SarahTheCoat

Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

~*~earlier~*~

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Frodo: Merry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll wait.

#legolas’ hick accent vs #frodo’s ‘i learned it out of a book’ accent #FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Frodo: :)

Frodo: Hello. My name is Frodo. I am a Hobbit. How are you?

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo, crying: please I can’t understand what you’r saying

Ok, but Frodo didn’t just learn out of a book. He learned like… Chaucerian Elvish. So actually:

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

Aragorn: *laughing too hard to walk*

@ghostriderofthearagon

dYinGggGggg…

i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.

to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!

Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.

Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*

Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.

Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man

Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s

Tolkien would be SO PROUD of this post

It got better

Ok but what I got from the part about Frodo’s books being written during Elrond’s childhood is that… Frodo would use outdated slang. So consider-

Legolas: y'all’d’ve

Frodo: Far out, man, I dig it

Elvish? Don’t talk to me about Elvish. Before you get started on Elvish, listen to that lot from Buckland speaking what they think is Westron. They don’t sound anything like us honest folk from Hobbiton. And as for Bree…

Frodo’s book-learned Elvish probably sounds ridiculous; Not just like Chaucerian Middle English, but I doubt there were any pronunciation guides and he’s murdering Elvish equivalents of Cholmondely (chumey), Worcester (wurster), Menzies (mingiss), Arkansas (arkensaw) and so on.

As for his accent, it’s probably either as ridiculously misplaced as his pronunciation, or vastly outdated. Compare the voice-over of a British 1930s newsreel to a modern documentary narration, or listen to how Elizabeth II sounded just after she took the throne in 1952, and how she sounded 70 years later.

Pippin Took, meanwhile - IIRC this is canonical in an Appendix but I haven’t looked up which one - is completely unaware that, unlike in the Shire, Westron in Gondor retains what in German would be Sie / Du address (formal and informal).

So he speaks in his usual (informal) way to everyone from a small boy to Lord Denethor, and gets away with it because he’s presumed to be a prince of his people. It’s not clear what presumption comes first: he speaks like that because he’s noble, or, he must be noble to dare speak like that…

IIRC Pippin’s more like the son of a squire, but Denethor and the rest don’t know it and Gandalf, who does, keeps the information to himself. He merely warns Pippin against “hobbit pertness”. Even as Gandalf the White he probably finds the situation amusing; Gandalf the Grey certainly would…

(snicker)(cc: @petermorwood)

Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

~*~earlier~*~

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Frodo: Merry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll wait.

#legolas’ hick accent vs #frodo’s ‘i learned it out of a book’ accent #FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Frodo: :)

Frodo: Hello. My name is Frodo. I am a Hobbit. How are you?

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo, crying: please I can’t understand what you’r saying

Ok, but Frodo didn’t just learn out of a book. He learned like… Chaucerian Elvish. So actually:

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

Aragorn: *laughing too hard to walk*

@ghostriderofthearagon

dYinGggGggg…

i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.

to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!

Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.

Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*

Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.

Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man

Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s

Tolkien would be SO PROUD of this post

It got better

yes! he was so deep into the structure and evolution of language, like, how sounds drift and change over time, or the different ways plurals get formed. mind blowing. makes me wish i had studied linguistics.

you know what gets me about lord of the rings? evil is defeated by people who choose to fight against it without possessing absolute, or even very much, conviction that they can actually win. all the converging story threads that lead to the happy ending are carried out by people who are far, far more convinced that they will fail than that they will succeed, who had only the frailest, most foolish hope, who had blind faith and frequently wavering hearts not peace or ease or certainty.

middle earth isn’t saved because no one faltered or came close to despairing or who sank to their knees in weary defeat. it’s not saved by pride or conviction or even strength. it’s saved because enough people do what they have to do even if they have to do it in the darkness. in the dust. with the ashes of hopelessness and bitterness in their mouths. because enough people took another step. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, Theoden, Boromir, Faramir, Merry, Pippin. And many don’t. For every hero there is someone who gives into the “reasonableness” of despair—Saruman, Denethor, Grima, even Gollum—but enough. Enough people said “it doesn’t matter if we lose, I will keep fighting” and then they do.

And that GETS me. It is the most hopeful thing about the lord of the rings to me. There is so much that sums up its spirit, so many beautiful quotes and moments, but to me it’s never been the most famous of the quotes about hope and love that hit me hardest but a line from the films. Before the battle for minas tirith, one of the soldiers says “we cannot defeat the armies of Mordor” and Theoden answers “no. but we will meet them in battle nonetheless.”

