Átaremma ("Pater noster" in Quenya) is J.R.R. Tolkien's Quenya translation of the Lord's Prayer. It is also known as Atyrë or Atar Manya. Six different versions of the prayer were published in Vinyar Tengwar, no. 43, edited by Patrick H. Wynne, Arden R. Smith, and Carl F. Hostetter. In the early drafts, Tolkien used menel to express "sky", but in the sixth and final version of the prayer he wrote i ëa han ëa, literally "who art beyond the Universe". This highlights Tolkien's desire to distinguish in Quenya the physical sky and the metaphysical heaven, following the modern Christian theology. One may conveen that given the existent different filologic constructions of the prayer, this is not a unique and official version.
Final version of the Prayer
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Tolkien and the Fæder Ure
We can safely assume that Tolkien knew the first english versions of the Fæder ure when he made Anglo-saxon language and literature the main object of his universitary studies in Oxford, and kept using different versions as a didactic instrument when he taught that same language in the University of Leeds (1920-1925) and then in the University of Oxford (1925-1959), therefore as a Catholic and a philologist, who had studied in depth the linguistic history of the Lord’s Prayer in English, he pointed out that the Latin term tentatio (from the Greek peirasmos) originally meant "trial, test, tribulation", not “temptation” in the modern sense of "enticement to evil". The English translation lead us not into temptation was already ambiguously problematic in the Middle Ages. Even the verb lead could misleadingly suggest that God is the agent of temptation, which Tolkien considered linguistically and theologically inaccurate.
See also
External links
- Text, translation and audio at Glǽmscrafu
- Calligraphy of the poem by Daniel Andriës
- [1]
- [2] by John R. Holmes