs ceasing to be present'), so on the other hand sangar umeai oi'kta could mean 'throngs ceasing to be a corruscation' or 'throngs ceasing to be a treasure', i.e. the throngs sparkling together now are not splarkling forever.

0, it came ore my ear, like the sweet sound That breathes vpon a banke of Violets

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON Thus piliningeve suyer = 'making a sound in the manner that pilininge does', which boils our problem down to discovering what the -inge means in this word. There is a pair of words that may throw light. The word qinga 'bow' (with qingi- 'twang, of strings, harp') is mentioned to explain the second element of QL i1uqinga 'rainbow' (s.v. I1weran). This is the same as the word qinga 'bow (for shooting)', listed in Etym. under base KWIG- with reconstruction of the primitive form *kwinga, and Tolkien's cross-reference to base KU3'bow'. And from this base is derived kuw whence Q ku 'bow'. So in qinga we seem to have the equivalent of k(u)w-inga = ku + -inga. Of less certain derivation is firinga, the Qenya equivalent of Gnomish Iring 'carcanet, necklace' (LT2 s.v. Nauglalring), which we might want to associate with QL FIRI : findl 'lock of hair', firin 'ray of the sun', possibly by a sense development via 'aureole' or 'halo'. What qinga and firinga have in common is that they are objects which are held in a curved pattern to serve their purpose. So pilininge may refer to atrow(s) inflight. the trajectory being a curve in which the arrow is "held" for the execution of its purpose. For a word having this overall meaning we might compare Old English earhlaru 'shooting of an arrow, flight of arrows', withfaru = 'going, journey, passage'. And we should perhaps note by the way that English arrow < arewe < arwe. earh is ultimately from the same primitive source *arkwo- as Latin arquus, arcus the source of English arc and arch. The verb suyer appears to be the past tense plural of suya- 'breathe'. For the inflectional ending -(i)er compare lanta- 'to fall' with eari lantier 'seas fell' (in the draft version of the Eressean fragment, in the commentary on ch. 2 of "The Lost Road", LR, p. 56) and i oromandin eller 'the wood-spirits came' (Nien., 1. 5). A problem arises when we note that of the nearby words that might be its subject, Lasselanta, nalla or qanta, none seems to be plural in form. The answer may lie in "Firiel's Song" (LR, p. 72) where, for example, we have in line 5: Eldain en karier IsH 'for Elves they made the Moon'. Here the only syntactic subject is the -r at the end of the verb, the semantic subject being the Valar mentioned 3 lines (and three sentences) previously in the phrase mannar Valion 'into the hands of the Lords'. In short the ending -r can sometimes function similarly to the pronoun suffix -Ito 'they'. Indeed, in an emendation to "Firiel's Song" this form

No.9

karier was changed to karielto. Therefore pilingeve suyer might mean 'they were breathing in the manner of a flight of arrows', they referring to the multiplicity of leaves and birds implicit in the ostensibly singular noun phrase lintuilindova Lasselanta 'the falling of leaves with many swallows', a plurality made explicit in the nouns lasser 'leaves' and sangar 'throngs' which are appositive to Lasselanta, and ultimately equated with each other "leaves like birds" by the simile in ve in line 3. That the many swallows are thus included in the "breathing" of Autumn helps to explain how it is like the flight of arrows. But if, as this suggests, it is the sound of arrows that Autumn breaths, there ought to be an object of the verb to express this. And that is where the enigmatic word nalla comes in. There is a Sindarin verb nallon 'I cry' in Sam's invocation to Elbereth, and this may be related to Q nallama 'echo' in Etymologies (s.v. LAM-), or iialme 'clamour' (s.v. NGAL-). SO nalla might very well be a noun meaning 'a cry', and the phrase piliningeve suyer nalla = 'breathed a cry like the flight of arrows'. The 8th line of the poem presents a double enigma in the words ematte sinqi about which we could only say certainly that a simile is posed using the conjunction ve 'like, as', contracted to v' before a word beginning in e, and that the image relates to Eldamar = 'Elvenhome' in the West. The word sinqi is also a sort of textual crux. Humphrey Carpenter reads it as singi while Paul Nolan Hyde offers the reading sinq', which he says is a revision in the manuscript from original sinqe. (See footnote 2 and Mythlore 56, p. 49.) We understand Carpenter's misreading of Tolkien's q's as g's, especially when not followed by the u one might normally expect if unused to pre-LotR Elvish spelling. But a change by Tolkien of V'ematte sinqe Eldamar to V'ematte sinq' Eldamar makes no sense metrically, since elision here would destroy the iambic scansion. On the other hand a change of sinqe to sinqi improves the pocm by eliminating the awkward sounding hiatus between the two e's. So we are inclined to accept Carpenter's interpretation of the manuscript revision of the final vowel here from e to i. The word which most closely resembles sinqi in sound is sinca found in Treebeard's invective morimaitesincahonda applied to the Orcs. This is preceded by a string of English compound adjectives, including "blackhanded" which we know is the translation of morimaite.

