Quote Originally Posted by TheArtilleryman View Post
Nice post!

I really love this about Tolkien's work. The same is also true of most names - they all have meaning.

Elven and high Gondorian names are translatable from the Sindarin e.g.:

Elrond: Star Cave
Arwen: Royal maiden
and my favourite - Legolas: Green leaf (yes, his name is Greenleaf Greenleaf )


Many Rohirric names are not made-up words, but are actually Anglo-Saxon in origin e.g.:

Eomer: Horse-famous
Eowyn: Horse-white, or white horse

Or Old English:

Theoden: Prince or king

Even Shelob, which means "female spider"... "lob" is an old English word for spider", hence "She-lob"


Everything he wrote was given so much thought and study, which is of course why the world he created is so immersive that we can often have a scary habit of talking about it as though it is all real. Tolkien was a little envious of Scandinavia and its Norse mythology, so Middle Earth was created to be the mythology of England, which is why, as you say, he thought of himself as discovering the work, rather than writing it.

Great thing about LOTRO too is that the developers took the time to make up translatable names too - see this from a reply I made to a thread last year where someone asked the meaning of Daervunn's name:



Thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts down and to provide the translations - really interesting!
Boy howdy. I knew that Rohirric was based on Anglo-Saxon, but I didn't know that Legolas Greenleaf = Greenleaf Greenleaf! I wonder if he ever had a talk with Thranduil about that....