Westron

Westron is the proper name of the Common Speech, and within the old realms of Arnor and Gondor it was the native language of nearly every speaking people except the Elves. As a mother tongue it ran along the whole coast from Umbar to the Bay of Forochel, inland to the Misty Mountains and the Ephel Dúath, and up the Anduin as far as the Gladden Fields. Beyond that it was the second language of everyone who needed one — used even by Elves as far east as Mirkwood, and known in broken form among Wild Men and Dunlendings.

It is a language of Men, softened and enriched under Elvish influence, and it can be traced to a place and a situation. Its ancestor is Adûnaic, the native speech of Númenor; at the Númenórean haven of Pelargir at the mouths of Anduin that speech mingled with words from the languages of lesser Men, and the mixture spread from there along the coasts among all who had dealings with Westernesse. That was still the Second Age — the Common Speech is older than the downfall of the island that produced it.

The Dúnedain used it because they had to. They were a thin ruling layer over more numerous peoples, and Westron was what administration and dealings with others required. They also worked on it: they deliberately enlarged and ennobled the language with many words taken from the Elven-tongues. Under the kings this refined Westron spread widely, even among the enemies of Gondor — and in Gondor itself, where it had begun, it kept a graver and more antique cast than elsewhere.

Westron is the only one of these languages that a reader never sees. The rule of Appendix F is absolute: languages foreign to the Common Speech appear in their own form, and everything that was Westron has been turned into modern English. Every line the hobbits speak, every name of the Shire, the word hobbit itself — all of it is rendered, not quoted. What looks like the absence of a language is in fact its presence everywhere.

The translation has a price, and Tolkien names it. The actual range between the country dialect of the Shire and the older, more formal and terser usage of Gondor and Rohan was wider than the English can show. Better-read hobbits had a book-language and adjusted their manner to whom they were addressing, which is the reason for the differences in style between Frodo, Sam, Gandalf and Aragorn — differences that in the original were differences of language, not only of character.

One grammatical feature is described outright, and it is the only one. The language kept two sets of pronouns apart in the second person, and frequently in the third as well: one familiar, one deferential. Whether one or many were addressed made no difference to the choice. In the Shire the deferential forms had dropped out of ordinary use and survived only among village people, chiefly of the West-farthing, as endearments. This is not an ornament: in Minas Tirith Peregrin Took addressed everyone of every rank — Denethor included — in the familiar forms, and it helped along the rumour that he was a prince in his own country. A whole misunderstanding rests on a pronoun that the English text cannot show.

Because the rendering is consistent, an English name in the text is itself a piece of information: it means that at the time of the story a Westron name was in use. Most of those Westron names were themselves translations of older, usually Elvish ones — Rivendell, Hoarwell, Silverlode, Langstrand, the Enemy, the Dark Tower. Some had drifted in meaning: Mount Doom for Orodruin, the burning mountain, and Mirkwood for Taur e-Ndaedelos. Others were only sound-shapes of Elvish words worn down by use, as Lune and Brandywine came from Lhûn and Baranduin.

A handful of genuine Westron forms are given, and they are worth having. The Shire was Sûza. Rivendell was Karningul. Moria in the Common Speech was Phurunargian, Dwarrowdelf, which even then sounded archaic — which is why the archaic English word was chosen for it. And the people themselves: the general Westron word was banakil, halfling, while in the Shire and Bree they said kuduk. Hobbit is an invention of the translator.

Even the endings are systematic. In hobbit names -a was the masculine ending and -o and -e the feminine, and the anglicised forms in the book were made by exchanging them. The strange-sounding names of Buckland come from somewhere else entirely: from the earlier language of the Stoors of the south, and they were rendered with Celtic-sounding names to preserve that strangeness. Readers who feel that Buckland sounds unlike the rest of the Shire are hearing something real.

The Quenya layer in everyday Westron is larger than one would guess from a language of Men. The month-names were kept in Quenya form, much as Latin month-names are used in modern languages — the comparison is drawn in the sources themselves — and the same held for the days of the week. Only the hobbits insisted on translations of their own. The Stewards' Reckoning that Mardil introduced was taken up by most Westron speakers; again the Shire went its own way. A calendar is a good measure of how deep a borrowing goes, because nobody changes one for fashion.

