Quenya

Quenya is the ancient tongue of Eldamar beyond the Sea, and it holds a distinction that no later language can take from it: it was the first that was ever set down in writing. Everything that follows in the recorded history of Elvish speech — the alphabets, the annals, the etymological tables that scholars of Gondor still consulted six thousand years later — begins at that point.

In Valinor the language was not sealed off. Some of its words were taken from Valarin, the speech of the Powers — aina, holy, from ayanuz, and the name Aman itself. This is the only substrate influence from another tongue that the sources record, and it runs in both directions: the Valar for their part learned Quenya and used it among themselves, so that in the traditions they appear throughout as speaking it.

One change from within the language mattered more than any borrowing. At some point in Valinor the sound þ, the th of English think, became s in the mouths of most speakers. It was not an accident of drift but a deliberate shift, decided by a majority — and Fëanor opposed it. The disagreement over a single consonant became a shibboleth in the quarrel of the Noldorin princes, and its timing can be fixed: it must have happened before the rebellion and the exile, because Sindarin, which had parted from Quenya long before, uses þ freely. The written language kept the distinction after the spoken one had lost it, which is why Quenya Isil stands beside Sindarin Ithil for the Moon.

When the Noldor came back to Middle-earth they brought Quenya with them, and for a while it was simply what they spoke. The change came quickly and from two directions at once. At the Mereth Aderthad, the Feast of Reuniting, more Sindarin was already being heard than Quenya: the Noldor learned the speech of Beleriand readily, while the Sindar found the tongue of Valinor hard going.

The second direction was a decree. When Thingol learned what had been done at Alqualondë, he forbade the tongue of the Noldor throughout his realm. From that day Quenya survived in Beleriand only as the speech of the Noldorin lords among themselves — and that is the moment at which a living language becomes a learned one. What the Third Age would call an Elven-latin was not made by scholars; it was made by a king who did not want to hear a certain sound in his kingdom.

The effect is legible in the names. Turgon gave his hidden city the Quenya name Ondolindë, the rock of the singing water; what it is called ever after is Gondolin, the same name shifted into Sindarin, stone for stone — Quenya ondo answering Sindarin gond. Túrin, choosing a name for himself late in his life, chose a Quenya one, Turambar, and the tale marks the choice as High-elven. In Gondolin itself Quenya held on longest: in the house of Turgon it was still the language of daily life, and Eärendil grew up with it as a child's tongue, the only such case recorded in Middle-earth. Even there the city as a whole had moved on, and most of its people spoke Sindarin like everyone else.

It was still the language men shouted in when there was no time to think. At the Nirnaeth Arnoediad Fingon called out in Quenya at the sight of Turgon's host, and Húrin, alone at the last, is said to have cried the same Quenya word seventy times over the bodies of his enemies. The text gives the translation on the spot. A tongue that had been pushed out of the market and the hall was still the one that came first under the worst pressure a life can carry.

The Tengwar can be used to write many languages, but the vocabulary for describing them is Quenya throughout. The four series are témar, the six grades tyeller, and every letter's full name is a real Quenya word that contains the sound it stands for. Four of them name the quarters of the world, and two of those are transparent: hyarmen marks the quarter lying to the left and formen the one lying to the right, which tells you that the speaker was facing west.

The writing system was fitted to the language rather than the other way round. Quenya had a palatal series and a labialised one in addition to the plain velars, so in the Quenya mode the fourth series became the kw-row. The standard Quenya spelling departed from the general system in several places: the second grade stood for nd, mb, ng and ngw, and two further signs for rd and ld. Because most Quenya words end in a vowel, the vowel mark was set above the preceding consonant — the opposite of Sindarin practice, where it goes above the following one. The clusters ts, ps and ks were common enough to earn an abbreviation of their own.

In Númenor Quenya was not spoken. It was known — by scholars, and by families of high descent who were taught it young — but it was nobody's daily speech. What it was instead was the language of record: laws, the Roll of Kings, the annals, everything meant to last. All official names of places, regions and landmarks in the island were Quenya forms, with local Sindarin or Adûnaic names beside them. The island itself carried a Quenya name, Númenórë, alongside Adûnaic Anadûnê and the older Elenna.

