#while ''ilkorin'' was going to be spoken by the elves who didn't go to valinor (i.e. those we know as the avari / nandor / sindar) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

iridescentoracle · 2 months ago

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"Muil" is only really attested in this one name, but "Emyn Muil" was translated as "Drear Hills" in an unfinished index/glossary meant to be an accessory companion to LOTR, per Eldamo, which is the most extensive, detailed, and reliable compilation of information on Tolkien's conlangs I know.

(I'm not seeing any etymological links to words like "twisted" or "knotted," though; the etymology of "muil" is unclear, but (still per Eldamo) it seems to have originally meant "mountain lake" back when it was from "Gnomish," while later it was going to be from "Doriathrin"/"Ilkorin," and would have meant "twilight, shadow, vagueness.")

picked up two towers to look for an eowyn thing; opened it read a sentence about a hill called Emyn Muil; all week i've been reading Voyage of Bran and looking up all the words of the original Middle Irish verses as I go so my brain was PRIMED it was READY the experience was akin to reading the scenes where everything is named Horse in Old English again; only I don't actually know Middle Irish so I just opened this book and a voice in my head that's been trying to learn Middle Irish vocab screamed ELFHILL (emain-muil); i have no reference no recourse no idea if that even works. im just stuck with it.

#lotr #replies #astronicht #maryellencarter #fwiw i did also look up words for ''twist'' and ''knot'' to look for any words that might be easily mixed up but nothing jumped out at me #also for the curious: ''gnomish'' was the earliest version of the language that would eventually become sindarin #(but was actually going to be spoken by the noldor (or‚ as they were known at the time‚ the gnomes or the noldoli))#while ''ilkorin'' was going to be spoken by the elves who didn't go to valinor (i.e. those we know as the avari / nandor / sindar)#and ''doriathrin'' would have been a dialect of ''ilkorin''#the linguistic situation we know (including the languages even being named sindarin and quenya) was only established #when LOTR was being revised for publication!#this is completely unimportant trivia but i couldn't figure out how much detail to go into in the second paragraph #so i erred on the side of under-explaining there and am erring on the side of over-explaining here i guess

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