A Hobby for the Tome

A question that I often see arise on Internet forums is: How did Tolkien make his names? Answers usually point to the names of the Dwarves being taken from Völuspá, or briefly point out that Tolkien made the names based on Quenya or Sindarin roots.

This post is the first in what I hope to be a recurring series, where I trace the creation of names in detail. I hope that this kind of investigation will help us find patterns in his creative process and clarify what kinds of linguistic patterns he found compelling. Most of the data I will use for this comes from Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth series, though other sources will be brought in when possible.

I am starting with Galadriel for two reasons. The first is that she is one of my favorite characters. It’s my blog and I’ll talk about what I want to. But also, the development of her name is complex enough to be interesting, yet not so intricate that it is a major task to unravel. The development of her name also does not seem to be particularly unique. My opinion may change as I work through more names, but at present it looks to me like the way he invented Galadriel the name follows a fairly typical path.

From Finduilas to Rhien

When Tolkien began writing the Lord of the Rings, he had not yet conceived of Lothlórien or Galadriel. They would not be invented until the Fellowship was well on its way. It should also be pointed out here that the language we call Sindarin today was, at the time, called Noldorin, and was the language of the High Elves, not the Silvan Elves.

When the Fellowship was taken to see “the Lord and Lady of the Galadrim” (Treason of Isengard, 246), the name Tolkien originally wrote for the Lady appears to be Finduilas. The name Finduilas had been created many years before for a character in The Silmarillion. Tolkien seems to have just grabbed it and used it on the fly as he was drafting. (I’ll trace the development of Finduilas in the future.)

As he proceeded with the story, he decided to give her a new name. He used Rhien. Christopher Tolkien draws comparison with the name of Tuor’s mother, Rían.

The meaning of Rhien is apparent from the Etymologies. Under the root RIG- ‘crown’, we find the Noldorin words rhî ‘crown’, rhîn ‘crowned’, and rhîs ‘queen’. In an article in Vinyar Tengwar number 46, an analysis of the manuscript of the Etymologies shows a deleted passage containing the Noldorin word rhiend ‘queen’ or crowned-lady. The root RIG- also contains the female name Rhian, probably the same name as Tuor’s mother Rian, mentioned by CT, with a different spelling convention for the initial letter. Under the root TA- ‘high, lofty; noble’ there is a note that says the preferred word for ‘queen’ in Noldorin was rhien or rhîn, etymologically from ‘crowned lady’.

A quick note on pronunciation: the letters rh represent a “voiceless alveolar trill” (r̥). This is a sound we don’t have in modern English, though it exists in Welsh, where it is also written with the letters rh. In Noldorin r sounds were usually voiceless at the beginning of a word. That is why Tuor’s mother Rían and the name in the Etymologies Rhian are probably the same name. The Etymologies just makes the voicelessness explicit. (However, there are sporadic cases of initial r in the Etymologies, so we can’t be 100% sure what is going on.)

In summary, then, Tolkien went from the recycled name Finduilas to the Noldorin word Rhien ‘Queen’. So, the queen was named Queen. That might feel a little awkward or silly, but it is worth noting that initially Celeborn’s name had been Tar ‘king’. There was not a lot of subtlety to these names at this point in the creative process.

The Tree Queen

As the chapter went on, Tolkien rethought Rhien as well. The next variant that appeared was Galdrien. The final –rien here is the same word as Rhien, but with rh changed to r (i.e., voiced) since it is not word initial. That’s just what Noldorin does, and this change is completely expected.

What about the initial Gald-? This is never directly addressed, but another name beginning gald- that existed at the time was Galdor. Galdor is found in the Etymologies under two different roots, with different implications for the meaning. The first is the root GALA- ‘thrive (prosper, be in health)’. It refers to the name Galdor (without details), but also includes a note that the name may be related instead to GALAD- ‘tree’.