The kings carried it in their names. Elros took the High-elven name Tar-Minyatur, and from him the custom ran unbroken for centuries, because Quenya was held to be the noblest language in the world. Under Tar-Ancalimon “the royal titles were still given in Quenya, out of ancient custom rather than love.” With the twentieth king the custom broke: Ar-Adûnakhôr took his name in Adûnaic, persecuted the Faithful and punished the open use of the Elven-tongues; his successor Ar-Gimilzôr forbade them outright. Even so, an old awe held. In the Book of the Kings the name of Ar-Adûnakhôr was nevertheless entered in its Quenya form, Herunúmen. The scribes wrote what the king had abolished.

By the Third Age Quenya was no one's cradle-speech. Appendix F calls it an Elven-latin, and the comparison is exact in the way such comparisons rarely are: a language that had kept its place in ritual, in scholarship and in song, still taught and still written, and no longer acquired at anybody's knee. The High Elves who returned from exile at the end of the First Age carried that use with them. Its speakers had to learn it, and learning it marked them.

In the realms in exile the names stayed Quenya where the speech did not: Elendil, Anárion, Isildur. In Gondor the royal usage ran out with the Stewards — after Mardil his successors bore no High-elven names. Learning kept the language alive elsewhere in the state. The order of the Istari is Heren Istarion, and wizard translates istar; Gandalf's name Incánus was formed in Gondor while Quenya was still current among the learned there, and Saruman had a Quenya name, Curumo, recorded nowhere else. Even the army had two registers: what the Sindarin drill called thangail was sandastan in the official Quenya.

The longest continuous piece of Quenya prose in the published sources is an oath sworn on a hill. When Cirion granted Calenardhon to Eorl in the year 2510, he spoke the binding words in Quenya, and the tale says so expressly. To that oath Tolkien supplied a running word-by-word analysis — cases, a future tense, an infinitive used as a gerund, the optative particle nai — the only sustained piece of Quenya grammar-in-action anywhere in the corpus. A dead language, used once, at the moment two peoples decided to trust each other.

Quenya appears in the story of the Ring rarely and always deliberately. Frodo greets Gildor in it on the road out of the Shire — the only time a hobbit speaks the language — and Gildor's reply treats the knowledge as a mark of learning; Bilbo had been the teacher. Galadriel's farewell in Lórien is in Quenya, and the text notes that Frodo does not understand it at first, calling it the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the Sea. On Cerin Amroth Aragorn speaks it to an Arwen whom Frodo cannot see. In Shelob's lair Frodo cries out words he does not know the meaning of, and the book leaves them untranslated.

Twice it does public work. In the Houses of Healing Aragorn names himself Elessar, Envinyatar and Telcontar, and says outright that these are names in the high tongue of old; at his crowning he repeats the Quenya words Elendil spoke on coming out of the Sea, with the translation standing beside them. And Treebeard, who learned many languages and loved the old High-elven best of all of them, uses it both to Pippin and in farewell to Celeborn and Galadriel. Of all the hasty tongues, he thought, it was the noblest.

The language also reached the calendar and the loan-words. A yén, usually rendered year, is in fact a hundred and forty-four solar years; the Quenya month-names were kept in Westron much as Latin month-names are kept today, a comparison the sources make themselves. And Westron tarkil, a man of Númenórean descent, is a Quenya word — which the Orcs shortened, in their fashion, to tark.

The Elves did not call their oldest tongue by a grand title. Quenya means simply the Elvish speech, and it belongs to the root quen- or quet-, to say, to speak — the same root that gives Quendi, the Speakers, which is what the Elves called themselves before they had met any other people who could talk. A language named for the plain fact of speech, spoken by a people named for the same fact: the naming is older than any of the histories that use it.

The form itself has a history. The older shape was Quendya, and it survived unchanged among the Vanyar; only in the speech of the Noldor did the d fall away and leave Quenya. In its own terms the word was never an adjective but always a noun, and it meant the Quendian language — that is, Elvish, without qualification. The narrower sense familiar today, one Elvish tongue among several, is a consequence of history rather than of the name.

