Finding Footing in a Forest of Fins: Name Etymology As a Characterization Technique of the Finwëan Noldor

Finding Footing in a Forest of Fins: Name Etymology as a Characterization Technique of the Finwëan Noldor Dawn M. Walls-Thumma Presented at the Tolkien at UVM Conference 7 April 2018, Waterman Building I AM THE RARE Tolkien fan who became a true Tolkien fan not because of The Lord of the Rings but because of The Silmarillion. I loved The Lord of the Rings—still do—but what made me want to dive deeper into Middle-earth was The Silmarillion. And because I own a website about The Silmarillion and present and publish about topics related to The Silmarillion, then this means that I have talked with a lot of people about that formative, sometimes traumatic, nearly always memorable experience of reading The Silmarillion for the first time. Aside from the shock that it is not another Lord of the Rings and the challenges posed by the “Old Testament style,” one of the major struggles new readers have with The Silmarillion is the names. There are not only a lot of them—quite a few more than there are characters even1—but many of them sound a lot alike. This complaint can be summed up as All Those Fins! How to tell Finrod from Fingon from Fingolfin? And the Fins are important characters too. On my own first reading of The Silmarillion, I failed to commit them adequately to memory, assuming I could just wing it as I went along, and I failed miserably at that first attempt at reading as a result. It seems knowing the difference between Finarfin and Finduilas did matter. Today I’d like to return to that dark and seemingly impenetrable forest of Characters Named Something Starting with Fin because the reason for the resemblance between the names of so many characters isn’t just annoying and confusing, it’s also very meaningful. The ubiquitous Fin element in Silmarillion names is patronymic, showing that characters are descendants of the Noldorin king Finwë. Upon that patronymic foundation, Tolkien’s manipulation of the names of these characters adds subtle elements of characterization to the story, what I like to call, in the style of Tom Shippey, asterisk-characterization. Tolkien’s assertion that he created Middle-earth as a place to speak his languages rather than creating his languages as an element of Middle-earth is well-known,2 as is the 1 By my admittedly quick count, there are 213 characters and 280 names of people in The Silmarillion. 2 See, for example, Letter 165 to the Houghton Mifflin Company: “If I might elucidate what H. Breit has left of my letter: the remark about 'philology' was intended to allude to what is I think a primary 'fact' about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. … The invention of Finding Footing in a Forest of Fins: Name Etymology as a Characterization Technique of the Finwëan Noldor centrality of his languages to his world. Language is central, in part, because it generates story. In The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey called this technique building an “asterisk-world,” playing on the philological convention of using an asterisk to indicate a word not attested in any source but inferred to have existed . Shippey points to the “Dwarves’ Roster” in the Norse Elder Edda as an example of Tolkien building such an asterisk-world when he used the Eddaic list of the Dwarves for the names of characters in The Hobbit (70). Essentially, he takes a linguistic oddity—a list of names without context—and provides the backstory that explains its existence. He used this strategy in Middle-earth as well, where idiosyncrasies in language and etymology were used to generate stories that explained them. As Christopher Tolkien notes in the introductory remarks to The Shibboleth of Fëanor, Tolkien had a habit of starting to write about language and almost inevitably falling into story (331). The Shibboleth of Fëanor details the etymologies of the names of Finwë’s descendants—All Those Fins. Found in the twelfth volume of The History of Middle-earth, The Shibboleth of Fëanor contains several examples of how Tolkien’s etymological musings spun into stories—complex, interesting stories. Ironically, given its title, The Shibboleth of Fëanor provides little illumination on the names of the sons of Fëanor. Tolkien did not finish it and never progressed beyond naming the characters in Quenya and providing bare-bones meanings for those names. One asterisk-story, “The Legend of the Fate of Amrod,” emerged as Tolkien worked on the names of Fëanor’s twin sons, Amrod and Amras. The story, Christopher Tolkien writes, “is confused and confusing” because Tolkien wrote the story on the fly as an explanation for the etymologies behind the twins’ names, showing how easily language gave way to story in