Telerin

The tongue bears no name of its own making: it is called after the people who spoke it, in the manner familiar from Sindarin beside the Sindar, and the word Telerin is simply the adjectival form of Teleri. That name belongs to the High Speech and is built on an element meaning to end, to finish, to come last, so that it may be rendered as the hindmost, those who came behind. It was not a title claimed but a description applied from outside, by the kindreds who had gone before them on the westward road and reached the shores of the sea while the third and most numerous host was still strung out along the way, delaying and divided in mind about the light beyond. A name given in this fashion carries the perspective of the namers with it, and the speech inherits that perspective along with the word.

Among themselves the same people used another word entirely. They named themselves Lindar, the Singers, from a root having to do with song and with musical sound, and the tongue may accordingly be called Lindarin. The difference between the two names is not merely one of dialect: one records where a people stood in a march, the other what they held to be characteristic of themselves. The self-name accords with what is elsewhere told of them, of their fondness for water and for shores, and of the music that was reckoned their particular art; and it belongs to a general habit among the Elves, whereby a kindred's own designation and the designation used by its neighbours may agree in reference and in nothing else.

In the later commentary the name serves a second purpose, marking word-forms rather than people. Forms are identified as Telerin where they stand beside a Quenya cousin and differ from it in shape, as with the word for silver, which appears in the Telerin form telpe against the Quenya tyelpe; the name of the elder of the Two Trees is held to preserve the Telerin shape, the Teleri having valued that metal above gold. The name of the Lady of Lórien is treated in the same way, her Telerin name Alatáriel standing beside the Quenya Altáriel, of which the Sindarin form by which she is commonly known is a rendering. Used so, Telerin names not a people but a source: the label attached to a form whose descent lies with the third kindred rather than with the Noldor.

In Aman the tongue belonged to a single people and a single stretch of coast. The third kindred settled at Alqualondë upon the shores of Eldamar, keeping to their havens, their ships and the pearl-work of their craft, while the Vanyar and the Noldor dwelt inland about Tirion and later, in part, beside the Valar themselves. The separation was one of dwelling and disposition rather than of quarrel, and within it the speech was simply the ordinary language of daily life, learned in childhood and used for every purpose from seamanship to song. Nor was it sealed off: there was coming and going between the kindreds, and marriage across them, for Finarfin took to wife Eärwen, daughter of Olwë who ruled at the haven, so that his children counted the mariners among their kin and were often in their company.

The greater number of that kindred never crossed the sea at all, and among them the case was quite different. Those who had halted in the search for their lost lord, those who settled at the Falas under Círdan, and those who had turned aside earlier and remained east of the mountains made up a whole people whose speech had no competitor whatever. It was the language of Doriath and of the havens alike, of king, smith, mariner and hunter, and for a long age no other Elvish tongue was heard in that land. When the exiled Noldor came at last out of the North they took it up readily, while the Sindar proved slow to master the speech brought from over the sea; and after Thingol learned what had been done at the haven of his brother's folk and forbade the use of that speech in his realm, the Grey-elven tongue became the common language of Beleriand, and the High Speech survived among the Exiles chiefly for lore and for names.

That division of function outlasted Beleriand itself. By the end of the Third Age the Grey-elven speech was still what Elves in the West actually spoke to one another, whereas the High Speech had ceased to be anyone's cradle-tongue and was kept for ceremony, for verse and for the making of names. Beyond the Elves its reach was narrow but real: alone among Men the Dúnedain retained a knowledge of it, brought out of Númenor and used in Gondor for naming and formal occasions rather than in the household. At no point in either branch is the tongue described as reserved, hidden or restricted to a learned class; whatever else may be said of it, it was a speech people simply grew up in.

The separation of the speech begins with the separation of the march. When the Eldar set out westward from the waters of their awakening, the third host was the most numerous and the least eager, and it fell behind the others by long stages, so that the distance between the kindreds was measured in years of travel before it was ever measured in words. Even within that host the unity did not hold: a great following under Lenwë forsook the journey where the road met the great river, and turned away southward rather than face the mountains, and these never came to the sea at all. Their descendants, wandering in the woods and the vales, were sundered from their kin longer than any other branch of the kindred, and when at last some of them came into Beleriand out of the east their tongue had grown so unlike that of the shore-folk that the two were no longer readily understood between speakers. Divergence, in this account, is not a late corruption but the oldest fact in the language's history.