Not everyone accepted the claim implied by that name. The Teleri did not regard their own speech as a dialect of Quenya at all, and they had a name of their own for it: Goldorin, the tongue of the Noldor. What the Noldor called simply Elvish, their kin across the water called the speech of one particular house.

Even at its height Quenya was never the common property of the Elvish race. It belonged to the kindreds who finished the westward journey and settled in Aman — the Vanyar, in whose mouths the older form persisted, and the Noldor, whose usage became the standard the histories record. The Teleri who reached those shores last held to a speech of their own, near kin to Quenya but separate in sound and in words, and they did not concede that theirs was a branch of it. Behind them stood everyone who never crossed at all: the Avari, who refused the summons westward, and the Grey-elves who remained in Beleriand under Elwë. Those tongues had been apart for an age of the world by the time the kindreds met again, so that when Quenya came back over the Sea it arrived as a foreign language even among Elves, and had to be learned like any other.

Among Men the reach was narrow and precisely bounded. Of all the races of Men only the Dúnedain knew an Elvish tongue as a living speech, and that tongue was Sindarin; Quenya stood a step further off again, the possession of their men of wisdom rather than of a people. The Rohirrim, allied to Gondor for five hundred years and neighbours to a court that used Quenya for its records, kept their own language and their own names and took essentially nothing from it. The Hobbits had no share in it either beyond a few words carried into Westron whose origin nobody in the Shire could have explained. Knowledge of it therefore followed archives and teaching households rather than borders: it was a matter of schooling and descent, not of nation, and a man's having it said more about who had taught him than about where he was born.

Restricted, however, is not the same as hidden, and Quenya was at no point a secret. The contrast lies close at hand in the same account: the Dwarves kept their own tongue as an inner possession, taught it to no one of alien race willingly, and went among their neighbours under names drawn from other languages altogether — a language deliberately shut. Quenya was the reverse in every particular. It was written down, taught, used for public formulae and spoken aloud in front of assemblies who followed not a word of it, and nothing in the record suggests that anyone who wished to learn it was ever turned away for being the wrong kind of person. What limited it was supply. Where a household or an order kept up the instruction, the language held; where the instruction lapsed, it was gone within a generation and left only names standing after it.

The language has no datable beginning, because it is older than the annals that would have dated it. The Quendi made speech at Cuiviénen before any of the Powers found them, and the tongue they then shared broke apart during the westward march, kindred by kindred, as the journey separated them. What became Quenya is the branch that completed the crossing: the speech of the Vanyar and the Noldor as it settled in Aman, worked on there by people who had leisure for such work and occasions to use it. Rúmil of Tirion is named in the histories as the first to find signs adequate for the recording of speech and song, and the tradition of writing begins with him; the letters afterwards carried east across the Sea were not his but Fëanor's, made later and made better, and it was those that every later scribe in Middle-earth inherited.

When the Edain came into Beleriand in the First Age they learned Sindarin, which was simply the speech of the country they had entered. Quenya reached them by another road, as lore, and the lore brought its vocabulary with it. The names under which the Powers are known throughout the traditions are the Quenya names used in Aman, and the Grey-elves had forms of their own standing beside them; what Men received in this matter was therefore the usage of the Blessed Realm rather than that of the neighbours they actually lived among. The arrangement outlasted the age that produced it. With the ruin of Beleriand at the end of the First Age the last households in which Quenya had been anybody's ordinary speech were gone, and nothing in the ages that followed restored that condition — from then on the language passed from one generation to the next by teaching only, and by no other route at all.

The Second Age supplies one episode in which the prestige of the language was turned against the people who prized it. When Sauron came in fair form to the Elven-smiths of Eregion he called himself Annatar, the Lord of Gifts — a Quenya name, chosen for hearers who would take it as a courtesy paid to their own learning. His commoner name is Quenya as well: the traditions give Sauron as the form of Valinor, against which the Sindar said Gorthaur. The pattern is not accidental. Where the adversaries of the Eldar are named at all in the histories they are usually named in the tongue of Aman, because the naming that the histories preserve came down from the Eldar of Aman, and an enemy who wished to be listened to had every reason to present himself inside that vocabulary rather than outside it.

