Valarin

The word Valarin is not a self-designation but an Elvish one: an adjectival form built on Valar, the plural of Vala, and used by the Eldar in the plain sense of "belonging to the Valar". The stem behind it is the element meaning "power", which recurs across a whole family of Quenya names — Valinor, Valimar, Valacirca, Valaraukar — so that the language name carries, at root, the same sense as the name of its speakers: the tongue of the Powers. The Valaquenta glosses that name directly, calling the Valar the Powers of Arda and noting that Men have often spoken of them as gods; the designation is therefore descriptive of rank and office rather than of any people or homeland, which is unusual among Elvish language names, where Quenya, Sindarin and Telerin all point to a kindred or a place.

That the naming is Elvish through and through is stated where the Valar are first set out by name: the roster given there is expressly in the speech of the Eldar of Valinor, and the same beings are known otherwise among the Elves of Middle-earth and under many names again among Men. The Sindarin cognate of Vala was Balan, with the plural Belain, so that a Grey-elven speaker had his own form of the term for the Powers; but the language name itself is transmitted in its Quenya shape. No name that the Valar might have used among themselves for their own speech is recorded anywhere.

The asymmetry is worth marking. Everything preserved about this tongue reaches the reader through Elvish record and Elvish nomenclature, and the High-elven speech in which it is named was itself the first of the Elvish languages to be set down in writing. Tolkien, writing about his invented world in his own voice, renders Valar simply as the powers or rulers set over the world, angelic guardians rather than gods proper — which is the sense the Eldar built into the name of their speech.

Properly the speech had one order of speakers: the Ainur who entered the world and took visible shape within it. The Valaquenta is careful about what that shape is — raiment rather than body in the manner of the Children, assumed so that the Powers might walk seen among them — and it is with that assumption of form, and not with their being, that audible speech is associated at all. With the Valar are to be counted the Maiar, the lesser spirits of their households, of whom the histories name only a handful: Ossë and Uinen of the waters, Melian, Olórin. Beyond that circle nothing is recorded. No exchange in the tongue is reported anywhere in the narratives, and no speaker of it appears who is not one of the Powers or of their following.

Toward the Children the traffic ran the other way. When Oromë found the newly awakened Elves by the waters of Cuiviénen he gave them a name in their own speech, calling them Eldar, the people of the stars; the first recorded meeting of a Vala with the Quendi is thus conducted in Quendian, not in the tongue of the finder. The pattern holds in Aman. Aulë was the friend and teacher of the Noldor, and much of their craft and lore came from him, but nothing suggests that his language went with it; and when he did furnish a people with a speech of their own, he devised a new one for the Dwarves he had made and taught them that, rather than sharing his own. Melian, longest dwelling of any Maia among the Children, gave her counsel and her lore to the Sindar of Doriath in their tongue.

It was therefore never a daily tongue in any land, and never a tongue of lore either, for that office among the Eldar fell to Quenya, which the Exiles kept as a language of ceremony and high matters and which the Númenóreans and after them the loremasters of Gondor learned as such. Among Men there is no record of any acquaintance with the speech of the Valar whatever. Nor was it secret in the Dwarvish manner: the Dwarves withheld Khuzdul on purpose and took their outward names from the tongues of Men so that their own should not be overheard, whereas the Valar guarded nothing. Theirs was simply a speech few wished to learn and fewer had occasion to use, and what crossed from it into Elvish did so as scattered words rather than as a language anyone kept.

The Ainulindalë places the beginning of things before Arda existed at all: Ilúvatar propounded his themes, the Ainur made a great Music upon them, and were afterwards shown a Vision of a world not yet made. Only then did those among them who chose it descend into Eä, which they found formless and dark, and they laboured through ages the histories do not number to give Arda the shape they had been shown. That account describes music, thought, and the word of Ilúvatar addressed to them, but records nothing of any tongue used among the Powers themselves; and the Valaquenta, in setting out the forms they afterwards wore, treats those forms as taken up within the world rather than brought into it. A speech belonging to the Valar therefore cannot be older than their descent, and stands with the long dark labour of shaping rather than with the Music that preceded it.

The awakening of the Quendi under the stars gave the Powers, for the first time, others in the world to speak with. What followed was not a spreading of their own speech but a summons: the Valar took counsel and called the Elves to Valinor, and when the Quendi feared the crossing, three ambassadors — Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë — were brought over Sea and returned to urge their kindreds westward. Through the Years of the Trees the Eldar of the three kindreds dwelt in Aman among the Powers and took much from them in craft and lore. The measure of what did not pass is that when writing was first achieved in Tirion, by Rúmil of the Noldor, it was devised to record Elvish speech and Elvish song; and the later letters of Fëanor served the same tongues. From the first, the written record of Valinor was kept in the language of the Children.

