Silvan Elvish

The name by which the tongue is generally known is not an Elvish word at all. Silvan is an English adjective of Latin descent, formed on the word for a wood, and it does in the published narrative what Wood-elves does in the earlier tale of Bilbo's journey: it describes a people by the country they live in rather than by kindred or by speech. In The Lord of the Rings the label attaches first to the folk and only through them to their language, so that Legolas is a Silvan Elf before anything is said of a Silvan tongue. Appendix F sets out the consequence plainly enough: the Elves of Lorien were mostly of Silvan stock, but what they spoke aloud to strangers was Sindarin with a manner of its own, and Frodo, who had little practice and is the reporter for most Elvish in the Red Book, drew the wrong conclusions from what he heard.

The second name, Nandorin, is genealogical rather than geographical. It is drawn from the Nandor, that part of the Telerin march which forsook the westward road at the Misty Mountains under Lenwe and never came to the sea, and whose descendants the Silvan folk are. A tongue named for them is therefore named for a decision rather than a forest, and the two labels divide the same speakers between them: Silvan is what the Elves of the west called their eastern kin in the Third Age, Nandorin what the loremasters called the branch as a whole. Later discussion of Lorien and its rulers uses the terms almost interchangeably, treating the Silvan speech as the surviving continuation of the Nandorin of the earlier ages.

What the speakers called their own language is nowhere recorded, and given how little of the language itself survives this is unsurprising. Nearly everything preserved is onomastic: names of persons and of places, kept because Sindarin-speaking neighbours went on using them after the tongue behind them had gone quiet. The clearest of these is Lorinand, given as the Nandorin name of the land afterwards called Lorien and glossed as a valley of gold, a name that fixes the golden trees of the region in the older speech before the later form drew the land into the orbit of a Valinorean word. Both names in current use, then, are names given from outside, and neither preserves anything the Silvan Elves are known to have said of themselves.

Silvan was a household and woodland speech, used among people who had no particular reason to be understood by anyone outside their own borders. The clearest picture of that in the narrative comes from the marchwardens on the Nimrodel, who tell the Company that they rarely use any tongue but their own, keeping to the heart of their wood and taking no pleasure in dealings with other folk. Only those charged with going abroad for news and for watching the enemy trouble to learn the languages of other lands; of the three brothers who meet the travellers, one has a serviceable command of the Common Speech and apologises for it, while his kin have next to none. The tongue was thus neither a mystery nor a discipline but simply what one spoke at home, and its narrow reach was a consequence of a settled habit of seclusion rather than of any secrecy about the language itself.

Behind that arrangement lay an old imbalance of numbers and authority. In both woodland realms a small body of Sindarin-speaking incomers had become the ruling house over a much larger Silvan population: Oropher and after him Thranduil in the north, Celeborn and Galadriel in the golden wood. The rulers did not impose their speech by decree so much as by prestige and use, and the people of the woods, who had never devised letters of their own, had nothing in writing to hold their own forms steady. What Silvan lore existed was carried by memory, and those among them who took up the written art from their lords used it for Sindarin instead, so that the tongue with the greater number of speakers left the smaller record.

The drift ran one way. By the close of the Third Age the old speech had gone out of ordinary use in Lorien and in Thranduil's kingdom alike, surviving as a colouring within the Sindarin that had replaced it. There is one recorded holdout: Nimrodel, who loved the ancient tongue of her people and would use no other, long after those about her had given it up, and whose refusal is noticed precisely because by then it had become singular.

The tongue begins as one side of a parting made on the westward march from Cuivienen. The host of the Teleri, last and most numerous of the three kindreds, was strung out along the road, and when the Misty Mountains rose before them a great part of that host would go no further. Those who turned aside there are the Nandor, and their speech, until then one with the speech of the kin who went on, thereafter had no share in what happened to Elvish west of the mountains. They dwelt long in the woods of the vale of the Great River, moving as the land invited them, and some strayed far down its course to the shores of the sea. In that seclusion they gained a deep knowledge of growing and living things, and their language changed as any language does among people who speak only to each other, untouched by Valinor and untouched by Beleriand.

One part of them came west after all. In the First Age Denethor son of Lenwe led a following over the Blue Mountains into Ossiriand, weary of the perils east of them, and there they settled among the rivers and were called the Green-elves for the manner of their dress and their love of the land. Thingol received them as kin, and they came to his aid when Morgoth's servants first broke into Beleriand; in that battle Denethor was cut off upon the hill of Amon Ereb and slain, and his people took no king in his place afterwards, keeping to their woods and fighting no more in the open. Their branch of the speech accordingly leaves no long history: it belonged to a small folk in a country that was drowned at the ending of the age, and whatever continued into later times continued east of the mountains, among those who had never left the river-vales at all.