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON Since hOn is given under the base KHO-N- 'heart (physical)', we suppose that another of these adjectives, "flinthearted", supplies the meaning of sincahonda. Treebeard was probably comparing the hardness of Orkish hearts to that of flint, but the mineral is also known for its production of sparks. We are reminded that the base THINwhence come sinde 'grey', sinye 'evening', sinta- 'fade', is said to have "affected" the base TIN- 'sparkle, emit slender (silver, pale) beams', whence tine 'it glints', tinwe 'sparkle, star', etc. The intermingling of the two bases is seen most strikingly in the various permutations of the name of Tinuviel's father: Tinto Ellu, Linwe Tinto, Tinwe Linto, Singoldo, Sindingul, Tindingol, Sindo, Sindacollo, Singollo. When we recall ikta < * it-ka 'sparkler', it seems likely that sinca 'flint' is literally 'mineral that produces sparks'. And given the apparent use of ikta to mean 'jewel', we might assume that sinqi, if it is related to sinca, is a plural noun meaning 'gems, jewels' by a parallel metaphor. It may not be entirely irrelevant to the comparison in the poem that prehistoric flint arrowheads are known as elfarrows and elf-shot in popular lore. The Lost Tales describe how the Noldor in Eldamar actually created numerous crystalline minerals, including amber, chrysoprase, topaz, garnets, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, amethysts, moonstones, beryls, onyx, agates, many lesser stones, opals and diamonds. And they were generous to share these, so that "pebbles of diamonds and of crystals which the Gnomes cast in prodigality about the margin of the seas, and the glassy fragments splintered in their labouring glittered about the seaward face of K6r; but the pools amid the dark rocks were filled with jewels" (LTl, ch. 5, p. 129). It may be this Gnomish prodigality that is referred to by ematte, for surely the colors of the autumn leaves as they fall away are equally extravagant. If we look for an early Qenya word or name beginning with em- we must make do with Emnon, which occurs only once in the phrase "the Prophesies of Emnon" (LTl, ch. 7, p. 170 re p. 167), where it is an emendation of original Morniento and was itself later replaced by Amnos. An explication of the name follows it in the text: "for thus was the place where they were spoken called at that time, which now is Hanstovanen or the beaching place of Mornie." This last is the ship that ferries the souls of certain Men from their judgement in the Hall of Fui in Mandos to their Purgatory in Arvalin (ch. 3, pp. 77,92), so

No.9

that Emnon is a place of exit from Mandos. For the formation of the name Em - non we can compare Moritarnon 'the Door of Night' (ch. 9, p. 215) with tara'cross, go athwart' from root TARA (LT2, s. v . Taruithorn). And parallel to this proposed Qenya stem em- we might also compare Gnomish ev- in the transitory name Evromord for "the Door-ward" of Mar Vanwa Tyalieva (LTl, ch. 4, n. 3).1 0 We know that mord originally meant 'shepherd' before becoming 'man, warrior' via its poetic use (s.v. Telimektar), and this seems close enough to "ward" (and the Qenya cognate mal:al: 'shepherd' could be connected to the first element of Varavilindo 'Birdward', s.v. TinJang), that it seems reasonable to equate evro- with "door", or at least with the comings and goings with which Evromord would be concerned as is a shepherd for his sheep. That Emnon seems to relate to goings only, may help to explain the appropriateness of a verb stem ema- *'leave', *'allow to go' or *'send away', to the context of our poem, so that ematte sinqi might mean 'gems left (behind)'.l1 And here it seems we find the point of mentioning the tuilindo or 'spring-singer' in relation to Lasse la n ta 'Leaf-fall' in line 5. The swallow as harbinger of summer, who sang in the spring, was thereby responsible (at least metaphorically) for the budding of the leaves. And now the swallow flies away, leaving behind the gorgeous but fallen, seemingly wasted leaves. Just so the Noldoli fled from Eldamar, leaving behind the glittering remnant of their "great labour" in fashioning the first gems, wherein "the lore of Aule and the magic of the Valar were their tools", abandoned and rarely appreciated until Earendel came there to be "Dusted with diamond dust climbing the deserted streets 10 For the relation of Q m to Gnomish v in similar contexts, cf. G Udum, Uduvna = Q Utumna (LT1) and the related name Uduvrin for Melko. 11 The interpretation of -tte is a conundrum. The only close phonetic parallel is in ette 'outside', where the first t is part of the base ET - 'forth, out'. If we hypothesize an extended stem, perhaps emata- 'be left, remain' derived from em a- 'leave, exit', then emat-te might be a derived noun or adjective. Cf. QL kolte 'living being' < KOYO 'have life', LT1, s.v. Koivie-neni, or aute 'prosperity, wealth; rich' < A WA, LT2, s.v. Ausir. Alternatively emat-te might be 'left behind by them', with ending connected to object pronoun te 'them' in LotR. Naturally this is all highly conjectural.

26

PARMA ELDALAMBERON of K6r." (LT2, ch. 5, pp. 261) Placing together the various pieces of our interpretation of these 4 lines we get, again giving idiomatic English by sense rather than trying to imitate all the grammar of the Elvish literally:

No.9

"introduce an antithetic statement, an illustration, extract, etc." Let us take a closer look: San rotser simpetalla pinqe, Sulimarya sildai, hiswa tim pe San sirilla ter i-aldar: Lilta lie noldorinwa 'Omalingwe Iir' amaldar Sinqitalar laiqaninwa.

Ai lintuilind(ov)a Lasselanta Piliningeve suyer nalla qanta Kuluvai ya k~rnevalinar V'ematte sinqi Eldamar. Ah with many spring-singers Leaf-fall Like a flight of arrows breathed a cry as full Of golds and many reddish hues As the gems left behind in Elvenhome.

The logical comparison is basically between rotser simpetalla 'pipes playing' and Iilta lie 'dancing people', a natural set. But perhaps more fully there is on the one hand (as thesis) the analogy between the sound of pipes and the sight of timpe sirilla ter i-aldar 'mist flowing through the trees', and on the other hand (as antithesis) an analogy between the sight of dancing and the sound of omalingwe Iir' amaldar 'voices singing in the trees'. There is an interweaving of compared and contrasted characteristics, something shared by each pair amoung the four images: sound of pipes, sight of mist: sight of dancing, sound of singing. The two phrases san rotser simpetalla pinqe and hiswa timpe san sirilla ter i-aldar are closely parallel in structure. Each has the adverb san 'then', a subject, rotser 'pipes' and hiswa timpe 'grey mist', and a word acting as verb, in both cases ending in -lla. That this ending is the same whether used with a singular or plural subject suggests that it is related to the ending -Ia discussed above with respect to lalantila lasser 'falling leaves'. We saw that the closest relative of simpetalla is simpetar 'piper', and that sirilla most closely resembles siril 'rivulet'. When we also note the relation of !irilla 'lay, song' to Iirit 'poem', we might suggest that -lla results from -Ia added to a form ending in a consonant, that in effect we have *simpetar-Ia, *siril-Ia, and *lirit-Ia in these derived forms. The first two of these (at least) appear to be verbal nouns, derived from nouns, more or less in the manner that Latin nominare 'to name, to nominate' is derived from the noun nomen 'a name', tibieinare 'to play upon a pipe' from tibieen 'piper, flute-player', or fluetuare 'to undulate, to fluctuate' from fluetus 'a streaming, flowing, wave' (itself derived from verbfluere 'to flow'). Between these two verbal-noun constructions rotser simpetalla and timpe sirilla, an intervening phrase sulimarya sildai is marked off by commas. We have

