Sindarin

Sindarin is the Grey-elven speech, and it exists because of a decision not to sail. Its speakers were Eldar who came to the shores of Middle-earth and went no further; their king in Beleriand was Thingol Greycloak of Doriath. In origin the language was akin to Quenya, not foreign to it — one stock, parted early. What separated them was time spent in a place that changes. The sources put it plainly: through the long twilight the speech altered with the changefulness of mortal lands, and so grew far estranged from the tongue of the Eldar beyond the Sea.

The name Sindar, the Grey Elves, most likely came from the Noldor rather than from the people it describes. They had called themselves something else. After the rest of the Teleri had departed over Sea, those left behind on the shore took the name Eglath, the Forsaken People — a name given from the inside, and it says what the parting felt like. The ordinary Sindarin word for an Elf is Edhel, plural Edhil.

There is a difference in kind between the two languages, not only in sound. Long before the exiles arrived, the development of Sindarin had become largely unguided change — the way the languages of Men change, by use and drift. Quenya was tended: preserved, taught, corrected. Sindarin had been living instead.

The exiled Noldor did not bring Sindarin with them; they acquired it. Two things made them change. The first was arithmetic: they lived among Grey Elves who outnumbered them. The second was a royal ban. When word came of the kinslaying at Alqualondë, Thingol forbade the tongue of the Noldor throughout his realm — and in his lands only Sindarin might be used, so that anyone with business at the king's court had to learn it. The exiles took up Sindarin for all daily use, and after the Dagor Aglareb it had become the common speech of Beleriand.

The consequence reaches all the way to the Third Age and into the book everyone reads. Because the exiles changed languages, Sindarin is the speech of every Elf and Elven-lord who appears in The Lord of the Rings. The word Sindarin itself, however, appears only in the appendices — thirty-three times, in Appendices D, E and F. In the narrative it is called the elven-tongue and nothing else, and in The Hobbit the word does not occur at all.

Of all the peoples of Men, only the Dúnedain knew and spoke an Elvish tongue, and what they knew was Sindarin. It began in Beleriand, where most of the Edain learned the Grey-elven speech early — as a common language and out of a desire to know. The House of Bëor went furthest and gave up its own language altogether. Their descendants carried the habit across the Sea: in the north-west of Númenor, settled mainly by people of Bëorian descent, Sindarin was in general use, and in Andúnië and the Westlands high and low alike spoke it.

In the royal house and in most noble and learned houses of Númenor, Sindarin was the ordinary cradle-speech down to the days of Tar-Atanamir. This is the sharpest distinction between the two Elvish tongues in Númenor and it is easy to lose: Quenya was known but not spoken, a language of documents and scholars, while Sindarin was what people actually said to their children. When the later kings banned the Elven-tongues, it was Sindarin the Faithful kept using — everyone of high birth, everyone who could write, even among themselves.

A tongue used for long ages by mortal Men tends to split into dialects, and in Númenor it would have done so; what held it together was continued traffic with the Eldar of Eressëa and Lindon. In Gondor at the time of the War of the Ring, only a small part of the population still knew the Elven-tongue and fewer spoke it daily, chiefly in Minas Tirith and Dol Amroth. Nearly every place-name and personal name in the realm was nevertheless Elvish in form and meaning — a country speaking one language and named in another.

Gondor also left its mark on the sound. The ch that Sindarin uses so freely was softened to a plain h inside words, except finally and before t — which is how Rochand became Rohan and Rochirrim Rohirrim. Both names are late Sindarin coinages made in Gondor, first used by Hallas son of Cirion; the plural in -rim is the Grey-elven way of forming a collective, the same suffix that gives Onodrim for the Ents and Haradrim for the Southrons.

Before the building of Barad-dûr many of the Sindar went east and founded realms in far forests, where their people were mostly Silvan Elves. That is how Sindarin crossed the Misty Mountains. What happened next is not one story but two, and they run in opposite directions.

