How Did Your Downs Name Come About?

[Estelyn Telcontar]

Sorry, ninja, but user names can't be changed. It would be rather confusing if a lot of members decided to change their names - newcomers wouldn't know who's who, and old posts would be without an author, seemingly.

[Mänwe]

Well for those interested, my username is self explanatory character wise. And neither is it particularly original, however I have always liked the character, especially his attitude and faith to good reason and council. I suppose I like to emulate those certain qualities, seeing them as good traits of an individuals personality.

[Hookbill the Goomba]

I know that many people are curious about my choice of name.

It comes from my being a fan of the Super Mario video games (my opinions of Nintendo, by the way, begin to waver), and it was a sort of tradition in my family to take two character's names from Nintendo games and chose a name. My older brother (on another forum) chose the waddle De character from the Kirby's Dream Land games, as well as King De-De-De and so came up with Waddle De-De-De.
I chose Hookbill the Koopa, a boss on Yoshi's island and the humble Goomba to come up with Hookbill the Goomba.

[Holbytlass]

Originally Posted by A_Brandybuck

From the beginning I wanted a Hobbit's name. But I had problems with picking an 'real' name, which belongs to a character in Tolkien's world.

That's how mine came about, too. I didn't want a specific hobbit that I felt I might have to live up to. Hobbits are the ones I like and relate to best and being female, well, there it is.

Originally Posted by ninja91

Is is possible to change your username? After 7 months on the downs, alot of people have Tolkienesque names. I want one...

Well, there is a way but it's long and tedious and you would have to start all over. I stumbled across it by accident.
Originally I started here as Hobbitlass but then we (hubby and I) got a new aol account with new email address. I somehow got logged out of The BarrowDowns and couldn't remember my password. Since I no longer had the email address the site couldn't send it to me and wouldn't (safety/privacy reasons o'course) give it to me at my new one so I had to start over.
Hence the new spelling Holbytlass. I lost all my rankings-I was almost to 500 posts!-and my reputation points. So I don't really recommend it.

Nowadays, I like this spelling and I love my nickname, Holby, given to me by Fea (I pronounce as Fay) in the WW games.

[Thenamir]

Long, long ago, in ages now considered the realm of legend and myth (the '80s and '90s), there lived a thirty-something Tolkien geek. For many years he had lain dormant as the trees of Fangorn, quiet in his geekiness, as had many who could claim the same title. For verily, thru many long years there had been nothing which merited becoming roused, and the only avenues for expression regarding the things of Middle-Earth were hoary newsgroups in which endless and fruitless debate prattled on the existence of balrog wings.

One fateful day tidings came to the shores of the Pea Sea where our geek plied his trade, rumors of a wond'rous new endeavor that promised to bring new life into long-silent fandom -- that the writs of lore and wonder penned by the Great Professor were to be transformed into a visual form (via infusions of much gold from the Brothers of the Stein of Wine, leaders of the Order of the New Line).

Then yea did the geek scour the realms within reach of his beloved Pea Sea, casting his mighty Inter-Net into the vast Oceans of Web from his lowly ship, the WinME, and drawing out what information could be learned or guessed regarding the building of this "moving picture" as it was so called. And lo, the guesses were many and the facts were few, and much fluff and frippery did the geek discard whild treasuring the few precious truths as a dragon watches over its hoard.

And at length in his search the geek moored his dinghy on the Isle of The Wight, known to its inhabitants as the Barrow-Downs. And while they knew as little as he of the work of the moving picture, and the debate of the wings raged here as well, yet indeed there was a camraderie and good fellowship such as had been absent in the petty newsgroups and bbs of his experience. And the geek spake unto himself saying, "this is a goodly land, and the people thereof are kindred to myself. I shall make my home here, and join myself to this band to whom the corpus of Middle-Earth is as dear as to me."

Thus the geek was welcomed into the Geekdom, but as each member of this society had chosen a new name which none but they would know and recognize, he chose for himself the name of "Thenamir" for the mere liking of the sound of it, close as it was to the names of Faramir and Boromir, both dear to his heart.

It was not until he had lived in the land for a time that one of the great scholars of that land made known to him that his name was well chosen, and was indeed taken from the elvish words for "grey sparkling jewel". Whereupon the geek rejoiced at his good fortune, and lived happily as a good citizen in that place. After a time he rose in the estimation of the ruler of that land, the benevolent BW, such that he was given authority to rule under him in that land, and the title of Forum Mod, which he retains to this day.