It served as the language of record in the plainest sense. When Cirion and Eorl swore their oath, Cirion spoke his in Quenya and then repeated it in the Common Speech, and Eorl's was interpreted out of the tongue of the Éothéod into the same. Two peoples with no language between them met in a third — which is what a common speech is for, stated once in a scene instead of described in an appendix. Names arose the same way: Balchoth is a mixed word of popular speech, Westron balc, horrible, with Sindarin hoth, horde.

Two limits of the language show in single words. Westron had no back fricative ch of the Welsh kind, which is why unlearned men of Gondor said h where Sindarin wrote ch inside a word — the sound change that turned Rochand into Rohan came from the mouths of people speaking the Common Speech. And Gandalf's popular name in Westron was a word already archaic then, meaning greymantle, mirrored in the Rohirric Greyhame that Éomer uses; but Incánus is expressly explicable neither from Westron nor from Elvish nor from the surviving northern tongues. Even the language everyone shared had an outside.

The hobbits had taken up Westron about a thousand years before the War of the Ring, and they used it in their own free and careless way. There is no evidence that they ever had a language of their own; they always used the speech of the Men near whom they lived. Their earlier tongue seems to have been a language of Men of the upper Anduin, related to that of the Rohirrim, and it was already being forgotten by the time Bree was settled. What survived of it survived as a layer inside Shire Westron — the names of days, months and seasons above all, and scattered words and place-names in Bree and the Shire.

This is the reason for one of the most-discussed decisions in the book. The language of Rohan is presented as Old English because it was distantly related to Westron and very closely related to the former language of the northern hobbits — and because it was, against Westron, expressly archaic. More than once the Red Book notes what happened when hobbits heard Rohan spoken: a good deal of it was already familiar to them, and they took the tongue for a relative of their own. The device is not decoration; it renders a real relationship in the fiction by a real relationship in English.

One word carries the whole argument. Kuduk, what the hobbits called themselves, is probably a worn-down form of the Rohirric kûd-dûkan, hole-dweller — the word Théoden used. Meriadoc Brandybuck recorded that explicitly, and he went on to write a treatise, Old Words and Names in the Shire, on the kinship between Shire words such as mathom and the language of Rohan. A hobbit doing comparative philology on his own dialect is the closest the book comes to putting its own method on the page.

Westron was common but not universal, and the exceptions matter. The tongue of the Wild Men of the Drúadan Forest was wholly alien to it; Ghân-buri-Ghân speaks the Common Speech haltingly, mixed with words of his own, gorgûn for Orcs. Dunlendish was foreign or only distantly related — which is worth stating, because it shows that Westron did not simply absorb every language of Men in the West. The people of Bree descended from the same stock as the Dunlendings but had long since become subjects of Arnor and taken up the Common Speech instead.

The other edge is Mordor. Orcs used Westron to make themselves understood between breeds, and older tribes in the north and the Misty Mountains spoke it as a mother tongue — badly. From that quarter comes tark, a man of Gondor, a mangled form of tarkil, a Quenya word that Westron had borrowed for men of Númenórean descent. Two Orcs of different breeds argue their way through the Morgai in the Common Speech, and the Uruk-hai talk to Pippin in it, made almost as ugly as their own. Even the Stone-trolls of the West had it, in a corrupted shape. The language of the kings had become the working language of their enemies.

Among the Elves the picture reverses. In Lórien few could or would speak Westron, and the Company was left largely isolated in their own language — one of the few places in the story where the travellers cannot simply be understood. The single occurrence of the word Westron in the narrative itself is nearby: Legolas sings the song of Nimrodel in the Westron tongue, as it is sung in Rivendell.

Two sounds are recorded for the language, and both are given by way of what its speakers did to Elvish. The sound of English ch was common in Westron, and its speakers regularly substituted it for Elvish ty; the sound of English sh was likewise common and took the place of Elvish hy. That is the whole of the recorded phonology, and it is enough to hear an accent: Westron speakers pulled Elvish words toward their own mouth.