The Darkening of Valinor and the flight of the Noldor closed that period of near dealing. On the northern shore the herald of Manwë spoke to the host, and Mandos afterwards pronounced their doom, and both were understood at once by those they were spoken to; the exchange runs in the Noldorin tongue, as every reported exchange between Powers and Children does. In Beleriand the position of that tongue then worsened. When Thingol learned how the Noldor had come, he forbade the speech of Valinor throughout his realm, so that the Exiles took up Sindarin for daily use and kept their own for lore and high occasions. The one vessel by which anything of the Powers' speech had travelled thus became itself a language of ceremony west of the Sea, and by the drowning of Beleriand and the departure of many Eldar over Sea at the end of the First Age it had no daily ground left in Middle-earth at all.

In the Second Age the Valar dealt with Men directly for the only time of which there is a full account. Númenor was raised for the Edain within sight of the West, and the Ban forbade its people to sail beyond sight of their own shores; when they began to murmur against it, messengers came from Valinor and reasoned with the King about death and the gift of mortality. The Akallabêth reports that conversation without any note of an interpreter or of an unfamiliar speech. What was proscribed in Númenor afterwards was Elvish: Ar-Gimilzôr forbade the Eldarin tongues, and Adûnaic became the language of the King's Men. With the Downfall in S.A. 3319 and the removal of Aman from the circles of the world, the road that had carried the Powers' envoys was closed for good.

One late episode belongs to the record. About the year 1000 of the Third Age the Istari appeared in Middle-earth, emissaries out of the West in the guise of aged Men, and they were of the order of the Maiar; yet through two thousand years among Elves, Dwarves, Men and Hobbits they used the languages of those peoples, and each was known by the names those peoples gave him rather than by any of his own. When the Third Age ended in 3021 and the last of them passed over Sea with the keepers of the Rings, nothing was left in Middle-earth that had ever spoken the tongue of the Powers. Its history is accordingly not one of rise and decline: it never spread far enough to be displaced, and never decayed, since its speakers did not die. What faded was only the possibility of hearing it, and what remained was a handful of words carried inside Quenya and a short written notice of the rest.

No connected passage of the tongue is set down anywhere in the published narratives, and no one is ever heard using it; what stands in its place is a body of Elvish names, and those names are Elvish in every part. The list of name-elements appended to the Silmarillion resolves a number of them into ordinary Eldarin words: Yavanna out of the terms for fruit and for gift, Nienna out of the word for a tear, Melian out of a compound meaning dear gift. The same Power may carry names with nothing in common but their bearer, since Varda is Elbereth among the Sindar and the two forms share neither stem nor shape. Wherever such a name can be taken apart, what comes out is Elvish morphology, so that the nomenclature of the Powers is evidence for the speech of the Children rather than for the speech it stands in for.

The same holds for the things of Aman themselves. The Two Trees are known by names transparently built on the words for silver and for gold, and the lights that were drawn from them at the end are given twice over in Elvish and never a third time: the Noldor called the Moon and Sun Isil and Anar, and the Sindar of Middle-earth Ithil and Anor. That is the characteristic shape of the record. Where an object of Valinor is named, the narratives supply a High-elven form and often a Grey-elven one beside it, with the sense of each recoverable from known stems, and say nothing of what the makers of those objects called them among themselves.

The contrast with the treatment other tongues receive is sharp. Appendix E describes how the Elvish languages sounded down to the values of single letters and the points where High-elven and Grey-elven diverged, and Appendix F, in surveying the speech of Men, Dwarves, Ents and Orcs, both names the Dwarves' own word for their kindred and remarks on how ill the Black Speech and the jargon of the orcs fell on other ears. For the tongue of the Powers there is no such notice at all: no account of its sounds, no specimen, not even a judgement on its manner. Within the books published in Tolkien's lifetime and the Silmarillion, therefore, it has no describable sound and no describable structure — only a name, and the statement that it existed.

Every system of letters named in the histories is of the Children's devising. Besides the signs first achieved in Tirion, which have already been noticed, the Silmarillion assigns a second invention to Beleriand: Daeron, the loremaster and minstrel of Thingol's court, devised the runes, and it was the Naugrim rather than the Sindar who valued them, taking the craft eastward and keeping it in use long after the Elves who made it had let it lapse. No third tradition is recorded, and none of any kind is ascribed to the Powers. Nothing in the narratives shows a Vala writing, and no book, tablet or graven line is said to be in their hand; the little that survives of their speech survives because Elvish loremasters set it down in Elvish letters within Elvish books.