And I—That is the spirit that leads to the conquering of evil when it comes down to it, when we’re talking about the part played by humanity alone in the fight against evil. Not the conviction you’re going to win, not farsightedness into a perfect future, not perfect inner peace or certainty. But acceptance of the real possibility of defeat, of that defeat being more the reality, the future, of your life than the victory, and then doing the damn thing anyway because goodness is worth fighting for even if you lose.

You have unlocked a LINGUISTIC SUBTEXT of LOTR which is very dear to my heart, Estel vs. Amdír. Lemme explain.

Estel is the alias Elrond gave to Aragorn in the books when he was a child to protect him until he came of age. It’s Sindarin Elvish for hope. But it’s a specific kind of hope. I don’t have my linguistic notes handy, so I can’t remember where Tolkien wrote out the full definition in his own notes, but it’s basically:

estel, n. hope, faith, trust, belief.

But there’s another Elvish word for hope.

amdir, n. hope, expectation, extrapolation. from prefix am to, toward + verb tiro look. Same root as in palantir, far-seer.

amdir is rational hope: you look at present circumstances, and look ahead to see what’s coming. It means calculating likely possibilities, outcomes. What’s the best you can expect to happen?

estel is irrational hope. You know there’s just no way to win. Amdir says you’re screwed, and you say, “I know, but I’ll keep going anyway.”

estel is a FOOL’s HOPE.

Ring any bells? Because you’re absolutely right. There are a lot of people who fail in LOTR because they only had amdir. Saruman was entrapped because he saw no hope of victory, so he threw in his lot with Sauron.

Boromir had been fighting a losing battle of defense against the forces of Mordor and knew there was no chance of defeating the overwhelming forces of Sauron save by some extraordinary means. He saw in the Ring a hope of saving his city by using it as a weapon. He knew “one does not simply walk into Mordor”… it’s too well-defended. Deep down, he wanted to try the amdir option, not the estel option.

And then there’s Denethor. Denethor, most of all, is the epitome of amdir. In the books he is a proud man, but rational. He’s the Steward of Gondor, and he takes the job damn seriously. His people are the bulwark defending Middle-Earth from being crushed by Mordor, which is visible from his window. He’s done a good job of marshalling forces and stockpiling resources for this battle — in the books, he does light the beacons to summon Théoden – and he actually has a palantir he uses to spy on Sauron.

His mind is strong enough to resist Sauron controlling him. So instead, Sauron controls the palantir, making sure it only shows off the greatness of Mordor’s armies, allies and weapons, and every last loss and setback of Denethor’s side. He knew very well Théoden had been held up at Helm’s Deep and would arrive too late. He knew Aragorn was coming to claim the throne, which didn’t thrill him: he thought Aragorn was just Gandalf’s puppet. And when he finds out Faramir had done what Gandalf wanted and sent the Ring into Mordor with a hobbit instead of bringing it to him flr safekeeping, he rails at Gandalf for risking everything on a “fool’s hope.”

The final straw is that, after Faramir is injured, Denethor looks into the palantir one more time to see if there’s any hope left… and he sees the fleet of black ships coming up the river. He thinks it’s more armies from Mordor. In fact, it’s Aragorn bringing a spare army to save the day. But Denethor thinks to himself, “checkmate. We’re toast.” And he decides to kill himself and his dying son rather than let them be seized as trophies by Sauron (or in his case, as a prisoner.)

Denethor gives into despair, but he is not a total madman in the books. He just has a meltdown because he only has amdir, not estel, and only a fool’s hope could win against impossible odds.

Also? Samwise is basically old English for “half wit.” He’s a wise Fool. Théoden and Aragorn do what they can to help, and in the and Aragorn leads his armies to the gates of Mordor to divert Sauron’s attention from Frodo and Sam as much as he can. But it’s Sam’s dogged determination to keep going even if it’s hopeless (amdir-less) that saves them all.

Note that I think Tolkien may have come up with the Elvish word amdir and written out its definition after LOTR was published. But the concept was obviously burbling around in his subconscious already. The more you look, the more you’ll see how the different flavors of hope show up in his writing

So yeah, @itspileofgoodthings , I’m tempted to say you’ve hit on the hidden meaning of LOTR. But like all the great stories, LOTR is a tapestry with multiple threads of meaning. Suffice it to say you’ve hit on a golden thread.