In Lórien Sindarin became the speech of the whole people, because many there were Sindar or Noldor who had fled from Eregion. In Thranduil's realm it was spoken in the king's house but not by all his people. And Oropher, who came to the Silvan Elves with only a handful of Sindar, went the other way entirely: his company merged into the people they had joined and took up their language and their forms of names. The same language, carried by the same kind of small ruling group, was in one case adopted and in the other absorbed.

The Silvan dialects had drifted so far that they were barely intelligible to a speaker of Sindarin, though their kinship as Eldarin tongues was easy to see. Frodo notices it himself in Lórien: he understands little of the speech of the Wood-elves east of the mountains, because it sounds unlike the speech of the West. Some Lórien names — Amroth, Nimrodel, Caras — cannot be fully explained from Sindarin at all; they are remnants of the older Silvan tongue. What decided the matter in the end was writing. The Silvan Elves invented no script of their own, so whoever learned to write among the Sindar wrote Sindarin as best he could.

The Cirth were made in Beleriand by the Sindar, and their inventor was Daeron, minstrel and chief loremaster of Thingol's realm. The oldest arrangement, the Certhas Daeron, was designed for one purpose only: to represent the sounds of Sindarin. The later expansions of the Angerthas are probably the work of the Noldor of Eregion, since they provide for sounds Sindarin did not have. Archaic Sindarin needed a sign of its own for a spirantal m, and the Angerthas had to find room for it.

The people who made the runes barely used them. The Sindar wrote few records with the Cirth; it was the Dwarves who took Daeron's runes up, carried them east over the mountains and made them their own. A script invented for an Elvish language is remembered today as a Dwarvish one.

In the Fëanorian letters Sindarin has its own habit. Because most of its words end in a consonant, the vowel mark is written above the following consonant, the opposite of Quenya practice. The inscription on the West-gate of Moria shows a mode of full writing in which all the vowels used in Sindarin appear as letters in their own right rather than as marks.

Sindarin was the only contemporary language to keep the modified front u, the sound of French lune, written y — and in Gondor even that was usually pronounced like i. Here the two Elvish tongues part company in the transcription itself: y is a vowel in Sindarin and a consonant in Quenya. The combination qu, so common in Quenya, does not occur. There is no z, and s is always voiceless; the rune whose theoretical value was z was used for ss instead. The diphthongs are ae, oi, ei, oe, ui and au, and no other pair of vowels is one.

Two details carry more weight than their size suggests. In stressed monosyllables the long vowel is marked with a circumflex, because there it was drawn out especially long — which is why dûn stands beside Dúnadan. And dh, th and ch are each a single consonant, written with a single letter in the original script; a reader who takes them for two letters will put the stress in the wrong place. Words stressed on the third syllable from the end, the Quenya norm, occur in Sindarin only in compounds.

Where the two languages can be laid side by side, the correspondences are regular. Quenya hy- answers Sindarin initial h: Quenya Hyarmen, the south, stands beside Sindarin Harad. The clusters ng, nd and mb, favoured in older Eldarin, underwent various changes in Sindarin — mb to m, nd to nn. It is this systematic quality that lets a name be translated between the tongues rather than merely re-spelled.

A language that a whole realm is named in leaves traces far beyond its speakers. The Dúnedain kept Sindarin month-names in their calendar — used by them alone, while the Shire went on with names of its own. The Westron the Dúnedain spoke was enriched with many words taken from the Elven-tongues, so that even people who knew no Sindarin used it daily without noticing. And in Gondor at the end of the Third Age nearly every place-name and every personal name was Elvish in form and meaning, in a country where only a small minority could still say what those names meant.

Some of those names can be dated and located. Amon Anwar, the Hill of Awe, was the Sindarin name of the mountain the Rohirrim would later call Halifirien — a name given before they came. Rohan and Rohirrim themselves were coined in Gondor after their arrival, by Hallas son of Cirion, out of roch, horse, and the stem meaning to possess. The two names sit on either side of a single event, and both are Sindarin: the language kept naming the country after the country had changed hands.

The naming also went to peoples who had no say in it. Orch is the Sindarin word for an Orc and Torog for a Troll; both entered the Common Speech and from there the book. It is worth noticing what that means for a reader: the words by which the enemy is known throughout the story come from the language of one side of the war. There is no name for these peoples in the histories that they gave themselves.

