User talk:Jools
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Languages used in the album In Elven Lands
The Elvish languages used in the album In Elven Lands are several different dialects of Quenya and Sindarin, including J.R.R. Tolkien's Proto Quenya (the so-called "Elf-Latin") and Neo-Quenya. These have all been sometimes misidentified as Neo-Elvish, however, most of the composition of the lyrics happened before Helge Kåre Fauskanger codified Neo-Quenya. Most were written before even before the collected Etymologies were published, and most of the vocabulary and grammar was taken from The Book of Lost Tales (Volumes 1 and 2) and The Book of Unfinished Tales.
The thing that many people have found confusing is that the entire work (according to the album notes) was intended to represent a corrupt later text, such as Tolkien described in the Introduction and Appendices to The Lord of the Rings. In order to create the illusion of a corrupt text (or in this case, a series of corrupt texts), the authors intentionally mutated words to account for the shifting palate, used loan-words from Anglo-Saxon and Sindarin and in one case simply mangled the pronunciation and re-transcribed the results to show the effects of the "folk music process" that often occurs over time.—Unsigned comment by Jools (talk • contribs).
- Hi and welcome to TG, Jools — and thanks for your recent contributions! From what you wrote here I understand that you're referring to this edit of the page In Elven Lands, and that you are critical of the change of "dialects of Quenya and Sindarin" to "Neo-Elvish (Quenya, Sindarin)". According to how you describe the linguistic process behind the lyrics, I would personally say it seems fair to describe it as "Neo-Elvish" (a term not limited to Fauskanger's version of Quenya). My suggestion, in order to make it clear to a reader that the album doesn't merely reproduce Elvish texts from Tolkien's corpus, would perhaps be to change the text back to "The songs on the album are written in dialects of Quenya, Sindarin, [...]". Any thoughts? --Morgan 18:56, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
- Hi Morgan – Thanks for the note. I was busy making major changes to the article, which, on reflection, might not have been altogether necessary. But I look forward to your notes on that. When we first released the album, many fans dismissed our corruptions as mistakes. Since Tolkien held that corruptions in a text often reveal aspects of a culture, we took great pains to make the corrupt text work in a realistic and organic way.
Which is, I suppose, my issue with calling it Neo-Elvish. We were trying to make a specifically Corrupted Elvish, while Neo-Elvish appears to be intended to be a functional language, Corrupted Elvish is used to illustrate the hypothetical texts that Tolkien was translating. I know....it's all a bit theoretical. Thoughts? Jools
Security Questions
I know I'm being a bit pedantic, but the security questions have several wrong answers. The name of the person who accompanied Frodo into Mordor was not "Sam" but "Samwise." "Sam" is what he was called, but not his actual name. The King of Gondor at the end of The Lord of the Rings was "Elessar" not "Aragorn." Nobody called him "King Aragorn," just as nobody referred to "Pope Benedict" as "Pope Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger." And the actor who plays Gandalf in the Hobbit films (and The Lord of the Ring films) is "Sir Ian McKellen" not simply "Ian McKellen." It seems strange my correct answers to the security questions would be rejected. I'm just saying. Jools
