Names in Middle-Earth, Quick Guide

[Akaara]

So do my names have any meaning?

Ariel
Niewen
Falathiel
Tuarwen

[Joviex]

So do my names have any meaning?

Ariel - Princess perhaps? Ar = King; -iel is a popular ending meaning daughter.

I know in English Ariel is Lioness of God, and in Sindarian that is Erura(w)viel.

Niewen - No direct roots. However, if I was to take a stab I would say Sad/Depressed Maiden o.0 since Ni(d) words all circle around mourning/sadness.

Falathiel - Here I would say that Falath- is from the root Falas, which means beach/shoreline. So perhaps Daughter of the Beach?

Tuarwen - perhaps could be an Englified Audrey (Noble Strength) because of the Tu = muscle, Ar meaning King and wen = maiden.

Though I think to be correct it would/should be Taurwen.

Hope those are fairly close ;p

[Berephon]

Brúmbellas will work for my bear, I think. It has the same "burly" sound to it as my screwed up version. I'm not sure if I can use the special character ú, though.

Yeah, the special characters are off-limits (except for us.)

[Joviex]

Yeah, the special characters are off-limits (except for us.)

Which is kinda lame/stinky/etc... I mean, its not like we haven't been asking since a2.

Is there a reason? Cause we never got any response (that I saw) on why they are not available to us.

[Amonceleb]

Which is kinda lame/stinky/etc... I mean, its not like we haven't been asking since a2.

Is there a reason? Cause we never got any response (that I saw) on why they are not available to us.

If I had to hazard a guess, it's likely to keep the so-called "leet" kiddies from composing names made entirely of the extended character set. Give some people an inch of freedom, and they will take a mile and then some.

[SiSL]

If I had to hazard a guess, it's likely to keep the so-called "leet" kiddies from composing names made entirely of the extended character set. Give some people an inch of freedom, and they will take a mile and then some.

Not also that, it is because of database restrictions, also ease of contact with characters with any locale keyboard setting, also similiar letters not to be confused by people and reports and actions such as Círdan and Cirdan etc.

[Joviex]

If I had to hazard a guess, it's likely to keep the so-called "leet" kiddies from composing names made entirely of the extended character set. Give some people an inch of freedom, and they will take a mile and then some.

They can have restrictions, much like the restrictions they employ on vowel usage now.

Not also that, it is because of database restrictions, also easy of contact with characters without having to type, also similiar letters not to be confused by people and reports and actions such as Círdan and Cirdan etc.

Databases store bytes. These extended chars are simply the same. Last DB I did employed Spanish, which does use the extended ASCII set. Did it make a difference? Nope, cause 0-255 is still that, 0-255.

Now, I will grant you, searching would be a pain, but a simple 5 line if function will take care of searching on both the flat ANSI char and the extended.

This is not something new, as MANY other cultures on the planet use accent marks.

Again, it was never explained why we could not do it ourselves, and as the Berephon above noted, they already are allowed, just not for the userbase.

[Bailo]

Excellent thread. Amazingly I only just discovered it and I find it to be an excellent and interesting read to this Tolkien fan here.

[MMOWarrior]

this should be a sticky!

great stuff

[Joviex]

In lieu of the new AMON-HEN content....

AMON-HEN in sindarin means Her Hill.

Amon = Hill
Hen = Her

Not sure what that has to do with Chickens (yes I got the Yolk) ....

[Thanatos]

So you're a student of yolk-lore?

(I think Hen actually means "eye".)

[Berephon]

Again, it was never explained why we could not do it ourselves, and as the Berephon above noted, they already are allowed, just not for the userbase.

I don't know the details, but it's a technical issue, not just a permission restriction. Remember that PCs and NPCs/Monsters are not generated by the same means and systems, so while it may be possible for us to use diacritics on the back-end, it may not be (and currently isn't) possible on the front-end.

Also, from a permissions perspective, it could also result in having characters named Harry, Hárry, and Hârry (badly confusing to begin with), and then expecting everyone to recognize the difference and know the hot-keys for typing diacritics when sending tells, etc. Given the number of diacritic characters available, it would get very ugly very quickly.

[jeffm]

Also, from a permissions perspective, it could also result in having characters named Harry, Hárry, and Hârry (badly confusing to begin with), and then expecting everyone to recognize the difference and know the hot-keys for typing diacritics when sending tells, etc. Given the number of diacritic characters available, it would get very ugly very quickly.

While I enjoy the stories and lore a lot, read The Hobbit and LOTR in the early sixties and am rereading Return of the King for the umpteenth time for example, I am not not interested in learning the diacritic keys, or keeping a list of all of them by my computer.

