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Overshadowed Eagle
Join Date: Nov 2017
Location: The north-west of the Old World, east of the Sea
Posts: 3,867
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A certain quote from HoME XII's The Problem of Ros came up in another thread, and I have A Question
Quote:
Elwing was born in the same year Beren and Luthien died, so she definitely didn't pick it up from them. Dior was killed when she was three, so while she was probably talking and had basic childhood Beorian (assuming Dior used it around the house), she wasn't exactly fluent. There's no indication of mortal residents in Doriath at the time, so presumably anyone who escaped with her spoke Sindarin only. It seems a stretch to say that Earendil learnt it from her. So did he get it from his own family? Again, it seems unlikely. Tuor's mother was Beorian, but he never knew her; he was fostered by elves of Mithrim, who presumably spoke Sindarin and maybe Hadorian. Idril definitely didn't know it - she was locked up in the mountains since before the language existed. There weren't any mortals in Gondolin to teach him, either. That only leaves other refugees at the Havens. They would have to be descendants of the refugees of Dorthonion, who left under Emeldir and included Morwen and Rian. Were they so numerous and/or stubborn that they stuck to their own language through integration with the Hadorians, enslavement by the Easterlings, and then evacuation to the Havens? Were they even at the Havens? Tolkien only wrote about Doriath and Gondolin as the sources for Earendil's settlement, with the others seeming to be over in Balar. None of these routes ring particularly true. I'm left with the image of Earendil delivering his speech in Sindarin, Quenya, and Hadorian, and then stumbling through a version in broken Beorian that Elwing helped him write from her vague memories of her father. He tries to say "Great Powers of the West" and ends up saying "Big Bossypants over there". ~ There's also a colossal snub in that quote: Unfinished Tales says that Druedain moved to the Mouths of Sirion after the fall of the Haladin, and we know that they eventually moved to Numenor. They would have spoken both their own language and Haladin (to chat to their neighbours), so it would definitely have been possible for Earendil to learn the supposedly-extinct language of Haleth. But did he bother to include the Druedain in his multi-lingual statement? Nope! He used Beorian instead, to give representation to one-quarter of his wife's ancestry. hS
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earendil, languages |
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