Tuilindo The next three lines of the poem are separated from the following three by a colon. This symbol indicates (as the OED puts it) "a discontinuity of grammatical construction greater than that marked by the semicolon, but less than that marked by the period." Some examples of its use are to

27

PARMA ELDALAMBERON seen that there is an adjective silda 'gleaming' of which sildai would be the plural, like malin ai, kuluvai, etc. We have seen the nouns solime 'wind' and solimo 'breather' related to sole 'breath' or 'spirit'. When we compare adjective rolima 'secretive' to noun role 'secrecy, a secret' (LT2, s.v. Foaloke) or sirima 'liquid, flowing' to sire 'stream', we are secure in proposing an adjective solima *'breathing' or *'breathable'. We also saw how the subsequent timpe 'fine rain' seemed to evoke Timpinen the semi-divine flute-player, and that the stars "blinked to his tune / Shimmering blue like sparks in a haze," so that the image here is 'gleaming breaths' as though the air played through the pipes causes a sparkling of the stars as reflected or refracted in the shimmering haze flowing through the trees. We are reminded then of the phrase in the Song to Elbereth that Frado hears in the Shire: "Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath!" And we can note that the suffix -rya translated 'her' is found in Galadriel's Lament, Elenhlri ortane ma-rya-t 'the Star-queen lifted up her two hands', and in OM3, line 4, ringa soma-rya-sse 'in her cold bosom', referring to the hold of the ship. The Lament also has tintilar i eleni oma-ryo Iirinen 'twinkle the stars in the song of her voice' (where -ryo = -rya + -0 with contraction), remarkably close in meaning to the imagery we are suggesting here. But there is no obvious female for solimarya to mean 'her breathing'. We might have "their breathing" meaning the pipes, or "his breathing" meaning the piper. (Granted a woman can be a piper but the archetypal piper in the stories, whether Tinfang or Daeron, happens to be male.) We might rescue the situation by supposing a personification of Autumn itself, noting that "October" is female in Kortirion among the Trees, lines 75 and 78, while "Winter" is male in line 80. In our poem then -rya may refer back to Lasselanta which we saw was the subject of the verb soyer 'breathed' .12

No.9

Lastly we note that while solima-rya is singular in form, the adjective sildai that follows it is plural in form. This singular/plural juxtaposition parallels that of ramavoite malinai 'having wings golden' in line 4. Technically the plural adjective malinai 'yellow' modifies the plural noun sangar 'throngs' in the preceding line. Yet the placement of malinai following the singular form ramavoite 'having wings' suggests that the plural ramar 'wings' implicit in ramavoite are also yellow. Likewise with solimarya sildai 'her breathing gleaming', the plural adjective sildai 'gleaming' may technically modify the plural noun rotser 'pipes' in the prior line. Yet the placement of sildai in adjectival position beside the singular form soIimarya 'her breathing' suggests that the plural soli 'breaths' implicit in solimarya are gleaming as well. The bare stem of a verb like IiIta- 'dance' can be used indicatively with a singular subject, as in yar i vilya ilD.1a miqilis 'to whom the air gives kisses' (Nieninque, line 4), from verb stem anta- 'give' found in Etym. s.v. ANA- 'to, towards'. So IiIta lie noldorinwa would be literally 'dances the people of the Gnomes', with the verb placed before the subject to emphasize its connection with the ideas that have gone before. Compare Vardo tellumar / nu luini, yassen tintiIar i eleni 'beneath the blue vaults of Varda wherein the stars tremble' (Nam. n. 5-6), with tintilar 'tremble' placed before its subject eleni 'stars'. Another possible way to construe lilta lie is adjective + noun, if liIta is also an adjective 'dancing', related to the verb. Compare the way the adjective lumna 'lying heavy, burdensome, oppressive, ominous' relates to the verb lumna- 'to lie heavy' (s.v. DUB-), or talta 'sloping, tilted, leaning' relates to talta- 'to slope, slip, fall down' (s.v. TALAT-), or verya 'bold' to verya- 'to dare' (s.v. B E R - ). In this case the entire phrase liIta lie

12 We should note, however, that the evidence we have for -rya referring specifically to a feminine antecedent is entirely circumstantial. There is no ending attested with meaning 'his' or 'their(s)' anywhere in the corpus published so far. True there are the pronouns su, so 'he' and sl, se 'she' in Etym. under S- ("demonstrative stem"), and a Qenya subject ending -ro 'he' is found in 'The Lost Road". But this tells us nothing about the possessives. In Latin one distinguishes hie 'he' from hac 'she', but in the genitive they are the same huius 'his, her, its'. The reflexive adjective

suus, sua, suum does have gender, but this indicates the gender of the noun possessed not the possessor. So maryat would be rendered in Latin as manus suas which means 'her hands', 'his hands', or even 'their hands'. This is always feminine plural because the noun manus 'hand' is feminine, so manus suas would be translated in English according to context. And it might also be the case with Qenya, for all we know, that -rya is translated 'his' or her' depending on the context.