In the story Sindarin is the language people reach for when something has to work. Gandalf uses it for command and for spell: at the West-gate of Moria and in the fire-spell against the wolves. Glorfindel greets Aragorn in it and calls to his horse in it. The march-wardens of Lórien give their order to halt in Elvish, and Haldir's words of welcome are in his own Elven-tongue. In Ithilien Frodo recognises Faramir's men by their speech — they use the Elven-tongue, or one hardly different from it, and that is what marks them as Dúnedain of the South.

It is also the language in which Gandalf is addressed by those who think themselves his equals. Mithrandir is a Sindarin name, used in Gondor by men of rank because they knew the language and used it — which is also why the cry of Ernil i Pheriannath could run through the streets of Minas Tirith and be understood. Sindarin supplied names to other peoples too: orch for an Orc, Torog for a Troll, and Glamhoth, the din-horde, as a general word for Orcs — the word behind the name of Gandalf's sword Glamdring.

Within Sindarin there were registers, and one of them can be dated. Nellas taught Túrin to speak the tongue after the manner of the older kingdom — an older, more courteous, richer speech than the everyday Sindarin of the marches. And it was a language of poetry: Dírhavel composed the Narn i Hîn Húrin in Grey-elven, in which he had great skill, using the verse mode called Minlamed thent. Both facts belong to the same point: by the First Age Sindarin already had an inside, with older and newer, plainer and finer ways of saying the same thing.

Tolkien described what he had done to Sindarin without any mystery about it. Its changes, he wrote to Naomi Mitchison, were deliberately devised to give it a linguistic character very like — though not identical with — British-Welsh, because that character attracted him and because it seemed to suit the rather Celtic kind of legend told about its speakers. The relation he intended between the two Elvish tongues is the relation between British and Latin: a language of learning and record on one side, a living vernacular that had gone its own way on the other.

The name Sindarin is late. Through the drafts the same language is called Noldorin, and the change is not merely a relabelling: in the earlier conception the Noldor had brought their language with them, and it was the exiles' own tongue that developed in Beleriand. The idea that the Noldor gave up their language and adopted the speech they found there is the hinge of the late conception, and it is not present in the earlier drafts at all. When Tolkien turned Noldorin into Sindarin he moved the language from the invaders to the inhabitants.

One caution belongs at the end, and it applies to almost every Sindarin word list in circulation. The appendix Elements in Quenya and Sindarin Names, from which most published glosses are taken, is a compilation by the editor, Christopher Tolkien, and it says of itself that it is incomplete and bounded by what its compiler knew. It is a good guide and not a dictionary, and the difference matters whenever someone builds a new Sindarin word out of it.

The name of the language is not a word of the language. Sindarin is Quenya, built on the element sinda, grey, and it describes the speech of the Grey-elves from without — in the tongue of the kindred that came back over Sea, not in the tongue of the people who stayed. The same element can be watched crossing from one language into the other in a single by-name. Elwë, lord of the Teleri, is Singollo or Sindacollo in Quenya, greycloak; the Sindarin form of that name is Thingol, where the initial s of the Quenya word stands as th. King and language carry one word between them, each in the shape its own tongue gives it, and the ending that turns sinda into the name of a speech is the ordinary Quenya way of forming such names.

The grey of the name is not a colour but a light. When the returning Noldor set the word beside a description of these Elves, what they described was a people of starlit country — Elves who had lived out the long dusk under stars, in lands the exiles themselves had left behind. The reckoning the Noldor brought with them divided the Elves by whether they had seen the light of the Trees, and the terms were accordingly light and darkness. Grey falls between those two words. It is a name given by people who had a scale of their own and needed a place on it for those they found, and it says as much about the namers as about the named.

In English the same name arrives twice. Appendix F explains that the whole book is offered as a translation, with the Common Speech rendered into English and the Elvish tongues left standing as they were; this is why Grey-elven and Sindarin sit side by side on the page, one a rendering and one the untouched Quenya word. Inside the story nobody uses either. When the language does name itself, the word is the plain adjective edhellen, elvish, which a reader meets carved on the West-gate of Moria describing the door itself; men of Gondor and travellers in the North speak simply of the Elven-tongue, without asking which one. No term the Grey-elves used for their own speech has come down at all — the language is known by a name its first speakers would not have recognised.