In Gondor through the Third Age the most visible public work the language did was the naming of kings. Titles of victory were taken in Quenya and set beside a king's given name: Tarannon became Falastur, lord of the coasts, when the realm first put out ships in force; Hyarmendacil and Rómendacil are the south-victor and the east-victor; Telumehtar took the name Umbardacil after Umbar was retaken in 1810. The practice was formal and it was public, announcing what a reign had accomplished in a language that most of those who heard it could not follow. It could also register a division rather than a triumph. Eldacar, whose mother came of the Northmen, was Vinitharya among his mother's people and Eldacar among his father's, and the dispute over his descent broke out into the Kin-strife. In 2050 Eärnur rode to Minas Morgul and did not return, and with the ending of the line went the occasion for such names.

The last stage in the record is archival rather than spoken. During his years at Rivendell Bilbo compiled three volumes of translations out of the Elvish sources available to him there, and these travelled with the Red Book into the Shire and afterwards to the Great Smials of the Tooks. At the King's request a copy of the Thain's Book was carried to Gondor early in the Fourth Age, and the copy made there was corrected and annotated against materials the Shire had never possessed, the corrections falling above all on names and on passages quoted in the Elvish tongues. Findegil, the King's Writer, finished that work in the year 172 of the Fourth Age. The final appearance of Quenya in the recorded history of Middle-earth is a scribe going through a manuscript and getting the spellings right.

The transcription used in the histories was deliberately made as Latin-like as possible, which is why Quenya is written with c and not k. Some habits of the language show through even so. The combination qu, that is cw, is characteristic of Quenya and does not occur in Sindarin at all. There was no z. The letter y is a consonant here, as in English you, where in Sindarin it is a vowel; and v and w are both used, against the Latin pattern, because the two sounds came from different origins. Archaic Quenya wrote hl and hr for voiceless l and r, but by the Third Age hl was commonly said as a plain l. Stress prefers the third syllable from the end — a pattern the Eldarin tongues share, and Quenya most of all.

Sound correspondences let one language be read off against the other. Quenya qu answers Sindarin p or b: Quenya quetta, a word, stands beside Sindarin beth. A third witness sharpens the picture. For swan the three tongues give Quenya alqua, Telerin alpa and Sindarin alph, all from an older alkwa — one form, three roads. Telerin also left its mark on the vocabulary: for silver, telpe prevailed over the form tyelpe that sound law would have produced, which is why the White Tree is Telperion and not Tyelperion.

Two systems of writing were current among the Eldar, and they were not competitors so much as instruments for different work. The tengwar were made for brush and pen, and shapes drawn with a pen are what they remain even when they are inscribed; the certar or cirth were made to be cut, and in Beleriand, where they were devised by the Sindar, they were for a long time used for nothing more than names and short memorials scored into wood, stone and metal. Quenya has no share in the second tradition. It possessed a full pen-alphabet before the Noldor ever left Aman, and everything committed to it — annals, laws, verse, the lists of names that later scholars worked from — belongs on the written side of that division from the beginning. The consequence outlived the languages that caused it. By the Third Age the tengwar were the ordinary script of the West, serving Westron as readily as the Elven-tongues, and the values a learner met first were the Quenya ones, other languages being fitted to the system as departures from that standard.

The runes travelled in the opposite direction, and their history says as much about Quenya's standing as its own does. Their arrangement is credited to Daeron, loremaster of Thingol, and the Sindar who had them made comparatively little use of them once the Fëanorian letters came east over the Sea; it was the Dwarves who took the invention up, esteemed it more highly than its makers did, and carried it into their own use and eastward beyond Beleriand. What results is a clean division of prestige: an incised alphabet that passed to other peoples and served for the practical marking of tombs, doors and goods, and a written alphabet bound to the tongue for which its standard values had been fixed. Quenya is on the side of the pen throughout. Nothing in the record shows it as a language of casual inscription, and nothing shows it acquiring a runic mode of its own; where it appears in writing at all it appears in books, records and copies made by trained scribes. A language that reached Middle-earth already provided with letters, and never needed a mason's expedient, is one whose whole relation to writing was scholarly before it was public.