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 noldorinwa *'dancing people of the Gnomes' would be the subject of the sentence and we would look for the main (indicative) verb in the next two lines. Under Etymologies root WEG- in discussing the masculine-name eJ;lding -we < -weg, Tolkien mentions a distinct ending "-we (-we abstract suffix)." The form in parenthesis with final long vowel is the primitive form of this suffix. Two examples with the Primitive Qendian form provided by Tolkien (s.v. SKAR-, uNG-) are:

form of the verb which, as we saw above, is Iirin 'I chant, I sing'. If lie 'people' is the subject of lire and 6maIingwe 'hummed tune' is the object, then how does amaldar fit in? We suggested that this contains prefix am- 'up' and aida 'tree'. The final r may be the key. In OM2 the second stanza begins: Man tiruva kirya ninqe valkane wilwarindon lunelinqe :uar. tinwelindon talalinen, yea falastane, • • • Who shall heed a white ship, vague as a butterfly, in the flowing sea on wings like stars, the sea surging, .. .'

harwe 'wound' < *skarwe ungwe 'gloom' < *ufigwe An example of the ending -we in QL which seems to be an abstract noun occurs in LTl (s.v. Dor Faidwen): USU 'escape' : uswe 'issue, escape'

Here yea 'the sea' is inflected with an -r suffix, and rendered 'in the sea'. (The word lune-Iinqe is literally 'blue-water'.) We can compare the similar inflection OfraDa 'moon' in the next stanza of OM2:

Hence our suggestion above that 6malingwe = 6 m a 'voice' + ling(a)- 'to hum like a harp-string' + -we = 'hum of voices', and perhaps also meaning 'hummed tune' or 'choral song'. If the next word lir' is a form of the verb 'to chant, sing', then 6malingwe could very well be the direct object with lie 'people' as the subject. We know that final a in a word can be contracted before initial a or 0 as in tenn' Ambar-metta 'unto the ending of the world', and lumenn' omentielvo 'on the hour of our meeting', both from The Lord of the Rings. But we have also given reasons (in Parma #8) to suppose that in "Firiel's Song" lines 1, 11 and 14, in the phrasing kare eldain 'made for elves', ire ilqa 'when all', and ire Anarinya 'when my Sun', the final e in the first word of each pair is marked for elision, or metrical contraction. So the facts in later examples of Elvish are theorecically consistent with lir' amaldar containing a contraction of either lira or lire. The latter has a formation (short root-vowel and final e) identical to the following verbs from Etym.:

ondoli losse karkane silda-ranar, minga-ranar, lanta-raDar, • 'the white rocks snarling in the moon gleaming, in the moon waning, in the moon falling, .. .' Here moon must stand poetically for moonlight if the rocks are white in it, so that spatially the rocks are within the range of the moonlight and this is the situation whereby the rocks are losse 'white'. Similarly the ship/butterfly is spatially in the sea whereby it is valkane 'vague'. or difficult to perceive, due to the random motion of the water on which it floats. Thus amaldar may mean 'in the treetop' or 'high in the tree'. Certainly we can imagine the sound hummed by dancing Gnomes rising into the top of a tree. The situation or causal connection probably lies in the implication that the tree itself is "humming" or "singing" by virtue of the rustling of its leaves or needles. The next word in the poem is sinqitalar, whose stem sinqita- seems to relate to the stem sinq- in more or less

take 'he fastens' (s.v. TAK- 'fix, make fast') teke 'writes' (s.v. TEK- 'make a mark') tine 'it glints' (s.v. TIN- 'sparkle') tope 'covers' (s.v. TOP- 'cover, roof) The translations imply that lire would have present tense and be singular: 'chants, sings'. The short root vowel is also consistent with the first person singular present tense

29

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 the same way as ninqita- 'to whiten' relates to ninqe 'white'. (See Etym. s.v. NIK- W -.) So if sinq- means 'mineral, crystal, jewel', then sinqita- would mean 'to cause to have crystals, to bejewel, to decorate'. For a (non substantive) verbal form ending in -la and inflected as a plural, we might compare tintilar in Galadriel's Lament, which is rendered variously as 'tremble', 'twinkle', or 'sparkle, glitter'. This seems to be derived from tinta- 'to kindle, make to spark' (s.v. TIN-), but the parallel is not close enough to conclude much about the meaning of sinqitalar, except that it is something like 'they bejewel'. The final word in the sentence is laiqaninwa 'greenish blue', apparently a singular adjective referring to the aida of the prior line. So lir' amaldar sinqitalar laiqaninwa seems to mean 'sings in the top of the tree they bejewel green and blue.' The they which is expressed merely by the plural ending on the verb sinqitala-r ought to be a plural noun in the immediate context, presumably either the Noldor 'Gnomes' implicit in the phrase lie noldorinwa 'people of the Gnomes' or the rotser 'pipes' of line 9. The music of singers or pipes can be said to bejewel the treetop because the hiswa timpe or "fine mist" would settle as dew upon the evergreen foliage which in vibrating to the sound would sparkle like jewels. Thus sinqitalar echoes and completes the idea of sulimarya sildai 'whose breathing (is) gleamings', as well as hearkening back to the sinqi left behind in Eldamar. We summarize our interpretation of these six lines:

colon: N-alalmino Iya lanta lasse Torwa pior rna tarasse: TukaHa sapg-ar.iLm.W .w.JUa. ramayojte karneambarai The phrase lanta lasse narrows the focus onto the fall of a single leaf. We have seen that possessive pronouns like -nya 'my', -Iya 'your', -rya 'her, his?', are normally added to the word for the thing possessed: hiidiJU:ar 'my heirs', tielI.a.nna 'upon your path', maUJl,t 'her two hands', ringa sumaoasse 'in her cold bosom'. The separation and placement of the pronoun as a word in front of the noun probably emphasizes it, so that in Elvish idiom we have a contrast like: lanta lasselya 'your fallen leaf Iya lanta lasse 'yours is the fallen leaf The person designated is presumably Autumn, the Narqelion of the title, and the Lasselanta invoked in line 5 and about to be reinvoked in line 19. We suggested above that pior in the next line could be the plural of pio 'plum, cherry' and that torwa could mean 'brotherly' or 'like a brother', implying as a metaphor a fraternal association of leaf with a cluster of cherries. But no means of expressing this connection in the Elvish was obviously present. Now we have seen that a final r like that in pior can have another meaning, that which we saw in vear 'in the sea' and ranar 'in the moon(light)', and have proposed to explain Hr' amaldar as 'sings in the treetop'. Each of these nouns has a spacial extent or scope which encompasses the action being described. As such we can connect this with the preposition mir 'to the inside, into' (Etym. s.v. MI- 'inside', equated with minna). This suggests that the ending -r can refer more generally to direction towards the inside of anything having spatial extent. Even more genarally we have tar 'thither' (s.v. T A -), referring to direction towards without regard to the kind of object. We see from IaI. i vilya anta miqilis 'to whom the air gives kisses' (Nieninque, line 4), that when the object noun or pronoun is more like a point than a space, the ending -r has a meaning more like 'to' than 'in'. And this fits well with the context of pior, the image of lasse torwa pior = 'leaf brotherly to plum'.

San rotser simpetalla pinqe, Sulimarya sildai, hiswa timpe San sirilla ter i-aldar: Lilta lie noldorinwa 'Omalingwe Hr' amaldar Sinqitalar laiqaninwa. Then pipes whistling thin, Whose breathing is glints, fme grey rain Then flowing through the trees: The dancing people of the Gnomes Sings a hum of voices in the treetop Which they bejewel green and blue. The next four lines echo the first four lines of the poem, with five words repeated exactly, as highlighted below. As in the prior six lines we have an antithesis divided by a

30

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 Also note that pio as a single fruit remaining on the tree with its brother leaves all fallen, reminds us of the last fruit of Laurelin from which the Sun was fashioned by the Valar. This is referred to several times by the phrase "fruit of noon" (see the Index to LTl). In the LT2 entry for SiIpion we also have a name Valpio 'the holy cherry of Valinor' from QL. No connection or identification is cited, but this singular pio of the Vafar as the "fruit of noon" would be a natural complement to the adjectival -pion of "the Cherrymoon" referring to the blosom of the Silver Tree. The phrase rna tarasse ends with the locative suffix -sse for the meaning of which we can compare ninqeruvisse 'upon a white horse' (Earendel, line 1), isilrne i1kalasse 'in the moon [light] gleaming' (OM3, 1. 17). The latter example shows that the suffix can be added to the modifier rather than the noun, generally when it follows, so that the marker -sse comes at the end of the phrase, but this is an option not an obligatory rule. It seems to be applied in our case, the phrase rna tara 'lofty hand' made into the locative rna tarasse 'in a lofty hand'. Here "hand" is a metaphor for the branch and twigs of the tree which bears the pio, but also insofar as this alludes to the fruit of noon, the "lofty hand" is emblematic of the divine agency that orders such things. So that indirectly this ma answers to the rnaryat in Galadriel's Lament when Varda, as orderer of the heavens, "has uplifted her hands like clouds, and all paths are drowned in shadow". If tuka-Iia is a noun 'draw-thread' = 'thread which draws', then it might be appositive to the ma 'hand' or the pio 'cherry', as though these were line and bait to catch the birds. But we require some syntactic connection to sangar 'throngs', with its plural modifier karneambarai 'redbreasted' in the next line, i.e. throngs of robins. We saw that lia 'twine' derives from root LI + ya 'entwine', so perhaps this verbal sense led to a verbal tukalia modelled on the noun, and meaning 'draw into a web' or 'wrap in tendrils', hence to 'entangle, ensnare' or 'lure, attract' by whatever means. For verb stems identical in form to nouns, compare Iipte- 'to drip' and Iipte 'a little drop' (LTl, s. v. lirnpe), or salpa 'take a sup of and salpa 'bowl' (s.v. Tanyasalpe). In support of our proposal of an adjective karne-arnbara 'red-breasted', we should note sara 'fiery', mentioned in the introduction to the Appendix of LR1. clearly derived from sa 'fire', cited under Sari. The robin redbreast eats mostly small insects and seeds, but also berries in winter. It

is probably significant that while the swallows are summer visitors to Britain, some of the robins reside there for the entire year while others only visit during the winter. So there may be a deliberate contrast in the poem, set in Autumn, between the red-throated birds leaving (the swallows) and the red-breasted birds staying (the robins). From this perspective sangar umeai 'throngs passing away' in line 17 refers not to birds flying south for the winter but to the flocks of robins passing away 0 r wandering from one tree to another in search of more berries. So we can render these four lines thus: N-alalrnino Iya lanta lasse Torwa pior rna tarasse: Tukalia sangar urneai O.kta rarnavoite karnearnbarai Begotten of the elm yours is the fallen leaf That's brother to the cherry held on high: Luring red-breasted wandering throngs As a treasury of jewels borne on its wings

Karneamba

31

Karnemirie

PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 Caves' of Thingol. This meneg is nowhere explained, but for the idea of 'thousand' from 'large number' compare the picturesque Gnomish moth meaning both 'sheep' and '1000' (LTl, s.v. Uin), "probably originally ·flock· ...