Set beside the Elves and the Dúnedain, the other peoples of the West stand out by their silence in it. The Rohirrim, the closest allies Gondor had and the people whose land and horsemen were named in Grey-elven, kept their own northern speech and did not take up an Elvish tongue at all; where they had business abroad they used the Common Speech, and Gondor met them in it. The Men of Dale and of the Lake likewise kept a northern language of their own. Long alliance, shared war and shared borders did not carry the language across; nothing in the ordinary business of Men required it, and so it was not learned. That is the plainest thing to say about its reach: it was never withheld from anyone and never a secret, and it still spread only where somebody wanted it.

Two peoples outside both Elves and Men did want it. When the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains first came into Beleriand they learned the Grey-elven speech readily and used it in all dealings with the Elves, while giving nothing back: their own tongue they kept close and taught to no outsider, and in later ages they took outward names from the languages of the Men among whom they lived. The two languages sat side by side in the same mouth on opposite terms, one open and one guarded. The Ents came to it from further off still, having learned the art of speech itself from the Elves, and never lost the appetite for words that came with it.

At the far edge of its reach stand the Hobbits, who as a people had none of it. What contact there was came through individuals and by accident of company: Bilbo, settled at Rivendell in his last years, worked through Elvish sources and left translations behind him, though the book does not say which Elvish tongue he had. The extreme case is Sam on the stairs above Cirith Ungol, crying out to the Star-queen in words he did not know and could not have construed. That marks the whole range — from the cradle-speech of a Númenórean house to a formula in the mouth of a gardener who had simply heard it often enough.

The chronology of Sindarin turns on a grim coincidence: the language reached its widest use in Beleriand during the same centuries in which Beleriand was being lost. Through the Wars of the Jewels the realms that spoke it were reduced one after another — the northern marches, then the hidden kingdoms, until the last of the free peoples were gathered at the Isle of Balar and the settlement at the Mouths of Sirion. When the Host of the West had thrown down Morgoth, the land itself broke and the sea came in over nearly all the country in which the Grey-elven speech had been the ordinary tongue of daily life. What survived of Beleriand was a strip beyond the Blue Mountains, and there those Elves who did not take ship settled. In the space of one age the language passed from being the speech of a whole land to being the speech of a coastline and of scattered companies that had gone east.

The Second Age begins with two departures in opposite directions. In the year 32 the Edain sailed west to the island prepared for them, taking the Grey-elven speech with them as a household inheritance; in Middle-earth the Elvish remnant settled in Lindon under Gil-galad, with the havens at its western edge. From about the year 600 the ships of Númenor began to appear off the coasts again, and by about 1200 they were making permanent harbours: from that point onward the language was carried back eastward in the mouths of Men, some six centuries after its speakers had left the ruined country. The great disaster of the middle of the age moved speakers rather than altering speech. In 1697 Eregion was laid waste, and Elrond withdrew with what was left of its people to found the refuge in the mountains — a new centre of the language made out of a defeat.

The one deliberate attempt to end the language belongs to Númenor, and it can be dated closely. In 2899 Ar-Adûnakhôr took the sceptre, the first ruler to be titled in the native speech of the island, and from his day the Elven-tongues were neither used in public nor permitted to be taught. Under Ar-Gimilzôr the prohibition became total: their use was forbidden outright, and no Elves of the West were suffered to come to the land at all, which cut the traffic that had kept the island's Sindarin from drifting. The reversal in 3175, when Tar-Palantir repented and took his title once more in the older manner, restored the form without restoring the ground it stood on. The Downfall came in 3319, and in 3320 the survivors who had kept the language established their realms on the western shore of Middle-earth. A policy pursued for four centuries by the most powerful realm of Men failed to kill the speech, but it did leave it in the keeping of a party rather than a people.