Appendix E treats both alphabets as Eldarin in origin and then follows them outward, tongue by tongue. The runes were taken up by the Dwarves and reworked into the form used at Moria, in which the tomb in the Chamber of Mazarbul was cut; the Fëanorian letters served the Common Speech, were used for Sindarin in a mode of Beleriand such as stood upon the West-gate of Moria, and were turned at last to the speech Sauron made for his servants, which is what Gandalf read in the fiery lettering of the Ring. Appendix F, in its survey of the other races, adds nothing further and gives no writing to the tongue of the Powers at all. The pattern is therefore consistent and worth stating plainly: Elvish script was fitted to the languages of Men, Dwarves and the Enemy alike, and never, so far as the record goes, to the one language spoken by those the Eldar reckoned highest. Whatever standing that tongue held, it rested wholly on its speakers, and left no written tradition of its own for anyone to inherit.

The Quenta gives a fair number of scenes in which a Power and one of the Children speak face to face, and in none of them is a second language in play. Melkor's undoing of the Noldor is conducted wholly in their own speech: he moves among them with counsel and rumour and with talk of hidden purposes, and when he comes at last to Fëanor with words about weapons and about a realm of one's own, he is heard, understood, and driven from the door in the same tongue. After the Darkening, Manwë's summons brings Fëanor to the Ring of Doom, where Yavanna asks him for the Silmarils to rekindle the Trees and he refuses before the whole assembly. Vala and Elf argue there as parties to a single conversation, and the narrative marks no difficulty in it beyond the will of the speakers.

The fullest speech by a Vala anywhere in the corpus is Ulmo's to Tuor at the deserted halls of Vinyamar, where he rises out of the storm and lays an errand on a Man of the House of Hador. It runs at length, and Tuor carries the charge inland and delivers it before Turgon in Gondolin; nothing in the telling suggests that he heard anything he could not follow, or that he repeated words not his own to say. The same holds at the other end of the age, when Eärendil comes ashore in Aman, is greeted by Eönwë the herald of Manwë, and sets the plea of Elves and Men before the Powers in the Ring of Doom. A mariner out of Beleriand pleads and is answered, and the account passes over the question of tongues entirely.

In The Lord of the Rings the Powers are called upon repeatedly, and every word addressed to them is Elvish. Gildor's company sing to the Star-queen under the trees of the Shire; Frodo cries her Grey-elven name at Weathertop and Sam cries it again on the stairs above Cirith Ungol; Galadriel's song at the parting from Lórien is High-elven throughout, naming Varda on her mountain and turning at the last toward Valimar. Set against these is a small negative notice worth recording: before the West-gate of Moria, Gandalf — himself of the order of the Powers' following — says that he once knew the opening-spells in every tongue of Elves, of Men and of Orcs. The tongue of those who sent him is not in that list, and it is nowhere else in the book either.

Tolkien's own account of his method puts the languages first: he described the invention of tongues as the foundation of the whole work, and the tales as having been made to give those tongues a world to be spoken in rather than the other way about. What he built in that manner he built historically, deriving later forms from earlier by regular change, and he was candid about the real models behind the sound of each. High-elven he characterised as an Elven-Latin, a language whose ingredients he took chiefly from Finnish, with something of Latin and Greek in it, while the Grey-elven tongue was shaped to a character much like that of British Welsh; even the Dwarvish words, he remarked, were given a deliberately Semitic cast. No comparable statement survives for the speech of the Powers. In everything he published in his lifetime, and in the letters where he explained his workshop to correspondents, that tongue is named and left unmodelled — a language of which the reader is told that it exists, without a phonology, a grammar or a real-world analogue to hear it against.

The framing he chose for The Lord of the Rings goes some way to explain the silence. The book presents itself as a translation of a hobbit chronicle: the Common Speech is rendered as English, and the tongues most closely related to it are rendered by older stages of English to keep their relative distance visible. Everything therefore reaches the page through a chain of recorders, and only what a recorder could hear gets described. Appendix E accordingly sets out letters and sound-values for the Elvish tongues, since those are the languages the fiction's own scholars possessed; Appendix F, turning to the other races, characterises Dwarvish, Entish and the speech of the Enemy's servants largely by their effect on outside ears — their strangeness, their length, their harshness — rather than by their structure. That is the workshop habit that governs the tongue of the Valar as well. Where Tolkien had not elaborated a language, he did not invent a description of it; he reported instead how it struck those who were not its speakers, which is a judgement his loremasters could plausibly make and his readers could not check.