This brings us to the final couplet of the poem: Ai Iind6rea Lasselanta Nierme mintya nare qanta. The interjection Ai is used here more like a sad 'alas!' than a wondering 'ah!' if nierme has to do with tears. The ending -me is used to form many nouns, most of them abstract. For example LTl has murme 'slumber' < muru- 'to slumber' (s.v. Murmenalda), qalme 'death' < QALA 'die' (s.v. Qalme-Tari), or kelu, kelume 'stream' < KELE, KELU 'flow, trickle, ooze' (s.v. Kelusindi). There is also a suffix -me referring to location or position, as in Aragorn's sinome maruvan 'in this place will I abide'. We saw above that there is a word nie ·tear·. The plural of this probably occurs in Nieriltasinwa 'the battle of unnumbered tears' (Ln. ch. 2, p. 84), if this contains *iltasinwa ·unnumbered·. In any case nierme seems to be either a noun 'shedding of tears, weeping, lamentation', appositive to Lasselanta in the prior line, or else an adjective 'in tears, tearful, weeping', modifying Lasselanta. The tears are nare qanta "flame full", apparently from reflecting the Autumn sunlight, and so would be a metaphor for the falling leaves, golden and red, as though the trees themselves were weeping. With regard to mintya, we have suggested above that this modifies nare, and perhaps by a blending of the ideas of mitya 'interior', minya 'first' and minda 'prominent, conspicuous', that it might mean 'intense', 'essential', or ·ultimate·. The last possibility could also show the influence of mente 'point, end' and metya- 'put an end to' (Etym. s.v. MET- 'end'). One final alternative is that mintya describes the tears and means 'a prominent or large number'. The reasons for suggesting this are all indirect. We can compare the metaphor of Nieriltasinwa on the one hand. Also the number words mir 'one' and minqe 'eleven' (QL root MI s.v. Minethlosin LTl) are ultimately related to minya and minda. In Etymologies minqe attests to a stem MINIK-W- and beside this a related form *minik-ya would produce our form mintya, as we can tell from intya- 'guess, suppose' s.v. IN(I)K-. In Doriathrin *minik-ya would yield meneg 'thousand' (for the vowel shift of i> e cf. med 'wet' < *mizda s.v. MIZD-), which occurs in the name Menegroth for 'the Thousand

*** To sum up we give a verse translation of the poem. The primary purpose of this rendering is to illustrate the rhythm and rhyme scheme of the original, which we attempt to imitate exactly. A secondary purpose is to present the sequence of imagery roughly as it is encountered in the word-order of the original. To accomplish these two goals, the English diction must inevitably differ somewhat from the Qenya. But if our poetic license allows (or indeed encourages) the reader to go back to the original with increased appreciation, then we trust it will have served its purpose.

Fire-fading In elm-wood born forever fall The leaves upon a breeze so small Like throngs that one can never hold A treasure borne on wings made all of gold, Ah many swallow-sung Leaves-a-Falling Breathed like arrows a cry in full recalling Golden-reds and crimson hues that are Like crystals strewn in Eldamar.

4

8

Then pipes sustain a slender whistle, Brightly glint the breathings, mist-grey drizzle Then meanders through the tree-brakes: 12 Dancing folk with Gnomish flitters Hum a tune which in the tree wakes Emerald and sapphire glitters. Beneath the elm thy leaf descended Kin to plum in hand suspended: 16 Entangling flocks that far have fled A treasure on the wing though breasted all in red Alas various Leaves-a-Turning In tears unmeasured full of burning. 20

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9

I Lantallo Ondolindo by Jorge Quinonez

This was originally meant for a page of an illuminated High-elvish manuscript: "The Fall of Gondolin". For better or for worse, I hope people like my first attempt at composing a High-elvish piece, in High-elvish. All my previous High-elvish works were but translations from the English into the Quenya; more specifically reconstructions of how the Quenya would have been. This 64 word work is based on the prose description of the fight from The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, pp. 183-184. I have opted not to include references and citations to the Quenya. I originally had in mind an alliterative, free verse poem. But, I think after the second stanza it became something else.

I Tyel Ehteliono ar Cosmoco

The End of Ecthelion and Gothmog

Aran i-Ehtelo, vanya ar verya, sindesire 0 harna sandaranco. Andamacil masse ar nasse karmasse.

The Lord of the Fountain, beautiful and bold, grey-faced with wounded shield arm. Long sword in hand and spike on helm.

Yel Kena Morcosionl Aran Valaraucaron, uruva ar saura. Amba Feanaro, Amba Findacano.

Lo! Behold Morgoth's Son! The Lord of Balrogs, fiery and foul. Feanor's doom, Fingon's doom.

I kotumo uruvalatta rihta linda aran.

The enemy's fiery whip strikes the fair lord. Ecthelion's spike goes through Gothmog, the balrog echoes in pain and falls.

Ehteliono nasse linna tere Cosmoco, i valarauco ltima naicenen ar lanta. Nail Ar-Ehtelion 0 Cosmoco lanta, mi Ehtele Taro, mir i nura nen. Sinome tyel i quenta Ehteliono ar Cosmoco.

Alas! Noble Ecthelion falls with Gothmog, into the King's Fountain, into the deep water. Here ends the tale of Ecthelion and Gothmog.

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 see through a glass darkly, and that we know in part, but that those imbued with the Spirit of Tolkien can see with the eyes of faith that his languages are without seam, woven from the top throughout. Alas, some of us are sceptics. I personally am loath to use Occam's razor on fellow Quendili; however, this seems to be one instance when it is required. It is patent from the published corpus that Tolkien changed his mind quite radically over such central items of the Legendarium as the race, descent, nature, size, name(s) and role of the mysterious stranger the Hobbits meet in Bree; the size of Elves; the identity and nature of Tol Eressea; etc. 'Wherefore not therefore allow him to change his mind about such relatively minor matters as the conjugation of SIL·? To do otherwise would appear either to require the multiplication of essential causes for beyond need, or to demand a more-than-Pascalian act of faith. Also, to insist on the identity of Goldogrin/Noldorin/ Sindarin denies the individuality of all these languages, especially the marvellous Goldogrin. Meanwhile, I am not averse to anyone composing in whatever variety or melange of Elvish languages inspires them - though I may ask for chapter and verse ...