The second and decisive division came at the shore itself. When Elwë was lost in the woods and his people would not depart while their lord was unfound, and when Ossë persuaded others to remain among the rocks and islands they had come to love, the island that Ulmo drew westward carried away only a part of the host. What had been one people speaking one tongue became two communities of speech with an ocean between them, and neither could thereafter influence the other. On the far side the newcomers were not brought at once to the mainland: they dwelt a long while upon the Lonely Isle, apart from the two kindreds who had gone before, and it is to that long solitude that the change in their language is expressly attributed. By the time they were established at their haven on the coast of Eldamar, the speech was no longer a variety of what the others spoke but a tongue standing beside theirs.

The branch left behind underwent a change of another order, and one the later commentary treats as the general law of tongues east of the sea. The speech of those who never crossed is described as akin in its origin to the High Speech of Aman, but altered through the long ages of starlight and afterwards, until it stood far from the language of their kin beyond the water; the mutability of the mortal lands is named as the cause. Nothing sudden is recorded, no reform and no displacement, only slow drift over an age in which the speakers had no other Elvish tongue to measure themselves against. The result was a language that could still be recognised as cousin to what was spoken at the haven in Aman, and could no longer be mistaken for it.

After the Kinslaying at the haven and the departure of the Exiles, the Amanian branch withdrew from the history it had briefly touched. Its speakers took no part in the wars of Beleriand, and when at the end of the Elder Days the host of the West went over sea they gave their ships and steered them, yet would not themselves set foot upon the hither shore. Whatever became of the tongue thereafter is not related in the narrative: it is neither said to have failed nor said to have spread, and it survives in the record chiefly as the source of scattered forms and names carried east by others.

The eastern branch outlived the land that shaped it. When Beleriand was broken and drowned, its people withdrew to the coasts beyond the Blue Mountains, and in the first year of the Second Age the havens of Lindon were founded, from which ships passed west for the two ages that followed. The daughter-tongue went with them into the new realms and remained a living speech there through both ages, while the sundering that had begun on the westward march was undone one shipload at a time. In the year 3021 of the Third Age the last of the great sailings bore the Ring-bearers out of Mithlond, and with the turning of the ages the two branches, parted since the island was drawn away, lay once more within reach of one another.

No description of how the tongue actually sounded survives in the published narratives. What stands in place of such a description is a judgment passed on its speakers rather than on their speech: the third kindred were reckoned singers, and song was held to be the thing they did best, a point already made by the name they used of themselves. To this the tale of their years upon the coast adds one detail of substance, for it was from Ossë, sitting upon a rock at the edge of the water, that they were taught the lore of the sea and the music of it, and the music so learned is treated as having become their own. Where a reader might look for an account of vowels and consonants, the record gives instead this association with sea and with singing, and nothing in it suggests harshness or difficulty. The judgment is the whole of the evidence on that head, and it should not be pressed further than it goes.

Of its build rather more can be seen, though only by comparison, and only through single words. Where a Telerin form is set beside its High-Speech cousin the two are plainly the same word differing in small and regular ways: a consonant simpler at the beginning, as in the word for silver, or a vowel kept where the other tongue has let two consonants come together, as in the Lady's name, which in the one speech has a short syllable that the other lacks. The influence could run either way. In the case of silver the High Speech did not keep the form its own habits would have produced but took up the shape used by the mariners, whose regard for that metal was the reason given. The name of the Lord of Lórien is treated likewise, the Grey-elven name by which he is known standing as a rendering of a Telerin compound built from the same word for silver.

For the branch that never crossed the sea the position differs in one respect only: its descendant is described at length. The guidance given for the reading of Elvish names treats the High Speech and the Grey-elven tongue and no third, so that Telerin proper has no pronunciation set down for it anywhere; whatever may be inferred about the family's habits must be read off the branch that was given a full account. There the voiceless th of English thin is kept, while in the High Speech the same sound had passed into s, which went on being written with its own separate sign; and the vowel written y, formed with the lips rounded as for u, is assigned to the Grey-elven speech alone among the tongues described. Both observations belong properly to the daughter and not to the mother, and they are cited here for what they are: the nearest thing to a phonetic description that the tongue's line possesses.

Two systems of letters are described in the account of writing appended to the tale of the Ring, and they are said to have been independent in origin. The tengwar, named so in the High Speech and tîw in the Grey-elven tongue, were made in Aman by the Noldor and were pen-work from the first, suited to ink and a flowing hand. The certar or cirth, the runes, were devised afterwards in Beleriand by the kindred who had remained east of the sea, and their angular shapes answer to the use they were put to, being cut into wood, stone and metal rather than written; for a long while they served for names and short memorials and for little else. Of the branch that crossed the water nothing whatever is recorded on this head. The letters made in Aman are credited to the Noldor, and no script is anywhere named as belonging to the mariners of the haven or as fitted to their speech, so that what can be said about the writing of this tongue belongs almost wholly to its eastern side.

