Tea at Trianon: On Tolkien, Translation, Linguistics, and the Languages of Middle-earth

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 2, 2022

On Tolkien, Translation, Linguistics, and the Languages of Middle-earth

From TOR:

Tolkien’s academic interest in Germanic languages, especially Old English, is most obvious in the Rohirrim. In the frame narrative, the language of the Rohirrim is unrelated to the language of Gondor (but is related to the Hobbits’ language, as noted when Théoden—or maybe it was Éomer—remarks that he can sort of understand Merry and Pippin’s conversation). Tolkien, as the translator of the RBoW for an English-speaking audience and as an Anglo-Saxon scholar, decided to use Old English to represent it. So the king is Théoden, which is an OE word for “king or leader,” from théod (“people”), and Éowyn is a compound word that means approximately “horse-joy.” The name they give themselves, Eorlings, contains the same eo(h)- “horse” root as Éowyn. Tolkien gives this as “the Men of the Riddermark.” Eorl is also the name of one of their early kings, much like the legendary Jutes who led the invasion of Britain in the 5th century were called Hengist and Horsa, both of which are words for horse (heng(e)st = stallion). (Read more.)