David Doughan Parma Eldalamberon has always taken its time coming; equally, it has always been well worth waiting for. Issue #8 is certainly no exception. Congratulations to all major contributors, most especially for the artwork. As for Pat Wynne's "Excruciatingly Thorough Analysis", I have not yet had the time to do more than sit and marvel ("And still they watched, and still the wonder grew / That one small brain could carryall he knew"); but I shall, Christopher, I shall. Meanwhile, I have a few thoughts on Pat's "Unifist (Unitarian? Universalist? Uniate?) Field Theory". I am a firm believer in pulling together as many strands of Elvish as possible so that those whose gifts are greater than mine can write verse or prose in these beautif~l languages, even, dare I say, subcreating them as they go. This is the process of evolving a "koine", or (more or less) standardised form which non-native speakers can use among themselves to understand and be understood, yet which allows room for both dialect and idiolect. I rejoice to see this happening abundantly in practice, Sir, in your own writing and in that of others, such as Tom Loback, Craig Marnock & a1. What puzzles me is the need felt by some to justify this by working back to a theory of Tolkien's Immaculate Linguistic Conception. Both Tom and Pat (and you yourself, Sir, at times) seem to aver that Tolkien sat down in those Army huts in 1915 or so with a full and complete vision of the Elven-tongues which he gradually revealed in their Platonic unchanging form over the next 58 years, and that any apparent contradictions or inconsistencies are due purely to the fact that now we

[No one is seriously suggesting we should not allow Tolkien to change his mind about the conjugation of sil·, only not to assume he changed his mind just because he replaced sile by sila in a particular speech by a particular character. Patrick chose this example, I believe, because the question is far from obvious and therefore the point that it ought to be investigated seemed noncontroversial. Nor do we need to go all the way back to 1915 to find a parallel example to show that sile and sila could be related, at least theoretically: Under Etymologies base TOP· we are given both t6pa· 'to roof and tope 'covers', obviously intended to be consistent with each other at least. [Nor do I think that anyone is seriously claiming to be more "imbued with the Spirit of Tolkien" than others. Your idea of an Elvish koine is certainly a useful metaphor for the so many students of Tolkien who do want to be able to use Elvish for communication and art. And surely in practice each student applies a blend of "Unifist" and "Conceptionist" ideas arrived at by that personalleap-of-faith we each call: "what seems reasonable to me." I certainly

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 I would submit that there is in fact no difficulty, that , to take one of Pat's examples, there is no conflict between -n and -0 as marking the singular genitive inflexion. That such a conflict is envisioned is the result of what might be termed the creationist fallacy. Knowing, as we do, that all the forms of all the languages appearing in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien were created by him continuously over a period of time, we can assert the unity of this creation. Everything that he created therefore has equal worth, both artistic and for the purposes of the Eldarin languages. With a little (and not wholly accurate) borrowing from Saussure, this might be termed the langue of Elvish linguistics. And yet questions about -n vs. -0 are on a completely different tack to the basic study of this langue. That such an opposition is held to exist implies that one is somehow "more correct" than the other, which is totally irrelevant to the concept I have just outlined. Such a question could only be relevant to the use, synthetically, of the Elvish languages, which might be similarly termed the parole of Elvish linguistics. And this is where the creationist fallacy enters the matter.

hope that such a milieu can continue to expand and the population of "non-native" Elvish users grow apace. That different schools of thought about how to speak or write Elvish should emerge, seems perfectly natural. Trying to coin neutral terms for differences of approach can never "justify", but surely they can reduce misunderstandings over principles that are incapable of definite "proofs". This may clear the air for discovery and study of the new patterns that are emerging from the recent revelations of what lies behind Tolkien's creative process. - Editor]

Craig Marnock [Excerpted]

I was very impressed by the whole issue of Parma 8, and liked all the art, particularly Adam Christensen's meticulous work and the cartoon on the back cover. I naturally have a response to make to Pat Wynne's "Unified Theory of Elvish", and not just because I was the unnamed person in the article (as the page reference you so thoughtfully provided will show). Pat is quite right in identifying the central problem as being the difficulty in, so to speak, telling the difference between the changes that Tolkien made, and so trying to decide if something is Conceptionist or Unifist.

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9 This point of view arises from knowing that Tolkien's works are his creation, and treating them as such. This is the given of what 1 call the langue. And yet the given of the parole is a different one, as use of the languages must imply an at least nominal projection of viewpoint into the mythos, of which the languages were such an integral part. So parole demands not a view of the works as a creation, but in sub-creational terms. 1 If this is a bit metaphysical, an example might be to say that when "the Valar rejoiced" at the coming of the Elves on p. 58 of The Silmarillion, the y probably didn't shout out I-Eldar tulier. 2 Of course the above is only a re-stating, in theoretical terms, of Pat's original point: How do you tell different subcreational periods apart? This is notoriously difficult as far as the grammar goes, but I think that the phonological differences (if charted) would give us a clearer idea of incompatibilities. And, finally, for any "Unifists" reading this, 1 would be interested to hear their views on "The Last Ark", and the two equivalent versions of it which grammatically differ a great deal (the lexical differences are perhaps less significant). If the language, over its fifty~seven years, is totally consistent, then why do we have such major differences; and what motives might Tolkien then have in rewriting the poem if his conception of the language had not changed in forty years?

related to e, apparently meaning 'indeed', which he notes on the next page. Continuing in this vein, the first element of inye might be the base of the article i, which also> the noun-forming morpheme *-i. The emphatic forms would therefore have either one or the other of these. And there would be parallel emphatic forms for -lme and -nte following from -lye/ elye which would be different from me and teo Unfortunately we do not have any instances of indepent 'thee' to back this up, but perhaps the S. borrowing Ie, rather than *ail or *il (from elye) indicates that this might be the case. The section on 1st plural was an excellent discussion; I think I'd agree that accepting the Plotz position provides the easiest solution. I will offer two pieces of speculation, though: one (the cowardly one), that "dual" in the footnote is a slip for "plural"; and two, that -1- forms are duals and -n- forms are general plurals (d. -mma in RoS, possibly from *-n+ *-m-a). Both of these would explain the wording. Coming back to earth a bit, -Iva is unlikely to contain an old dual; compare Tolkien's statement in Appendix E to LotR that, "For lv, not for lw, many speakers especially Elves, used lb." This statement would make little sense if there was a shift -lw- > -lv-. I connect S im with Q -lme (the exclusive form, which is to say 'I and mine, but not you') and think that -lve shows the "normal" 1st plural, equivalent to ammen, and deriving from a form with initial b- (an+ *ben > ammen).