There the position was the reverse: a people who had no other Elvish tongue to reckon with also had letters of their own devising, elaborated by Daeron, minstrel and loremaster at the court of Thingol, and the fuller arrangements of the runes carry his name. The record is nonetheless plain about how little his own folk made of them, and about who did: the Dwarves who came into Beleriand learned the runes and prized them above what the Elves who invented them thought of them, carrying them east over the mountains, where they were still being cut in stone in Moria long afterwards. When the Noldor came out of the West with the tengwar, those letters were taken up for continuous writing, and the Grey-elven speech came to be set down in them — as upon the elven door at the western entrance of Moria, written in the Fëanorian characters after the manner used in Beleriand. Neither change argues neglect of the tongue itself. It was written in two systems and read in both, and the shift from one to the other is a matter of what a pen can do that a chisel cannot.

The tongue is nowhere actually spoken on the page. Through the tale of the Elder Days the third kindred are constantly present — at the shore, at the haven, upon the water, and at the worst hour in the harbour where their ships were taken — yet nothing they say is reported in their own language, and every name the narrative gives to them, to their lord and to their city belongs to the High Speech in which the whole account is framed. Where speech itself becomes a matter of the story, as when their long dwelling apart is said to have changed the way they talked, the change is stated and not shown. The appendices to the tale of the Ring are no more forthcoming: they set out two Elvish tongues at length, and the people concerned enter only obliquely, as those of the Eldar who came to the coasts of Middle-earth and lingered there instead of passing over the sea, from whom the Grey-elven speech descended. A reader who goes to the narratives themselves for a specimen will come away empty-handed.

What survives in the published matter stands in apparatus rather than in story. The list of name-elements appended to the tale of the Elder Days glosses the word for silver and remarks in passing that the High Speech took up the mariners' form of it rather than the one its own habits would have yielded; the reader meets the tongue there, in a note, attached to a name he has already passed a hundred pages earlier without knowing that anything foreign was in it. That is the whole of its showing in that book — one word, cited for comparison, in a glossary.

The fullest showing is a note on two names, printed among the material gathered about the Lady and Lord of Lórien. It is there that the tongue comes nearest to being placed in a speaker's mouth: in the account followed in that note, the Lord of Lórien is not a Sinda of Doriath but a prince of the haven and kin to Olwë's house, so that the name by which he is known is the Grey-elven rendering of one he bore natively; and the name the Lady chose to be known by, likewise a rendering, was the one he had given her, a compound meaning a maiden crowned with a garland of radiance. Whether the note is taken as etymology or as episode, it supplies what the narratives do not — a Telerin word said by somebody, to somebody, for a reason.

Tolkien said of his own undertaking that the making of languages was its foundation, and that the stories were written to give those languages a world in which they could be spoken rather than the other way about. He was equally explicit about two of the models he worked from: the High Speech of Aman was shaped with Finnish in his ear, a language whose discovery as a student he described as the opening of an unexpected store, while the Grey-elven tongue was made on purpose to have the sound of Welsh and something of its grammatical manner, so that it might stand to the High Speech much as Welsh stands to Latin. For the third tongue no such model is named anywhere in the published letters. What can be seen of its construction is structural rather than acoustic: it was made to sit between the two he did describe, near enough to the High Speech that a pair of cousin words differ by no more than a consonant or a syllable, and yet the ancestor of the speech built on a Welsh pattern. Its purpose in the scheme was to make that descent credible.

The method behind it is that of a comparative philologist rather than of a maker of codes, and it shows most plainly where a form declines to follow the rule. The word for silver in the High Speech ought by that tongue's own habits to have taken one shape and took another; the note appended to the tale of the Elder Days accounts for the irregularity by borrowing from the mariners, which is precisely the kind of explanation historical linguistics offers for a word that will not be regular. An invented irregularity, supplied with an invented reason, is a fair specimen of how the whole family was built. Of alterations in his thinking the published matter preserves little, since almost all of the relevant writing remained unprinted in his lifetime; the one shift that can be followed concerns not the language but a speaker of it. In the tale as edited, the Lord of Lórien is a kinsman of Thingol and a man of Doriath, whereas a late piece gathered among the Galadriel material makes him a prince of the haven in Aman instead. That change of descent is also a change in the tongue's reach, giving it a named speaker in the story where before it had only glossed forms.