[Elmo]

i had just found a name that hadn't been taken oh yeah and it doesn't have spaces because I thought usernames wouldn't be allowed them

[Brinniel]

After four years on the BD, I'm surprised I have never before posted on any of the nickname threads...but I suppose that is because there is little meaning behind my name.

Brinniel was a 13-year-old girl's attempt to be creative and original. When I think of it now, it's not exactly either of those two. I'm sure I would have thought up something better if I hadn't been so impatient to register, plus when I think about it...I was pretty darned young at the time.

As silly as my nickname is, I've never really hated it....so I suppose I could've picked a worse name. And after all these years, Brinniel has sort of stuck with me...it's become my user name practically everywhere. And I bet that if someone called that name out on the street, I'd come running...

[LjósÁlfr]

Well, I used to have a other account here called Amras Oronar, but I didn't like that name anyway, and I was inactive for quit a while. Also, I just discovered I spelled my name wrong, so I registered again under the properly spelled name, since I hadn't made a great ammount of posts anyway (LjösÁlfr first, it's LjósÁlfr now)

Well, LjósÁlfr is Old Icelandic (A dialect from Old Norse) for "(a) Light Elf". Since Tolkien had taken so much from Norse Mythology I wanted a name which connected both with eachother. What did he take from Norse Mythology? Well, the entire principel of elves, dwarves.. Barrow-Wights are basicly the Norse Mythological undead creature's called Draugar (I was considering to make my name Draugr ). And 'The Great End' about which can be red in for instance The Lost Tales, seems to look a lot like the 'Ragnarök'.

As to what Ljósálfar ("Light Elves") exactly are, I give you this text, first in Old Icelandic, then in English, considering Elves (Ljósálfar) and dwarves (Dökkálfar, in other texts by the same writer reffered to as Svartálfar). The text was writter by Snorri Sturluson, a Icelandic historian living from 1178-1241:

"Sá er einn staðr þar, er kallaðr er Álfheimr. Þar byggvir fólk þat, er Ljósálfar heita, en Dökkálfar búa niðri í jörðu, ok eru þeir ólíkir þeim sýnum ok miklu ólíkari reyndum. Ljósálfar eru fegri en sól sýnum, en Dökkálfar eru svartari en bik."

"There is one place there [in the sky] that is called the Elf Home (Álfheimr). People live there that are named the light elves (ljósálfar). But the dark elves (dökkálfar) live below in earth, and they are unlike them in appearance – and more unlike them in reality. The Light Elves are brighter than the sun in appearance, but the Dark Elves are blacker than pitch."

The Dark Elves are basicly Dwarves, they've been called Dvergar in other texts. And they seem sort of evil-ish in this text, well, origenally (in for instance "The Lost Tales") they were.

[The Might]

Well, I didn't want to choose a character name, but I wanted something that sounds important and cheesy
So I took The Might

[Amariden Ravenhill]

My name originated from my earliest role-playing game experiences as a young teenager. I had joined a Lord of the Rings online RPG at the invitation of a friend and created the eccentric Hobbit lass Amariden Ravenhill. Sadly, the forum was shut down, yet the two of us continued building upon the plot. Two years later, it had grown from a humble Lord of the Rings RPG that was barely surviving to an entirely new, enormous epic-scope story played only by the two of us and a few other friends. While it had drifted far from it's Middle-Earth genesis, we still payed due homage to Master Tolkien. Then, in February of 2004, my dad died suddenly. I used the RPG as a means to vent my emotions during the next several months. Our group had begun to slowly unravel and many of them lost interest in it, became involved in other RPGs or denounced it as "stupid". In the end, even my closest co-RPGer drifted away. During these times, I started working on an RPG/Webcomic in a completely different setting, but in the old one still lingered like a ghost flitting about the dark corners of my mind. As I was clearing out my e-mail of old letters and other such things last night, I found pieces of Amariden's long-lost Hobbit origins as well as my password for this forum (I had lost it in the summer of 2004) and now I return to the Barrow Downs at long last.

This, dear friends, is the origin of my name.

[Nimrodel_9]

I wanted a cool elvish name that wasn't as common. One of my favorite song/poems Tolkien wrote is the one in FotR about Nimrodel. So there ya go!