In the Third Age nothing was forbidden; the losses were arithmetical. No ruler moved against the language, and yet the number of those who used it from morning to night fell in every century, because its native speakers were leaving. Particular years can be pointed to: in 1981 the Silvan folk of Lórien fled south after the waking of the evil in Moria and their lord and his lady were lost, one of several such subtractions that emptied a community without any change of policy. The end of the age took the rest. In 3021 the keepers of the Elven-rings went to the Havens and sailed, and the households of Rivendell and Lórien dispersed thereafter; Celeborn remained a while in the eastern refuge before he too went over Sea, and with him the last living memory of the Elder Days departed from Middle-earth. What had been an everyday tongue in four separate realms became, within a generation, an inheritance held by mortal men and by Elves in the east who were dwindling.

The last dated event in its history as a spoken tongue is a voyage. In the hundred and twentieth year of the Fourth Age, reckoned in the Shire as 1541, King Elessar died at last, and Legolas built a grey ship and went down the great river and over Sea, taking with him the colony his people had made in Ithilien. After that the language survived chiefly as a thing written down and studied. The complete copy of the Shire chronicle made by Findegil, the King's Writer, was finished fifty-two years later, in the hundred and seventy-second year of the age, and it alone preserved in full the volumes of translation out of the Elvish that had been made at Rivendell; the same libraries held a Hobbit's essay on old words and names, tracing the Elvish elements that had settled unnoticed into common speech. The history that begins with a people who would not sail ends with scribes at Great Smials copying a language whose speakers had gone.

The pronunciation notes attached to The Lord of the Rings exist mainly because the spelling invites English habits that are wrong. C is always a k, whatever follows it, so that the word for silver begins as it does in the name of the lord of Lórien, not with an s. F has its ordinary value except at the end of a word, where it stands for v, as in the fen-name Nindalf and in the Ent-name Fladrif. Where an f sound falls at the end of a word it is written ph instead, as in the word for swan, the digraph turns up again inside a handful of words, standing there for a drawn-out ff that goes back to pp. The most interesting use of the digraph is the third one: the appendix notes that ph can stand where an f is related to or has come out of a p, and gives as its example the plural in the cry raised in Minas Tirith for the prince of the Halflings, whose singular form begins with p. The change is recorded there as a fact about spelling; what causes it is not explained.

The liquids carry much of the character of the language. Sindarin has voiceless l and r, written lh and rh, which arose from older combinations of s with those sounds; l itself is palatalized to some degree between e or i and a consonant, or finally after them, so that an English word like bell would have been heard by the Eldar with a glide in it. R is trilled in every position and, unlike the English r, is not swallowed before a following consonant. On this point the sources record a judgment rather than a description: “The Orcs, and some Dwarves, are said to have used a back or uvular r, a sound which the Eldar found distasteful.” It is one of the few places where a manner of speaking is given a value. The soft dh, the voiced th of English these, usually corresponds to a d elsewhere in the family — the Sindarin word for tree stands beside its Quenya counterpart in exactly that relation.

The vowels are pure, and the long ones differ from Quenya's in quality as well as length: in Sindarin long a, e and o have the same quality as the corresponding short vowels, because they were derived from them comparatively recently, whereas the older long vowels had already been altered. Of the language's structure the appendices give very little directly, and what they do give comes in passing, attached to a name that needed explaining — a Halfling is a perian, and the people as a class are the Periannath. Almost everything else about how Sindarin is built has to be read off the names themselves, which is why the published word-lists are lists of elements rather than a grammar.

The two scripts available to Sindarin were made for different acts. The runes were shaped for cutting: their long use was for names and short memorials set into wood, stone and metal, and their angular forms follow from that purpose rather than from any preference of the eye. Continuous writing — books, records, a text meant to be read on a page — belonged to the Fëanorian letters, devised in the West by a maker of the other kindred and carried east by the exiles, a system meant for pen and brush and adaptable, by a change of mode, to whatever language a scribe had in hand. Sindarin was accordingly set down in a system it had not produced, by the same people who had produced the other one. One small detail shows how completely the borrowing was accepted: the standard names of the letters, as the appendix records them, are Quenya words, so that a scribe writing Grey-elven named the parts of his alphabet in the other tongue.