Both writing systems were adapted to it. In the Third Age the Fëanorian tengwar spread over roughly the same area in which the Common Speech was known, and its mode reflects those same sounds: because Westron used ch, j and sh so much, series III was given to them and series IV took over the ordinary k-row. Among the runes, the two new Cirth of the Angerthas Moria, numbers 55 and 56, stood for a vowel common in Dwarvish and in Westron. A language exists in what its writers had to invent for it.

One practical rule follows from the translation for anyone reading aloud. Since Westron has been replaced throughout by English equivalents, hobbit names and special words are to be pronounced as English: Bolger with the vowel of bulge, mathom rhyming with fathom. The Elvish rules of Appendix E do not apply to them — a distinction that is easy to miss and that decides how half the characters' names sound.

The Rohirrim are the clearest counter-case in the West. They kept their ancestral tongue and renamed almost every place in their new country in it; only their lords spoke Westron freely, and those in the manner of Gondor. Éomer meeting Aragorn speaks the Common Speech of the West in tone and manner like Boromir — the dialect gives away where a man was schooled before he says anything about himself.

The northern peoples sit in between. The languages of the Beornings, the Woodmen, the Men of the Long Lake and of Dale were related to Adûnaic and in part still resembled Westron — kinship close enough to hear, distant enough to keep them separate peoples. The Dwarves fall outside the scheme in their own way: they kept Khuzdul secret and used the languages of the Men among whom they lived, which in the West meant Westron. Their public speech was always somebody else's.

And in Gondor itself the layers are audible within a single conversation. Faramir's men in Ithilien first speak Westron after the manner of older days and then change into the Elven-tongue — two registers and two languages in one encounter, which is what a five-thousand-year-old chain of borrowings sounds like when it reaches a company of soldiers eating supper.

Westron is an English word, and a late one even inside the drafts. Its speakers called their language Adûni; in Sindarin it was Annúnaid, and an earlier draft layer has the Noldorin name Falathren, the shore-language, with Soval Phare, the common speech, as the speakers' own term. The endonym passed through Yandune, Andunar and Adunar before it settled. The English name itself was formed late, apparently on the pattern of the old word southron; before that the drafts say Westnish throughout.

There is more of the language than was ever printed. Tolkien stated that he had sketched Westron in structure and sound and invented a number of words; most of that material fell out of the appendix as it went to press. What survives in Appendix F is therefore not a summary of a thin invention but the visible part of a fuller one — which explains why the few genuine forms that did survive, banakil, kuduk, Karningul, Sûza, Phurunargian, look like samples rather than the whole.

The latest essay tells the story of its origin differently from Appendix F, and the difference is worth keeping rather than smoothing away. There the Faithful use Sindarin, Adûnaic is left to unguarded change, sinks to being the speech of the unlearned — and precisely as that vulgar language it spreads as a lingua franca among peoples of quite different kinds, used by Elves and Dwarves in dealings with each other and with Men. The printed appendix has the language of the kings enriched by design; the late essay has the language of the disregarded spreading by use. Both are Tolkien's.

The language carries two designations in the book, and they are not used in the same places. Westron is the proper name, and it belongs almost wholly to the appendix, where the matter is set out in the manner of a grammar; in the narrative the tongue is called the Common Speech, and now and then the Common Tongue. Appendix F introduces the two as equivalents at the very first mention, so that the reader is told once that the technical name and the everyday phrase point at the same thing. Of the two, the descriptive one carries more information. Common here does not mean ordinary or low: it means held in common, shared, the speech that two parties with nothing else between them can fall back on. It is a name for a function rather than for a possession.

The other half of the name is a direction. Westron is built on west, and the fuller form given in the appendix ties it to the West-lands; where another language might be named after a nation, this one is named after a quarter of the world. The naming repeats a pattern already old by the Third Age. The Númenóreans called their island Anadûnê, Westernesse, and the element adûn, west, sits inside their royal titles as well, as in the name Adûnakhôr, Lord of the West. The language and the people who carried it are thus named twice over for the same compass point, once in their own speech and once in the English of the translation. The contrast with the Elvish tongues is instructive: those are named for the peoples who spoke them, this one for a region and a use, because it was the property of no single people.