My eyesight is not what it used to be, nor are my fingers as accurate on the keyboard anymore. To try to get the correct diacritic to /tell someone would be unnecessarily painful: I struggled visually to tell the difference between the last pair of Harry's in the quote above.

Any game like this is a set of compromises. I appreciate the Turbine decision to not permit this awkward complexity to detract from my gaming enjoyment.

[Digero]

I don't know the details, but it's a technical issue, not just a permission restriction. Remember that PCs and NPCs/Monsters are not generated by the same means and systems, so while it may be possible for us to use diacritics on the back-end, it may not be (and currently isn't) possible on the front-end.

Also, from a permissions perspective, it could also result in having characters named Harry, Hárry, and Hârry (badly confusing to begin with), and then expecting everyone to recognize the difference and know the hot-keys for typing diacritics when sending tells, etc. Given the number of diacritic characters available, it would get very ugly very quickly.

One way around that is to treat a, á, and â as the same letter. The diacritics would be used when displaying the name, but you wouldn't need to type them (e.g. when sending a tell), and it would prevent confusion from similar names by not allowing two people with the names Hárry and Hârry.

For example, if I wanted to send a tell to Hârry, I could type:
/t harry hi
and the result would be:
You tell Hârry, "hi"

[karakedi]

Thanatos writes:

(I think Hen actually means "eye".)

Yes, that's correct. Amon Hen was the hill of they eye (watching) and was the place the Fellowship broke up, Frodo and Sam heading east, and the rest staying on the west side of the Anduin.

The matching hill on the east side of the river was Amon Lhaw, hill of the ear (listening).

[Joviex]

Thanatos writes:

Yes, that's correct. Amon Hen was the hill of they eye (watching) and was the place the Fellowship broke up, Frodo and Sam heading east, and the rest staying on the west side of the Anduin.

The matching hill on the east side of the river was Amon Lhaw, hill of the ear (listening).

OK, think I have found the confusion. It means both SHE and EYE, and with a diacritic it is a prefix for child.

<TABLE borderColor=#004c00 cellSpacing=2 align=center border=1><TBODY><TR><TD>hên</TD><TD>child (Sindarin, noun) - mostly used as a prefix</TD></TR><TR><TD>hen</TD><TD>1.she (Sindarin, pronoun) 2.eye (Sindarin, noun) </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>

[atteSmythe]

Also, from a permissions perspective, it could also result in having characters named Harry, Hárry, and Hârry (badly confusing to begin with), and then expecting everyone to recognize the difference and know the hot-keys for typing diacritics when sending tells, etc. Given the number of diacritic characters available, it would get very ugly very quickly.

Not a suggestion to allow them or anything, but the solution, IMO, would be to count all diacritics as plain characters. Once someone chose the name Hárry, Harry and Hârry would be disallowed as new characters. /tell Harry would match Hárry, and he'd get the message.

I imagine this would greatly increase the overhead of processing those requests, though maybe not - you'd store the name as Harry, then have a separate field for the 'display name' including the diacritic.

Ahwell, we can dream. Since we're not even permitted midcaps in surnames any more (see user name!), I imagine that special vowels aren't showing up any time soon.

[Inkling]

Funny that other games allow special characters, since of all MMOs that have ever existed, those characters would be most appropriate in LotRO.

It took a while for people to figure it out, but now everyone and their dog has special characters in their name on my WoW server. It's a mess. So while it's a shame that we cant have them in LotRO, it's probably for the best.

[Thanatos]

Not a suggestion to allow them or anything, but the solution, IMO, would be to count all diacritics as plain characters. Once someone chose the name Hárry, Harry and Hârry would be disallowed as new characters. /tell Harry would match Hárry, and he'd get the message.

I imagine this would greatly increase the overhead of processing those requests, though maybe not - you'd store the name as Harry, then have a separate field for the 'display name' including the diacritic.

Ahwell, we can dream. Since we're not even permitted midcaps in surnames any more (see user name!), I imagine that special vowels aren't showing up any time soon.

The trouble with that is some "original" idiot would claim the name in the form of "Härr¥" and we'd be forced to either see that jumk all the time, or turn off player names altogether. I don't want to do the latter because I like seeing the good names people come up with, and I also would like to recognize kinship members and friends when I see them.

I've requested, multiple times now since the beta, that we should have an option to not show player floaty names of people on our ignore list, but it's been ignored. Reporting bad names doesn't work anymore either. Everything from real-world slurs, illegal drug references, to outright lewd names have been reported and apparently approved of on my server.

[atteSmythe]

The trouble with that is some "original" idiot would claim the name in the form of "Härr¥" and we'd be forced to either see that jumk all the time, or turn off player names altogether. I don't want to do the latter because I like seeing the good names people come up with, and I also would like to recognize kinship members and friends when I see them.