The Second Age brought the two branches back into contact, and on unequal terms. Survivors of ruined Beleriand crossed eastward in small numbers and settled among a woodland population that vastly outnumbered them, and in the first generations the movement ran toward the older speech rather than away from it: Oropher came into the Greenwood with only a handful of Sindar about him, took the language of the people he meant to rule and names shaped in their fashion, and withdrew steadily northward, away from the Dwarves of Khazad-dum and from the power rising in the golden wood to the south. A like arrangement stood in Lorinand under Amdir. Both kings answered the summons of the Last Alliance, and both fell in the assault upon the Morannon in 3434, together with a heavy part of the woodland companies they had brought south; the losses fell on the Silvan folk, while the surviving houses and their Sindarin remained.

The Third Age narrowed the ground under the speech twice over. From about the year 1050 a shadow settled on the Greenwood, so that Men began to give it the name of Mirkwood, and the northern realm drew back into its defensible corner. Worse came in 1981, when a Balrog was roused under the Misty Mountains: the Dwarves abandoned Khazad-dum, many of the Silvan Elves of Lorien fled south out of the wood, and in that same year Amroth and Nimrodel were both lost. What remained in Lorien was a reduced people under lords from elsewhere, and the trend of the following thousand years is plain in the one thing the story records of their speech, that when strangers came to the borders in the last years of the age they were answered in Sindarin.

The end of the War of the Ring dispersed rather than restored the woodland communities. In 3019 Thranduil and Celeborn met in the middle of the forest and gave it a green name again, the northern part falling to Thranduil and the southern eaves, taken as East Lorien, to Celeborn. Two years later Galadriel went to the Havens with the Ring-bearers; Celeborn afterwards left the wood for Imladris, and the day on which he too sought the sea is not recorded. In the Fourth Age Legolas brought a company of his father's people south to settle in Ithilien, and Lorien itself is not spoken of again. No chronicler follows the tongue beyond that point, and there was in any case nothing to follow it in: a speech with no letters of its own, once its last households had scattered or taken ship, leaves only the names it had already given to rivers, hills and people who outlived it.

Nothing in the record describes the sounds of Silvan directly. What the sources offer instead is a verdict on how it struck a listener, and even that verdict is passed on Sindarin rather than on Silvan itself. Appendix F reports that the folk of Lorien spoke Sindarin with an accent, and sets the word in inverted commas, as though it were the nearest available term rather than the right one, since most of those speakers were of Silvan stock. That manner of speaking, working upon a hobbit's slender training in the tongue, was enough to convince the listener at Nimrodel that he was hearing something else entirely; a commentator of Gondor, writing on the Thain's copy of the Red Book, is credited with catching the error. The one piece of evidence about how the speech sounded is thus a record of failure to understand, and it belongs as much to the ear that heard it as to the mouths that produced it.

Of the language itself only fragments were ever written down, and those in records kept in other tongues: a few words, and a larger number of names of persons and of places. The single specimen with a meaning attached to it is the older name of the golden wood, given as Nandorin and rendered as a valley of gold. Its second element is a word for a valley, and that same element closes the longer name recorded for the region at an earlier time, Lindorinand, understood as the vale of the land of the singers. From this it can be said that Silvan built place-names as compounds ending in a common noun, with the qualifying matter placed before it, which is the habit of the related Elvish tongues generally. Beyond that there is no verb, no inflection and no sentence to work from.

Even the names are compromised as evidence, since they reach the record through speakers of another language. The name of the wood was afterwards reshaped by Galadriel into a High-elven form referring to singing gold, from which the short name in common use descends, and a word that can be pulled that far in one recorded instance may have been pulled some distance in others without anyone noting it. The surviving Silvan words are preserved inside Sindarin usage and have been fitted to it. What can be stated about the tongue's relation to the speech of Beleriand therefore rests on the descent of its speakers rather than on any comparison of forms, and the assertion that it was not the language of the West remains what it was when first made: a judgment about how far apart two kindred tongues had drifted, offered without the material that would let anyone measure the distance.

Two systems of letters were in use among the Elves and their neighbours at the end of the Third Age, and both were made west of the Misty Mountains. The Cirth were devised in Beleriand by the Sindar, their fullest arrangement being credited to Daeron, minstrel and loremaster of Thingol, and they were at first cut rather than written: names and short memorials incised on wood, stone or metal. The Tengwar came out of Valinor with the Noldorin exiles and were suited to brush and pen, and by the later ages they carried nearly everything that was set down at length. The runes travelled the further of the two. An earlier and plainer version of them travelled east through the Second Age and were taken up by peoples who had no part in their making, the Dwarves above all, who fitted them to their own tongue at Khazad-dum and afterwards developed a second mode in Erebor. Nothing of the sort is recorded for the woodland Elves, whose two realms lay on either side of that same trade in letters.