What the speakers called it themselves is a question the published book quietly declines to answer. Every designation a reader is given stands in English — Westron, the Common Speech, the Common Tongue — and no form in the language itself is printed, though Tolkien's unpublished papers supply one. The label is also used from outside as freely as from within: when Gandalf renders the words of the Ring for his hearers at Bag End, the tongue he turns them into is named as the Common Tongue, and it is the same term whether the speaker's own language is Elvish, Dwarvish or that of Rohan. That is fitting for a name that describes a role. The Common Speech is what everyone in the West-lands called the thing they could all use, and it needed no owner's name because it had no owner.

Within its own range Westron was simply what people spoke, and it carried no mark of rank. A king and a farmer used the same language, and nothing in the book suggests that a Man of Gondor thought of the Common Speech as beneath him or a hobbit thought of it as above him. What stood above it were not higher forms of Westron but other tongues entirely. High-elven was nowhere a cradle-language by the Third Age; it survived as a language of lore and ceremony, learned by those who had occasion to learn it. Sindarin sat closer to daily life: in Gondor it was still used by those of nobler descent, and a few families kept it as a birth-tongue. Neither of these displaced Westron. They were additions on top of a floor that everybody already stood on.

The reach of the language is best measured by its odder speakers. Treebeard, the oldest living thing that walks, meets Merry and Pippin in the Common Speech and continues in it, though his own tongue was slow past bearing and was never handed on to anyone outside his kind; the Ents had learned speech from the Elves and went on collecting it. Gollum kept a broken, hissing Westron through centuries alone under the mountains, and it was still serviceable enough for the riddle-game and for guiding two hobbits across Ithilien. At the Black Gate, Sauron's emissary parleys with the Captains of the West in it, without difficulty. A language that runs from an Ent to a creature ruined by the Ring to the mouthpiece of Mordor is not a class dialect.

What Westron never was is a secret. The Dwarves guarded their own language and the Black Speech was made for a single service, understood by few and hated where it was recognised — Gandalf had only to utter a little of it at Elrond's house to appal the company. Against both, the Common Speech had no threshold and no keeper. It was picked up by those who needed it, taught to those who wanted it, and spoken badly by many without anyone having standing to object. That is the whole meaning of the descriptive name: a possession held in common cannot be withheld.

A chronology can be laid over the language, because most of the events that shaped it are dated. The first ships of the Númenóreans appeared off the coasts of Middle-earth about the year 600 of the Second Age, and for a long while afterwards the traffic was one of mariners and havens rather than of settlement. Pelargir was built in 2350 and became the chief haven of those Númenóreans who kept faith with the Eldar, which fixes both the place where the mixture arose and the party that carried it outward. On the island itself the ancestral speech was moving in the opposite direction: in 2899 Ar-Adûnakhôr took the sceptre under a title in Adûnaic, the first king to do so, and under Ar-Gimilzôr the use of the Elven-tongues was forbidden outright. The same Adûnaic that was hardening into a badge of the King's Men at home was loosening into a language of dealings on the mainland.

The Downfall of 3319 took away the language's homeland without taking the language. Adûnaic as Númenor spoke it went down with the island; the coastal speech grown from it was long established on the mainland and stood outside the disaster entirely. When Elendil and his sons founded the realms in exile in 3320, they came ashore in country where a form of their own tongue was already current, which is one reason two small companies of survivors could govern peoples far more numerous than themselves. Over the age that followed the advantage compounded: the Common Speech travelled with the power of Gondor south along the coasts and north through Arnor, and it went on spreading in places where that power itself did not last.