The two scripts then travelled in opposite directions. The older and simpler runes spread eastward through the Second Age and were taken up by Men and Dwarves alike, and even by Orcs, each people altering them to fit its own use and its own skill. The Fëanorian letters went the other way and became the ordinary hand of the western lands, serving tongues they had never been designed for: the writing on the Ring is in Elvish letters of an ancient fashion, and what those letters spell is the Black Speech. What this says about Sindarin's standing is plainer than it is flattering. A script follows use and authority rather than descent. Sindarin was written wherever it was spoken and was never confined to inscription, but neither hand was its exclusive property — the one its own people invented is remembered chiefly in other mouths and other lands, and the one that carried its books arrived from the other Elvish tongue.

The first Sindarin a reader meets is spoken at the Ford by Glorfindel, who greets Aragorn with mae govannen, well met, after an exclamation that names him Dúnadan; the novel prints the words and leaves them unglossed, and a reader who wants their sense must go outside the story for it. A little later the same speaker calls noro lim to his horse, ride on, and here the narrative does not even name the language, saying only that he called out in the elf-tongue. Gandalf's use is of another kind. At the West-gate the word that opens the door is mellon, friend, a single noun that had been standing in plain sight on the arch; in the dark below the mountains, and again when the wolves press in, he speaks naur an edraith ammen, fire be for the saving of us, adding a second line against the wolf-host. These are the passages in which Sindarin is made to accomplish something rather than to colour a scene, and there are not many of them.

In Lórien the utterances shrink to their smallest. A voice out of the dark above the flet says daro, halt — one word, and the shortest complete sentence of the language in the book. In the same chapter Legolas, sighting the pursuit, drops into his own speech to say yrch, the plural of the ordinary word for an Orc, and the narrative notes the lapse rather than translating it; the meaning arrives through the alarm of the others. Both moments show the usual shape of Sindarin on the page: an interjection or an imperative, one to four words long, embedded in English narration that supplies the sense by context and never stops to construe it.

A name can do the work of a sentence. On Weathertop Frodo cries out the name of Elbereth as he strikes, and afterwards Aragorn judges that the name wounded the Ringwraith more than the blade did — the one place where the story attributes force to Sindarin in a mortal mouth. The appendices add material the narrative had no room for: Aragorn, meeting Arwen in the woods of Rivendell, names her Tinúviel, and Gilraen's parting words to her son are given as a single Grey-elven verse-line, a linnod, in which she says she gave hope to the Dúnedain and kept none for herself. Against all this stands one instructive exception. When Frodo greets Gildor's company in the Woody End he uses the other Elvish tongue, and the compliment is noticed as such — the most conspicuous Elvish greeting in the book is not Sindarin at all.

Tolkien's own account of his procedure reverses the order most readers assume. He described the invention of languages as the foundation of the whole undertaking and the tales as having been made to give the tongues a world in which they could be spoken, rather than the other way about; the finished book he was willing to call, before anything else, an exercise in linguistic taste. The long letter he wrote to explain the legendarium to a publisher's editor sets the two related Elvish speeches near the front of the description and treats their parting as one of the things the mythology exists to account for. Writing to W. H. Auden he put it in the same terms, calling the work linguistic in inspiration at bottom and describing his language-making as a private occupation of many years' standing rather than a device got up for the story. Sindarin, on this account, was not applied to a finished world as ornament; the world was built to hold it.

The second thing the letters show is how little of the work reached print. What Tolkien published in his lifetime was an account of the writing systems and the sounds, offered explicitly as a summary and not as a grammar, together with a survey of the peoples and their speeches; the derivational machinery behind it — the older forms from which the words were drawn and the rules by which they had been altered — stayed in his papers. Readers who wanted more had to ask, and he answered them, so that some of the most-quoted glosses of Sindarin words and of the invocation of Elbereth exist only in correspondence, outside the fiction they belong to. This has a consequence worth stating plainly: the language as the public knows it is a published fragment plus a scatter of private answers, and much of what circulates as settled fact rests on the second of those rather than the first.