Quenya - Tumblr Posts

Oh how I wish I spoke Polish 😔

Created for the Quenya learning server I'm in, but why traumatise only my friends when I can also do it here

I loooove this! My personal hc is that (of course all the Noldor and Feanorians are like this, even in war) when Mae and Mags were taking care of Elrond and Elros (I love the kidnap fam so much, they will always have a very special place in my heart) that they brought them both up to be fairly similar, which for Elros is one thing as king of the men as being half elf they expect him to be at least a little strange and elvish but for Elrond. Who is an elf. And is around other elves. Who remember. And knew. Of the Noldor. Specifically Feanorians. Who had this tradition... but of course Elrond, in hi slove for his family, will continue the tradition of loads of bling.

Of course when he marries Celebrian, who was of course raised by her parents, including Galadriel, who was a Noldor herself... basically their kids, and Arwen's kids (as ofc Aragorn isn't going to stop the bling fest) are spotted from miles away, from the glinting of the light from the silver and gold covering them head to toe.

However, I do believe that Elrond will sometimes tone it down, and only really tones it up to annoy people, and to remind them of the Noldor, as it isn't always practical wearing the usual Noldor amount.

There is no word for gaudy in Noldorin Quenya, the same way fish have no word for wet.

The Vanyar and Teleri have words for gaudy which translate roughly to “something a noldo would like.”

Arwen means "Noble Maiden" in Sindarin, from ara- ("noble") and gwenn ("maiden"). Tolkien remarked that it also means "greatly blessed" in Welsh.

The Quenya form of her name is not entirely certain, but in his Quenya greeting, Aragorn refers to her again as "Arwen" (Arwen vanimelda, namárië!). This suggests that the form Arwen itself is also coincidentally a valid, or at least understandable, Quenya calque (using ar-, stem Arwend-).

Other names:

Her epessë, Undómiel, means "Evenstar", from Undómë ("evening twilight") and el ("star").

She is also given the names Elrenniel and Elerondiel, both meaning "Daughter of Elrond" in Sindarin and Quenya respectively.

Okay, so, today on deeply nerdy things I'm working on (and also looking for advice on; vote at the end of the post!)...

So I've been working on coloring Worm's page from the quarantine coloring book (this is what I have so far), and I decided that I needed to put a name on the side of the boat. Because this stream was the first thing I watched with Gerard and Worm, I decided that “Daydream Believer” would be a good name for the boat (fair warning, it’s a pretty violent game they’re playing in that stream, but to summarize, the part I’m referencing is from Gerard’s turn as the murderer when he starts playing Daydream Believer by the Monkees to creep out Worm and the other dude they’re playing with, which is the moment I linked to.)

But then I thought, this is an alien creature’s magical space-boat. I can’t just title it Daydream Believer in English. So I whipped out my D&D player’s handbook (5e) and went to the Elvish alphabet.

But then I thought, I can’t just write Daydream Believer in English with Elvish letters. I need to translate it into proper Elvish first. Which, of course, the only correct Elvish languages to use are Tolkien’s--Sindarin and Quenya. (In any case, I don’t believe that there is a complete D&D Elvish language.) 

So, I brought up a few Sindarin and Quenya online dictionaries and translators, and I came up with a few different translations for “Daydream Believer”, and I wrote them out and transcribed my favorites to try and see which ones looked best in the D&D Elvish alphabet (I know Tengwar is technically the correct Tolkien-based Elvish script to be writing in, but I was already rolling with the D&D Elvish transcriptions, and I think I like the look of them for an alien space boat better, so I stuck with the D&D Elvish). But now I’m kind of stuck between three, and I thought, why not ask tumblr?

The two on the left with the blue highlights are Sindarin translations, and the one on the right with the green highlight is Quenya; I know there are differences in use between the two languages but I figured there’s no particular reason an alien couldn’t speak either of them. The first of the two Sindarin translations is “celain ely thenid pen”. ‘Celain’ means daylight, ‘ely’ means dream, and since I couldn’t find the word ‘believe’ in Sindarin anywhere I looked, I used ‘thenid’ which means ‘faithful’ and ‘pen’ as a pronoun meaning ‘one’. So, the first translation is really “daylightdream faithfulone”, which is fairly close. But I chose that translation mostly for aesthetics, and I worried I had strayed from the truest translation of the words, so I did another. 

The second Sindarin translation I did was “eraid ely esteliad pen”. ‘Eraid’ is just ‘day’ instead of ‘daylight’, and ‘esteliad’ is ‘trusting’, which seemed closer to the meaning of a daydream believer as one who is trusting in their daydreams rather than one who is faithful to their daydreams, although that could lead to a whole debate on the meaning of the original song, which--let’s be honest I’m way overthinking this already. I’m just trying to find pretty letters to write on the side of this boat, lol :) But nerdy linguistic overanalysis for a random obscure reference that pretty much no one is going to get is what I’m here for, haha. 

So, the third and final of my top three translations is the Quenya one, “árë maur savindo”. Quenya actually seemed to translate the phrase more easily, if only because there’s a word for “believer”. ‘Árë’ is day, ‘maur’ is dream or vision (which, I like the idea that the daydream believer’s daydreams are visions of a sort--oh no I’m analyzing the song again, I said I wouldn’t do that, I’ll stop, haha. I actually have thought about the meaning of the song quite a lot), and ‘savindo’ is believer. The Quenya translator that gave me ‘savindo’ warned that it was fan-created, but ‘sav-’ is in fact the Quenya verb for believe, and there was a whole section in the Quenya-English dictionary I looked at for “one who ___” verbs and they all ended in ‘indo’, so I think it’s a correctly derived translation. 

Tl;dr--those are the three best translations I came up with, and I highlighted where I wrote each of them out in Elvish in the image above. So, now I’m asking you to vote: which Elvish translation of Daydream Believer should I write on the boat on my coloring page? “Celain ely thenid pen”, “eraid ely esteliad pen”, or “árë maur savindo”? Vote in the replies or reblog with your vote! :) 

Postscript: If anyone wants to see my full Elvish translation scribblings which led to this, here’s what my process in my sketchbook looked like:

(There was a reflection from an old art class in the top left so that’s what I roughly photoshopped out if you were wondering.)

It’s always fun to have an excuse to mess around with translations and practice writing things in Elvish script :) 

I'm not your average LotR fan who watches the movies every weekend, speaks Elvish, have read the Silmarillion multiple times and knows Lord Elrond's family tree by heart.

Because I speak Dwarvish.