In the north the language outlived the state that had brought it there. Hobbits who had crossed the Misty Mountains into Eriador received leave from Argeleb II to settle beyond the Baranduin, and the Shire was founded in 1601 of the Third Age — the year from which they counted every date of their own thereafter. Arthedain, the last of the northern kingdoms, ended in 1974, and the victory won at Fornost in the following year came too late to restore it. For more than a thousand years after that no king ruled in Eriador, and the Common Speech went on being spoken there regardless: at the crossroads in Bree, in the Shire, with nothing behind it but use. That is the clearest evidence that it had ceased to be the language of an administration and become simply the language of the country.

The Third Age ended in 3021 with the departure of the Ring-bearers and the keepers of the Three, and the Fourth began with Westron holding its ground and its chief rivals receding. With the Eldar leaving Middle-earth, the Elven-tongues were becoming everywhere what they had already been in most of Gondor: matters of learning and ceremony rather than of daily use. The Common Speech meanwhile kept the office it had held since the exile kingdoms were founded, that of the language of record. The Red Book was copied in Gondor at the request of a great-grandson of Peregrin Took, and that copy was finished by Findegil, the King's Writer, in the hundred and seventy-second year of the Fourth Age. The last thing the sources report of the language is a scribe in Minas Tirith writing out a hobbit's book — a fair image of what it had been for all along: something set down in one country and read in another.

The largest single body of genuine Westron that reaches the reader is a set of hobbit personal names, and what it shows is a language of long forms with short familiar ones cut out of them. Meriadoc Brandybuck was in the original Kalimac Brandagamba, and the name he actually went by was Kali; Peregrin Took was Razanur Tûk, called Razar; Samwise was Banazîr, shortened to Ban, and his father Hamfast was Ranugad, shortened to Ran. The clipping is regular enough to look like a habit of the speech rather than an accident of four cases, and it is the habit, not the sound, that the English names reproduce. Two of these carry meanings that decided the translation: Kali happened to mean jolly or gay in the Shire, though the full Kalimac was by then a name without sense; Razar was the word for a small red apple. Merry and Pippin are chosen to do in English what the nicknames did in Westron, which is why the pair of them sound like a joke and are in fact a piece of philology.

Where a Westron word is glossed, it usually falls apart into two elements, and the elements carry their weight. Banazîr is half-wise, that is simple; Ranugad is stay-at-home. The river the hobbits called Brandywine was Branda-nîn, border-water, and the Bucklanders' standing jest on it was Bralda-hîm, heady ale — the same first element with the second exchanged, a pun that only works because compounding was the ordinary way the language built a name. The recorded forms also carry marked long vowels, in Sûza and Banazîr and in the second parts of nîn and hîm, which is the one visible sign in print of descent from the speech of Númenor. Beyond that, nothing is said about how the pieces were joined, and nothing should be inferred.

The decisive fact about the shape of Westron is negative: no sentence of it exists. Every specimen given anywhere is a noun, a name, or a compound in isolation, and there is not a verb, an article or a clause to be had. Two points of structure are stated outright — the courtesy distinction in the pronouns and the gender endings of hobbit names, both dealt with above — and they are the whole of the printed grammar. Everything else the reader is told about how the language went belongs to the register of judgement rather than description: that it was softened by Elvish, that it sounded graver in Gondor, that hobbits handled it freely, that in Orc mouths it was made hideous. For a section on how a language is built, that is the honest finding. Westron is described from the outside, by the impression it made on those who heard it spoken, and the impression is the information.

Westron had no writing of its own. The two systems current in the West-lands were both of Elvish making: the tengwar, letters proper, shaped for the brush and the pen, and the cirth or certar, angular characters devised for scratching and incising on wood, stone and metal. The division of labour between them was original rather than permanent, and by the Third Age it had loosened considerably, so that the pen-letters were used for inscriptions as readily as the runes. Men learned the Fëanorian letters at second hand — the Dúnedain had them of the Eldar and carried them into their realms in exile — and what was written in the Common Speech was therefore written in an alphabet that had been made for other languages and fitted to this one afterwards. It is the same relation the vocabulary stands in, worked out in another medium: a tongue of Men enriched, and now recorded, out of Elvish stock.