Tolkien’s mind. In the story, which did not make it into the published Silmarillion, both twins were named Ambarussa by their mother, Nerdanel, at birth. Fëanor wasn’t enthused by this idea and asked that she change one of their names, so she changed the name of the youngest to Umbarto with the sinister meaning of “Fated.” Fëanor either misheard or, disturbed by the possible implications of the name, took it upon himself to change it to Ambarto, meaning “exalted or lofty.” Nerdanel ominously remarks, “Umbarto I spoke; yet do as you wish. It will make no difference.” After the Darkening of Valinor, as Fëanor sets out for Middle-earth, Nerdanel meets him and begs him to leave one of the twins to her. When Fëanor refuses, Nerdanel answers, again ominously, “You will not keep all of them. One at least will never set foot on Middle-earth.” Her portents prove correct. Fearing that some of his company might return to Valinor, Fëanor sets fire to the stolen Telerin ships in the night. What he languages is the foundation. The 'stones' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows” (219, emphasis in the original). 2 Dawn M. Walls-Thumma doesn’t realize is that his youngest son—Umbarto, the Fated—sleeps on board and is burned with the ship. The story is more than an interesting, if disturbing, vignette. Several important elements emerged in Tolkien’s attempt to explain the names of the Fëanorians twins.3 Most importantly, Nerdanel’s foresight emerges as an important element to the story, as well as in the naming of her sons, adding weight to the importance of those names in defining character. The primary purpose of Shibboleth, however, is larger than this one story. As I noted earlier, Tolkien often created asterisk-worlds in which his languages made sense. Shibboleth arose out of Tolkien’s attempt to explain a detail of historical phonology in Quenya, namely how the unvoiced-th or thorn came to be pronounced instead as an S, and provides an example of phonology driving history—and big history, the kind of history that would literally and figuratively reshape the world. Shibboleth is a late text, written no earlier than 1968, and as such the story of the strife of the Noldor was already in place. However, just as he weaves the existing burning of the ships at Losgar into the “Legend of the Fate of Amrod,” Tolkien leverages the story of the Noldorin strife—of Míriel Serindë’s unnatural death, Finwë’s remarriage, and Fëanor’s antipathy toward his stepfamily—into a historical phonological context, explaining how the idea of changing pronunciation of the thorn to a S-sound was arrived by consensus of the Noldor. As a linguistic loremaster, Fëanor—in true prescriptivist fashion—hated the idea and saw it as degrading and confusing the language. Complicating this: his late mother, Míriel, spelled her name with the thorn and preferred her name be pronounced using it. Fëanor’s stepmother, Indis, in an attempt to assimilate with the Noldorin culture into which she’d married, began to use the S-sound instead of the thorn, even though the Vanyar had retained the thorn. This had the unfortunate result of making it look like Indis was going out of her way to mispronounce Míriel’s name. Fëanor, naturally, took this as an affront to his mother’s memory, and as Shibboleth tells it, his retention of the thorn came to be a symbol of his pure Noldorin heritage and his primacy in the House of Finwë. Later, these attitudes would exacerbate his willingness to believe that Fingolfin and the Valar plotted to remove him, which made him susceptible to Melkor’s machinations. These are all examples of building asterisk-worlds, of developing or enhancing plot using etymology. Where I’d like to turn is a technique less often recognized: Tolkien’s use of name etymology to develop character, what I’ll call asterisk-characterization. One of the challenges of The Silmarillion is its relative lack of characterization. Its heroic 3 New elements that arise in “The Legend of the Fate of Amrod” include Nerdanel’s foresight in naming her children, conflict between her and Fëanor regarding her relationship with the Valar, the implication that Fëanor’s sons were not wholly enthusiastic in their support of his agenda, and the death of Amras at Losgar rather than the Mouths of Sirion at the end of the First Age. 3 Finding Footing in a Forest of Fins: Name Etymology as a Characterization Technique of the Finwëan Noldor characters are defined by their acts rather than their personalities or characteristics as people. Yet in their names, these characteristics begin to emerge and, sometimes, suggest tensions or conflicts with the potential to drive character development much as we have seen language drives plot development.

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