I meant to go back and edit my post - regardless of the appropriateness of multiple, I'd limit it to one per, and only the ones that are appropriate to Tolkien's languages, not the whole unicode character set. Same for midcaps in surnames - I'd be fine with them only after 'approved' prefixes (de, d', le, von, etc.), and only one per...even if that vetting means my prefix is too obscure to be on the whitelist.

Allowing them doesn't mean allowing them unconditionally - we can have vowels in our names, even if we can't have four of them in a row!

[Thanatos]

Funny that other games allow special characters, since of all MMOs that have ever existed, those characters would be most appropriate in LotRO.

It took a while for people to figure it out, but now everyone and their dog has special characters in their name on my WoW server. It's a mess. So while it's a shame that we cant have them in LotRO, it's probably for the best.

The tell system being based on first name alone is the simplest solution, but also very restrictive. I guess that's the legacy left to us by EQ1, though. The only MMO I have played that works around that is CoH. With all the support LotRO has for starting tells by clicking on lists or the chatbox, it wouldn't really matter if a name is easy to type or not. Your friend and kinship panels act as contact lists, and from there you have the IM chatbox, so it would be no harder than any instant messenger program like GoogleTalk, ICQ, XFire, Yahoo IM, AIM, or whatever.

[putnal008]

First off...love the thread. Great stuff going on here and would to see it go further. Without the proper knowledge of the languages of Middle Earth, I could take a swing at creating names for my toons and never quite get it right, which will bug me to no end.

So here is what I would like. I am shortly going to roll a burglar and would like him to have a good name. I have spent well over a week contemplating choices and can come up with nothing solid.

Now, I have become well known as Gurthag on Nimrodel. I would like to run with this, and show my wargs name within my burglar's. I believe Gordraug is very close to meaning "Wolf of Fear/Dread" or "Dread Wolf". Until I am corrected, this has become my warg's surname.

I would like to integrate that into my burglar's name, and add the title of Master or Owner to it somehow. Something like Master of the Dread Wolf. I have tossed around different combinations but it all sounds so dead on my tongue.

So if anyone out there can toss me a bone, it would be greatly appreciated.

[Thanatos]

There are a few things to consider if you want to make the name really Tolkien-like and valid in a lore sense. I've also given a quick answer below.

Things to consider:
We'd need to know the race and origin you plan to use.
Man or Hobbit, and Gondorian, Rohirrim, Fallohide, etc.

The free peoples do not use the Black Speech. If you want to, nothing stopping you, but realize that you are declaring yourself a slave by doing so. There's a reason why the Free Peoples are called that. Sauron's forces hate the world, themselves, each other, and him most of all, but greater than their hate is their fear, so they serve. There is nothing cool about being "evil" here, no glory, just cowardice.

Most of this thread so far is about Sindarin, the "modern" form of elvish. Of the possible races and cultures that could pick burglar, only Men of Gondor use Sindarin names. The rest tend to have names that come from the Germanic language branch in one form or another. Rohan uses Anglo-Saxon names, pretty directly. While even hobbits have similar roots, they have been turning them into nicknames for so long that the old forms are all but lost, and only the older Fallohide families still use them. Men of Bree have lots of modern English names, so they are probably the easiest.

http://www.20000-names.com/
Look at Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, plus parts of the German, Norse, Norwegian, Scandinavian, Swedish, Icelandic, and English lists. If you're good at recognizing patterns, you should see how they relate. Even the French list can be useful for some of the old Gothic and Norman names, as those work well for Fallohide hobbits.

Quick Answer:
If you just want something that sounds passable and has a resemblance to your warg's name, make a Stoor or Harfoot Hobbit and call him "Gortho". As to making up the convoluted story of how he's associated with a warg, you're on your own.

[Joviex]

Now, I have become well known as Gurthag.

Honestly I dunno how I would translate your name ;p

The root Gur is the state of death (with a diacritical over the u).

The Tang part seems to have a root somewhere along the lines of Thang? perhaps which the words circling here all mean division or oppression.

Maybe something along the idea of oppressing death, as in stopping it.

Anywho....

herdir,ortheri-[orthor] is master. Mastery is (with a diacritical over the u).

As for dread wolf.... perhaps Gorgaur?

[SiSL]

There are a few things to consider if you want to make the name really Tolkien-like and valid in a lore sense. I've also given a quick answer below.

Things to consider:
We'd need to know the race and origin you plan to use.
Man or Hobbit, and Gondorian, Rohirrim, Fallohide, etc.

Very true, actually brief naming guide like prefixes and suffixes in character creation screen, especially for each family / region you select your race from. May be we should add those to naming guides as well. While I intended this thread to be more "know meaning of the name of place where you are standing at", I would not mind to add such info as well.