I thought that Bill Welden's "A Survey of Eldarin Pronouns" was the best article this issue and I will certainly be referring back to it rather a lot in future. I have only a few follow-on comments to the piece. Bill is quite right that the first element in elye has been passed over too much. It could be a nounforming morpheme, but is surely more likely to be

Pat Wynne's "Excruciating Analysis" was very impressive, not only in sheer bulk but for the sustained insight throughout the piece. Some of this went mostly over my head (usually the comparative grammar bits) but I'd like to follow up on some of what he raises. With regard to toi, I would doubt that the final -i is a plural marker; Quenya inflexions do tend to have lots of suffixes, but this is an independent word. Perhaps the -i might be the common derivational element seen in *mori. A minor point is the derivation of a-nanta. Surely if the initial a- was the word for 'and' then 'and yet' would be the first definition rather than the second. That 'but yet' is the first probably indicates that this is intensive.

1 It seems that Patrick was considering -n vs. -0 from a subcreationallevel. In Craig's terms: Would any character within her or his own parole use -n for some genitives while using -0 for others, following a grammatical rule? - Editor. 2 The "sub-creational" quesion would take a form like: How would Galadriel say 'the Elves have come'? And the answer is either I Eldar tuller, or else I Eldar utulier, each of which is remarkably close to the much older sentence (short of an absolute identity, which no one expects). - Editor.

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9

Paula Marmor [Editor of Parma 1 through 5] Dear Chris: Thanks to you (and Adam) for Parma S. It's really great to see Parma geting its third (?) wind. Do you suppose we can go on indefinitely cycling in new linguaphiles every five years or so? I am truly surprised to see Parma looking (and reading!) this well after damn near twenty years. I think PS is the best issue any of us ever did. Hug yerself for me, okay? [I'm yours, as ever, to obey!] Some comments on the set of pronoun discussions (my favorite topic, still!) In relation to your reply to Tom Loback's article (page 4): In the this-those-these-here-now relationship, one should perhaps also note the use of English yonder as what is sometimes called a demonstrative adjective: Yon old dog ... Yonder castle in the glen ... In contemporary usage these would generally be replaced by that, which lacks the connotation of distance from the speaker implied by yon, yonder. A more accurate (although only questionable modem) translation would be the rustic that there: That there dawg ... That there and its complement this here (connotationally, at least> would seem to carry exactly the flavor of the relationship you're trying to pin down in connecting hi 'here, now' to hin 'this, these'.

On Arden Smith's "Problematic" numbers: I find it interesting that Arden assumes that the -en of *chaenen/ *caenen, dolothen, edwen is "evidently an ordinal suffix" but never suggests that the -en of kainen might be the same suffix, or might disprove the theory, or might simply confuse the issue. The issue is certainly confused!! I suspect we simply don't have enough data to address numbers above twelve as yet. Althouth--:just to throw out an unsupported hunch - I think we should be looking for a six-based version of something like the Shepherd's Score, based on old Welsh. In the Shepherd's Score, six is "one and five," eleven is "one and ten," sixteen is "one and fifteen" ("one and three fives"). So mabe 23 is "five and three sixes" (that explains the lemin but not the kainen - or not yet).

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No.9

by Patrick Wynne [sung to"the tune of William Blake's "The New Jerusalem"]

And did those feet of ancient rhyme Tell of the fall of leaves once green? And was each whole iamb agog With faded foliage it had seen? And could analysis divine The morphemes whence their meaning spills? And was liN arqelion" published here To give us dark Syntactic Thrills? Bring me my Glossary of vold!* Bring my Concordance to inspire! Bring me my WEUt Oh page, unfold! With molten poesy I'm afire! I will not close my lexicons Nor shall my pen slip from my hand Till I have glossed "Narqelion" In words we all can understand. * Very Old Lexical Depositions, as you may recall from Vinyar Tengwar [newsletter of the E.L.F., enquire J. Quinonez, 3326 Polk Ave., San Diego, CA 92104].

t A Working English Lexicon, compiled by Paul Nolan Hyde, PhD.

Aiya Aiwendili ! The term aiwe (Sind. aew) for 'small bird' has been long known. And certain species we could put a name to, such as the sorno 'eagle' (Sind. thoron) or the nightingale, with two names 16melinde/dulin 'dusksinger' or tind6merel/tinuviel 'daughter of twilight', because of the special role these birds play in the stories. And we could describe certain features of birds like their ramar 'wings' or a quesse 'feather'. Now not only do we have a more general term than aiwe, namely wilin, but many more species names and also vocabulary for describing many specific features. We offer the friendly illustration on the previous page as inspiration to any aiwendili (or wilindili) who would like to share in researching or devising" aiwessi" eldarinwa.

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PARMA ELDALAMBERON : No. 9

Twenty Years After . .. A Look at Parma's Past

Parma Eumlomberon edited by Paula Marmor Number 1 - Autumn 1971 Number 2 -1972 Number 3 - June 1973 Number 4 -March 1974 Number 5 -1977 edited by Christopher Gilson Number 6 - 1983 Number 7 - 1988 Number 8 - 1989

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