The one statement bearing directly on the question is a negative one: the Silvan folk devised no writing, and such of them as acquired the art from their Sindarin-speaking lords used it for Sindarin. What that says about the tongue's standing is less a verdict than a distribution of effort. The skill was present in both realms and was not withheld; it was simply spent on the other language, so that the annals, the letters and whatever formal record the woodland kingdoms kept were made in a speech most of their inhabitants had learned rather than inherited. No source calls Silvan unfit for letters or beneath them, and none reports any attempt to write it that failed. The practical effect, however, was the same as a prohibition would have been. Every Silvan word that survives does so inside a document composed in another tongue and spelled by another hand, and the tongue itself left no inscription, no book and no fixed orthography by which its forms might have been held in place. When its households dispersed there was accordingly nothing to consult, and the tradition passed out of reach in the manner of any speech that had lived only in the mouths of those who used it.

Silvan is present in the narrative almost entirely as speech overheard rather than speech reported. On the borders of the golden wood the wardens' talk among themselves is described but never set down, so that the reader is given the fact of an unfamiliar sound and the hobbit's inference from it, and not a line to examine. The one woodland song the book names is the lay of the maiden of the stream, which Legolas introduces as belonging to the tongue of his own people and then delivers in the Common Speech, in the form current at Rivendell. Later, in the city among the trees, the laments made for the wizard lost in Moria reach Frodo as sound with a single recognisable name in it; Legolas, who could have construed them, will not, saying the grief is too near. On each occasion where the language might have been quoted, the text withholds it.

What the Lorien chapters do print in Elvish belongs elsewhere. The one word Legolas lets slip when orcs are sighted from the flet — the plural naming that people, uttered in alarm and marked by the narrator as a lapse into his own speech — is a Sindarin form, so that even the woodland king's son is not shown speaking Silvan unguarded. The farewell Galadriel sings at the parting is expressly in the ancient tongue of the Elves who crossed the sea, which stands further from the speech of the woods than anything else in the book. The nearest thing to a Silvan item in the main narrative is a footnote glossing the first element of the city's name as an old word for a fortress with a moat; the note does not say which language the word is old in, and the attribution rests on inference rather than statement.

The earlier tale of the northern realm is silent in the same way at greater length. Bilbo passes weeks among the Elvenking's folk, hears their feasting under the trees and the singing of the raft-elves at the water-gate, and none of it is preserved in any Elvish form; the songs are rendered in the language of the telling, as everything else in that book is. What is now assigned to Silvan comes accordingly from outside the story proper — from the commentary appended to the Red Book, and from the later notes on Lorien and its lords, which supply one land-name with a meaning attached and very little besides. No book, letter or inscription in the tongue is described anywhere in the narrative, and no continuous sentence of it survives to be examined.

Tolkien's own account of his method puts the languages first: he described the invention of tongues as the foundation of the work, and the stories as having been made to give those tongues a world to be spoken in. The two Elvish languages he brought furthest were given their character by analogy with real ones, Quenya taking its shape and much of its phonetic taste from Finnish, with Latin and Greek behind it, and Sindarin built deliberately to resemble British-Welsh in its style of sound and mutation. No comparable model is recorded for the woodland speech. It exists instead as a position on a family tree: a branch that separated at a stated moment, was cut off from the influences that acted on its relatives, and drifted accordingly. This is the economical side of the method. Because every Elvish tongue was derived from a common ancestor by describable change, a language could be given a definite standing in the scheme without a single conjugation being worked out, simply by fixing where and when its speakers turned aside. Silvan is the purest instance of that in the published matter — a tongue characterised entirely by its history, and by the assertion that it had grown too far from the speech of Beleriand to pass for it.

The material that says most about the tongue comes from writing Tolkien left unfinished, and his editor is explicit that this part of the legendarium never reached a settled form: the history of Lórien and its rulers is among the most tangled of the late problems, worked over repeatedly and never resolved. The consequences show in the names. The golden wood carries several forms across those drafts, each reflecting a different judgment about which language had prior claim on it, and the equation of the Silvan speech with the older Nandorin belongs to this late layer rather than to anything published in Tolkien's lifetime. The frame supplied for the whole linguistic scheme in the appendices — a record kept by speakers of the Common Speech and rendered into English — happens to suit an unwritten tongue very well, since it accounts for the absence of specimens without requiring any to be supplied.