Unbetitelt

(He wonders, absently, whether he should be using that past tense, now that his brother is gone.)

He looks (looked?) like his brother. It was one reason that Feanor hated him so much more than Finarfin.

But someone lowborn - still educated, still familiar with the stories. Faithful or not. Lifespan lower than the upper class, but longer than other humans - but that doesn't matter - thousands of years is a long time. The Roman Empire was more recent than this guy.

Because imagine the founder of your nation and its first king, who was told to have been born as the son of a bird and a star, lived to be 500, and who died 2000 years ago. Just. Has a sibling. Who is still running around. You can go visit him. You can! He's very friendly. He wrote the medical book your healers study from. He updates it religiously every other decade. You don't hear from him often because he lives fairly secluded from society and seems to prefer a quiet life but every few hundred years something batshit insane happens and he's right there. At the center of things. Pretending to be a background character, as if Sauron didn't look warily at him expecting him to turn into another Lúthien incident. Maybe he's shy?

You are a sailor. You meet him on one of your journeys to Middle Earth.

"You humans are barely taller than dwarves.."

"And you elves are as tall and lanky as birches."

Biomechanical elves, feat. Maglor and Galadriel! Because you don’t live for ~5000 years on one hröa without needing some maintenance.

Additional thoughts below the cut!

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

In which Maeglin’s attempt to calculate tunnel load distribution is thwarted by his nosy second-in-command.

Saelon, son of Saelas, strode into Maeglin’s study uninvited and sat on top of the archive chest.

He was fond of this spot in particular, but in the past had made use of a number of other surfaces including the window embrasure, the map-press, and once, a scale model of the eastern corridor.

“Tell me something,” Saelon said.

“No,” Maeglin answered, not looking up from the plans spread before him on the drafting table.

“Then tell me this instead.”

Maeglin sighed deeply and set aside his silverpoint. He had been at work for the better part of the morning planning the passages that would soon run beneath the southern wards of Gondolin. There the rock was of many layers, and Maeglin had been halfway through an intricate calculation for the pitch of an archway.

“What is it?”

Nerdanel for @tolkienwomensweek (a little late sorry)

Another board for the mouths of Sirion, where the great river emptied into the sea and where, one day, the last refugees of Beleriand would shelter until the third kinslaying

The thing is, we don't actually know what Nerdanel (the name) even means. This is because the actual etymology of Nerdanel is probably something like nerdo "large, strong man" + ⚠️anel "daughter", but anel was generally replaced by seldë in later notes, which renders this void. And also this meaning makes no sense.

So I made a few alternate names for Nerdanel:

Nertanel from nér "man" + tamo "smith, builder, wright" + -(i)el "daughter"

Nerdantel* from nér "man" + √DAT "fall down" + él "star"

Nernanel from nér "man" + nan- "back (again)" + él "star"

Nertiel from nertëa "ninth" + -(i)el "-daughter"

Nerdarel from nerdo "large, strong man" + seldë "daughter"

*I think this would probably be Nellantel in proper Quenya, using lanta- "to fall".

Given that Nerdanel was the daughter of Mahtan (literal translation is "forger smith"), I feel like Nertanel would be the best fit. And we have examples of names being half-Sindarised — just look at Fëanor!

Nost-na-Lothion is a festival mentioned in The Book of Lost Tales as being a flower holiday, when the rivers in the surrounding Echoriath flowed over the plain of Tumladen to water all the spring flowers. The literal translation of the name, in what was then called Gnomish, is "birth of flowers". If you look at it through the lens of later Sindarin and Quenya, you see:

Nost(a) means "birth" in Quenya.

Loth means "flower" in Sindarin.

(-ion) was the pluralising suffix in Gnomish with connections to the genitive, but later it became the genitive plural in Quenya.

Na was a genitive article even back in Gnomish, and survived to be the same in Sindarin.

Lookit all the linguistic blending!

-----

(Everything is Quenya. I got the words from Eldamo, and I think I put them together well enough.)

Fëanáro

Hwindaran - the Mad King

Aranáro - the Fire King

Liëaran - the People's King

Naitëhildë - the True Heir

Táriyon - the Queen's Son

Therindion - the Broideress' Son

Aranaitë - the True King

Maitimo

Ercambo - the One Handed

Formemacil - the Northern Sword

Formenáro - the Northern Fire

Formenoro - the Northern Mountain

Narthilmo - the White Fire

Entuloico - the Returned Corpse

Aranaitë - the True King

Valariandëaran - the King of Beleriand

Valariandecundo - the Guardian of Beleriand

Morimól - the Thrall of Darkness

Imnahtana - the Self Slain

Húnarindo - the Cursed Man

Macalaurë

Lindo - the Singer

Sercelindo - the Blood Singer

Macillindo - the Sword Singer

Roquen - the Horseman

Hatallindo - the Spear Singer

Formennorndo - the Northern Runner

Ranyando - the Erratic Wanderer

Laitëatar - the False Father (Elrond and Elros will smack anyone who uses this)

Tyelcormo

Oromendur - Servant of Oromë

Sercendur - Servant of Blood

Hravano - the Wild Beast

Tyelpemacil - the Silver Sword

Tyelpefaramo - the Silver Hunter

Aranehtar - the King Slayer

Hínanehtar - the Child Slayer

Carnistir

Atandil - Friend/Lover of Men

Therindo - the Broiderer

Aharo - the Furious

Laureleper - Golden Fingers

Morimo - the Dark One

Curufinwë

Curwë - the Skilled/Crafter/Inventor

Tornangaquar - Steel Fist

Pityaran - the Little King

Tornanganamba - Steel Hammer

Tornangaran - Steel King

Telperinquar

Curwë - the Skilled/Crafter/Inventor

Cormahto - the Ringmaker

Sercenca - the Bloodless

Ambarto and Ambarussa

Onóna - the Twins

Laicundo - the Guardians of the Laiquendi

So, when Aragorn fashioned himself an alias as The Eagle of the star, he did so with the root word Thoron and not Soron. He was using archaic Quenya or better known as — Feänorìan Quenya.

I guess posts have been made about where you can find references on Sindarin, Quenya, Nandorin, Old Elvish, and Noldorin among others on Tumblr but I wanted to make my own list (so I can come back to it when I need it). If you know a website you'd like me to consider for my list, please just mention it to me.