What the borrowing bought was an ordinary literacy of a very unglamorous kind. The hobbits had their letters from the Dúnedain, who had theirs from the Eldar, and they used them for deeds, genealogies and household books; the oldest surviving book of the Shire was the Yearbook of Tuckborough, called the Yellowskin, a Took family register. In Moria the Company found the opposite case, a single volume written by many hands in runes of Moria and of Dale with Elvish script here and there among them, which is what writing looks like where several peoples keep one record together. Neither script marks the Common Speech as high or low. A language that could be set down by a Took clerk and a Dwarf-scribe alike, in whichever of the two alphabets came to hand, was simply the language things got written in.

Almost every genuine Westron form a reader can point to stands outside the story proper: in Appendix F, and a little in the Prologue, where Tolkien writes as editor rather than as narrator. The narrative keeps its own rule and hands over nothing untranslated, except where a word had come into the Common Speech from outside it and kept its foreign shape. The clearest instance is the name Saruman went by in the Shire. Sharkey is spoken in the story — first by his ruffians, then by the hobbits who had learned it from them, at the end of the Scouring — and it is explained only afterwards, as probably an Orkish word for old man taken over into the Common Speech. What is heard in the text and what is accounted for in the appendix are two different places in the same book.

The one family whose Westron name can be followed through a change is the one that founded Buckland. Appendix F gives Zaragamba, which appears in the English text as Oldbuck, beside Brandagamba, which appears as Brandybuck; the Prologue supplies the event behind the pair, the crossing of the river and the settlement on the far bank, after which the head of the house altered the family name. A reader who notices only that the Brandybucks were once Oldbucks is in fact watching one Westron name replaced by another, with the translation following each step in step. The same appendix supplies the true form of the most familiar name in either book: the finder of the Ring was Bilba, and Bilbo is the translator's adjustment, made so that the name would not look feminine in English.

A few names in the narrative stand as they do because they were never Westron at all. Bree, Combe, Archet and the Chetwood belong to a speech older in that district than the Common Speech, and they are rendered with English elements of Celtic derivation chosen to fit the sense — bree for the hill, chet for the wood. Inside the story nobody remarks on any of this. The hobbits and the Men of the Bree-land use the names as ordinary place-names, and the hill stands over the village without comment, exactly as foreign matter does when it has been in a country long enough. The notice that these are relics arrives only in the appendix, which is where nearly all the visible remains of the language are kept, and where they read less like quotations from the story than like specimens laid out beside it.

Tolkien described the making of languages as the ground of the whole undertaking, and said plainly that the tales existed to give his languages a world to be spoken in rather than the other way about. Quenya and Sindarin were built in that spirit, and he was willing to name the tongues whose sound and shape stood behind them, Finnish for the one and Welsh for the other. Westron belongs to the same workshop but occupies the opposite end of it: a language invented in order to be effaced, whose entire office in the finished book is to be replaced by the author's own English. No real tongue is named as its model, and none is needed, because its character was fixed by its history within the story — a mixed harbour speech that spread because it was useful — rather than by any outside music he wished to imitate. The one place where the invention pressed on the world outside the book was in translation into other languages: since the English of the Shire stands for Westron and not for itself, Tolkien held that a translator had no licence to reshape the nomenclature at will, and he argued the case in detail, at times sharply, when the earliest foreign versions were prepared.

What reaches print is not a single substitution but a graded one. The Common Speech becomes modern English; the tongue of Rohan, related to it and archaic against it, becomes Old English; and the names out of Dale and the North, whose speech was more remotely akin, are given Northern forms — so that a distance between languages inside the story is carried by a real distance between languages outside it. Tolkien attached a caution to this in the appendix itself, and it is easily overlooked: the procedure is linguistic only, and implies nothing about the Rohirrim in their arts, their weapons or their ways of war. The reason for translating at all is set down in the same place, with a pair of names as the demonstration. Rivendell and Imladris were Karningul and Imladris to those who used them, one word familiar and one foreign; had both been left as they stood, the book would have been pushed equally far off in both directions, and the difference between a name one lives with and a name one borrows would have vanished. The device is thus not a convenience but an argument about what a reader is meant to hear, worked out by a philologist on his own material.