Counted by lines, Quenya occupies very little of The Lord of the Rings, and what it does occupy is unevenly distributed. The longest unbroken stretch is not speech but song: the farewell sung at the parting from Lórien is set out as verse, at length, before any English is allowed near it. Everything else in the narrative proper is short — a greeting on a road, a cry, a formula of possession, a run of names taken in the high tongue at a sickbed. Against these set-pieces stands a quieter kind of presence, words absorbed into the telling itself rather than quoted from anyone's mouth. The seeing-stones are the clearest case: the narrative keeps the Quenya plural palantíri and never manufactures an English one, so that a grammatical feature of a language nobody in the story speaks survives inside ordinary Westron prose.

The largest single body of Quenya in the published book is one that no character ever pronounces aloud. The account of the calendars sets out the reckoning of years in Eldarin and Númenórean terms, and its vocabulary is Quenya from end to end. The Elvish year runs in six seasons and not four — tuilë, lairë, yávië and hrívë among them — and the days that stand outside the ordinary count carry names of their own: yestarë at the beginning of the year and mettarë at its close, loëndë as the mid-year day of the Númenórean reckoning, the enderi as the middle-days of the Eldarin one. This is terminology, not utterance. It occurs in the text as the technical apparatus of a system still in official use, which is a different mode of survival from the ceremonial phrases, and a more durable one.

In the posthumously edited prose the balance shifts again. The Silmarillion is written in English and carries Quenya almost entirely in names, to the point that its appendix on name-elements functions as the reader's real glossary; morphology comes through unannounced, since the singulars and plurals are simply left standing beside one another — Vala and Valar, Maia and Maiar, Elda and Eldar, Noldo and Noldor. Directly quoted Quenya is rare there and falls at thresholds: a shout as a battle turns, a wish spoken at a leave-taking. The plainest instance of the second kind is in Unfinished Tales, where the Noldor who have guided Tuor as far as they intend to go turn back and send him on with a wish that the sun shine upon his path — Anar kaluva tielyanna. As almost everywhere in the corpus, the meaning is supplied on the spot; a reader is never left dependent on a dictionary that does not exist.

Outside the histories, Quenya is the oldest thing in the whole legendarium. Tolkien began his first Elvish language around 1910 or 1911, while still at school in Birmingham; the early name was Qenya, and the spelling with u came later. The order of work matters for reading everything else: he stated plainly what had set The Lord of the Rings going: the impulse was a linguistic one, and he wrote the book so that his Elvish tongues would have the history they needed. The stories were built for the languages, not the languages for the stories.

He named the ingredients himself: Quenya is built on a Latin basis, with Finnish and Greek as the two other main components — an ordering worth noticing, since Finnish is usually named first by everyone else. Finding a Finnish grammar he described as opening a cellar of wine of a kind he had never tasted. What the languages actually took from each is more divided than the summary suggests: the sound of Quenya is Finnish, its grammar is closer to the inflecting patterns of Latin and Greek than to Finnish agglutination.

The design was consciously two-layered, and here the invention mirrors the history: Tolkien gave Quenya an everyday register, Tarquesta, and a learned and ceremonial book-language, Parmaquesta, of which only the latter keeps the full set of cases. He was clear about what the language was not for. He never intended Quenya as an international auxiliary language — that was a different question, on which he thought well of Esperanto. And in a letter written near the end of his life he put the status plainly: to the learned of Gondor, Quenya was at least as familiar as Latin is in western Europe today, and to use it was to do honour. By the time of the War of the Ring it had been dead, in the sense that nobody learned it as a child, for something like six thousand years.

One correction he made is worth keeping, because it shows how far the grammar was thought through. Frodo's greeting to Gildor read omentielmo in the first edition and was changed to omentielvo — Quenya distinguishes in the dual according to how many people are actually meeting. An author who revises a printed line over a pronoun ending is not decorating a story with foreign-looking words.