New Tolkien? http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/09/18/books.newtolkien.ap/index.html Children of Hurin. Who will be reading this? I'll probably pick it up even though I'm not a huge Tolkien fan.
If you've read Unfinished Tales you're already familiar with the story. This sounds interesting to me. Christopher Tolkien does a good job of compiling and editing his dad's unpublished material (unlike Frank Herbert's kid, ugh) so this book could be pretty good . . . Probably best for real fans of the written material, rather than casual fans of the movies, though.
I read the Silmarillion and I seem to recall at least flicking through the Unfinished Tales. It's all quite dry though, if Tolkien was ever going to release some of this sort of material in the same vein as LOTR or even The Hobbit he'd have had to drastically rewrite it. I think he mostly wrote it for his own entertainment and maybe would've let some of it be published to satisfy some of his more - erm - fanatical fans. You know, the ones that actually learn Elvish...
I don't think everything was dry in Unfinished Tales... I thought the story about Gandalf came to send the Dwarfs to Bilbo was quite interesting. I agree that the first section of the Silmarillion is quite a swamp, but it is pretty good as a whole. I've looked through all the appendices and I've never found much on Elvish as a language - maybe I've got a different edition, but where is it?
Ive got so much Tolkien that I have yet to read. I started to read some of it, but as dondrei said, its too dry. Odds are Ill end up picking up this book anyway, reading it is another story. pun intended
Tolkien is overrated. I'd much rather read some Stephen Erikson or George RR Martin. They should stop releasing stuff he never had time to finish, it'll just end up dissapointing people.
If you like his stories a lot, his son's editorial work is worth taking a look at. Yeah maybe Martin is a better writer than Christopher Tolkien, but CT kicks the pants off of Robert Jordan or most anyone else in the genre today when he's got this kind of source material to play with.
The way I understand it, all of the languages Tolkien invented were Indo-European. Taking the Elvish languages as an example he gave us a lot of both Quenya and Sindarin. I forget which is which, but one of those is an archaic, Latin-like, language. There are words in both languages he only gave examples of once, but because they are Indo-European and we have the "Latin" we can figure out what the words are in the other language. My copy of The Silmarillion has 55 pages of appendices - Note on pronunciation, an Index of Names and Places (and their meanings), and Some Elements in Quenya and Sindarin (includes dialect and regional pronunciations and root words). Together with songs and poetry in these languages they can be reconstructed in the exact same way ancient languages are. I couldn't be bothered going to the bookshelf to check, but the complete alphabet of at least one language and bits and pieces of others are also included in The Hobbit and LotR. All of this goes together to enable students to study these languages as a subject that counts towards the linguistics degree at either Oxford or Cambridge (which ever one it was that Tolkien was a Prof. at), and maybe other universities, because the languages are based on the 'stern laws' of the discipline. In fact, I seem to remember reading somewhere that Quenya or Sindarin was invented by Tolkien in the first place to satisfy the requirements of his own degree in linguistics.
I've been flicking through pages on Elvish and so far not one of them has mentioned where or even if any of it has been officially published. It may be that it was only disseminated through publically available records of Tolkien's personal writings.
El/il is a word that means 'light', 'bright' or 'shining' and 'guardian or shepherd' (in the same sense as the Greek original of 'planet'). The word 'mul' signified a star in Babylonian. Variations of El often form the name of a chief deity, for example El (and his female counterpart Elat), Baal, Bel, Enlil. The Hebrew word Elohim means The Shining Ones (and is to an extent cognate with the English word Elves). The Arabic name Allah and the Hebrew name El are identical. The English word Illuminate is derived from this root.
I thought it would be il + luminate, lumos being the root. I suppose it's possible it dropped an initial vowel sound, seems quite a stretch though.
It predates Greek by over 2000 years. It is more than likely the initial vowel was dropped and was originally 'lumos. Vowels are transitory a lot of the time anyway so that is the likely reason. It is also possible it could be interpreted as a compound - Bright/Shining Light. The word 'il' also means 'raise/d' and 'song' (in the sense of a raised voice) which sheds light ('tis fun to pun) on Tolkien's supreme being - Iluvatar - who sang and made the stars. Of course, a hymn is a voice raised in song in worship of the deity that is usually associated with the sun or moon or stars.
Quenya. True, but... The man had a thing for languages. Elven languages have higher concentration of influence from Finnish than any Indo-European language in existence; you know, we aren't the biggest influence givers there is in terms of loaned words etc. He was in love with our strange phonetic language, and as a result, a great many words significant to the stories of Tolkien look quite readily pronouncable to a Finn, if you just know how to deal with all the ^'s and ´'s.
Have a look at some of the source material for the 2 writers i mentioned, they aren't exactly lacking in material.
