Original Thinking in Avallonian

“I remain puzzled, and indeed sometimes irritated, by many of the guesses at the ‘sources’ of the nomenclature, and theories or fancies concerning hidden meanings. These seem to me no more than private amusements, and as such I have no right or power to object to them, though they are, I think, valueless for the elucidation or interpretation of my fiction.” (Letter 297)

The way Tolkien describes the ‘sources’ of his names as being “valueless for [..] the interpretation of my fiction” (Letter 297) again highlights his desire for his work to be free of conscious allegory. He describes his story as being his own, taking place in his own world, and thus the names and words of his languages are mostly original and that “chance-similarities between names made from ‘Elvish tongues’ and words in exterior ‘real’ languages” is a fruitless endeavor “especially if this is supposed to have any bearing on the meaning or ideas in my story” (Letter 297). This explanation is echoed in the idea of linguistic “congruence”  that occurs when words “in two different languages, quite unconnected, and where no borrowing from one to the other is possible, you will come across words very similar in both sound and meaning” (Night 66). Tolkien separates his own fiction and exterior sources: “Investigators, indeed, seem mostly confused in mind between (a) the meaning of names within, and appropriate to, my story and belonging to a fictional ‘historic’ construction, and (b) the origins or sources in my mind, exterior to the story, of the forms of these names” (Letter 297). Even though he wants his “fictional ‘historic’ construction” to be mapped onto our world in ‘reality,’ this is still fantasy and Middle Earth is a fantastical history of our ‘real’ world.

Tolkien refers to his source of the names of the dwarves (and of Gandalf) in the Völuspá. The first possible reason for this, that comes to mind, is that he liked the “flavour” of the names—as he talks about language in one of his letters (Letter 163). This is echoed in The Notion Club Papers: as it is “flavour of the words that suited me [Lowdham]” (Night 66).  However, this is made more unclear when he explains the source of the dwarves’ names: “the influence of memory of names or words already known, or of ‘echoes’ in the linguistic memory, and few have been unconscious. Thus the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit (and additions in the L.R. ) are derived from the lists in Völuspá of the names of dvergar; but this is no key to the dwarf-legends in The L.R. The ‘dwarves’ of my legends are far nearer to the dwarfs of Germanic [legends] than are the Elves, but still in many ways very different from them” (Letter 297). He does not mention that he likes the taste/flavour of these dwarfish names (which is not to say that he doesn’t) but does say that his legends of his dwarves are separate from the legends of the dvergar.

What does this mean? Does Tolkien’s use of names from languages and mythologies, such as the names of the dwarves, invoke the source’s mythology even if Tolkien does not intend for that to be the case? Maybe, but I think that is what Tolkien is trying to avoid. I wonder if using these names was intentional—because one has to dissociate what one knows about the dwarves in Norse myth form the dwarves in the legendarium. By using the same names from another mythos, does Tolkien create a paradigm shift in which the reader must dissociate the origin and meaning of names from the legendarium? Does this (consciously or unconsciously) encourage the reader to apply the same dissociation to other aspects of the story such as allegory and “hidden meanings” (Letter 297)? I find it likely that this is (consciously or not) a good reason for his use of the dvergar names (and an even better reason when the name is not for a dwarf, but an Ishtar (looking past the fact that Gandalf was not Tolkien’s original name for him)).

 How are we to understand language and keep our understanding congruous with Tolkien’s notions of language? One way to think about names and language is to associate them with regions and cultures. Names of the same person differ depending on where he goes—for example, Gandalf’s name (as we talked about in class): “‘Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not’” (LOTR). The countries Gandalf travels to is defined by the people who live there. Marco said in the chat that “Our languages represent how we interact with the world.” I think this is a great way to think about language as a defining feature of our cultural, societal, and individual identity.

Nearing the end of our discussion we talked about the connection between language and culture and asked if Tolkien would want us all to speak the same language. The chat responded with a resounding “no” as there would be a critical lack of unique myths and stories. This shows we clearly think as a class that Tolkien agrees with the social, cultural, and psychological power of spoken language.

—Jared Zuker