Under GALAD- ‘tree’ we find the Noldorin word galadh ‘tree’, and a few names, including Galdor, again without any explanation. I want to draw your attention to the d in Galdor and Galdrien vs the dh in galadh ‘tree’. This will be significant as the we continue.

There is a third root that needs to be considered: KAL- ‘light’. KAL- had a variant GAL- that showed up in Noldorin words. One such Noldorin word is galad ‘light’ (as shown in Vinyar Tengwar number 45). However, this entire GAL- entry was struck through. There is no evidence if this root was created or rejected before or after the name Galdrien was invented. The timing around these forms is unknown.

Galdrien was also soon changed, to two different variants. One was Galadrien and the other was Galadhrien. The former retains all of the unclarity in the Galdrien form. We cannot say if it relates to GALA- ‘thrive’, GALAD- galadh ‘tree’, or GAL- galad ‘light’, but the Galadhrien form shows us what Tolkien seems to have been thinking. Galadh must be from ‘tree’, not galad ‘light’. Galadhrien was the “Tree Queen”. And indeed, Celeborn’s name about this time morphed to Galathir “Tree Lord” (galadh ‘tree’ + hîr ‘lord’).

What is going on with the d~dh alternation? Tolkien similarly went back on forth on whether the mountain name should be Caradras or Caradhras. Is it significant? It’s hard to say for sure, because there are a couple intersecting issues.

One issue is pronunciation. The letter d in Noldorin is pronounced as in English. Dh is pronounced like the th is this. These two sounds are close to each other, both being voiced and alveolar/dental. It is possible that Tolkien was unsure whether he wanted the stop d to become the fricative dh in this particular word. He might also have been concerned about the consonant cluster dhr vs dr. In other words, he may have been undecided about exactly how he thought the name should sound.

Alternatively, he may have been concerned about orthography, how the name looked. Galadhrien looks more alien than Galadrien to English readers. He was certainly concerned about these issues. He went back and for on Keleborn vs Celeborn, due to tensions between how English speakers try to pronounce the name vs an internally consistent orthography.

As we shall see, this issue continued until well after the Lord of the Rings was published.

Finalizing the Name

The Lothlórien chapter got longer and longer, and Tolkien finally decided to split it. The title for the second part was given as Galadriel. Some of the names before this had been edited to Galadriel, but we don’t now if that was before or after this new chapter title was created. Through the rest of the drafting of the book, though, her name is consistently given as Galadriel. It is a one letter change (n > l), but it requires a whole new Etymology.

The Galad– at the beginning is probably still ‘tree’. So what about -riel? There is no element -riel attested in the Etymologies. If we ignore the r, though, we can find a familiar element. Tolkien had been ending feminine names with -iel since his earliest days of name creation. It shows up in Fíriel, Tinúviel, Gilthoniel, etc.

In the earliest days of the Book of Lost Tales era, it showed up on both male and female names. He later specialized it to feminine names. He derived it from a word meaning ‘daughter’ under the root YEL- ‘daughter’ or SEL-D ‘daughter’. The technicalities of the derivation aside, both roots ended up giving a feminine name ending –iel from ‘daughter’ or ‘child’.

But what about that r? It seems to come from nowhere, except that it was part of Galadrien first. It is worth noting, though, that another, earlier name had an unexplained r in it. Goldriel was said to come from golda ‘gnome’ + -iel. So were did that r come from? It kind of just shows up. It’s the name Tolkien wanted, and not every sound of it seems to have a solid explanation.

Mystery details aside, Tolkien seems to have settled on the name Galadriel by the time he finished the first draft of the chapters that take place in Lothlórien. She is no longer the Tree-Queen, but the Tree-…something feminine. Tree-Lady seems reasonable enough.

De-finalizing the Name

After the popularity of the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien began reworking some of his older stories to make them more in line with his new creations. For present purposes, the interesting ones are the Grey Annals and the Quenta Silmarillion. This work was done primarily in the last half of the 50s. The exact dates aren’t known, but CT dated one of the passages in question to December 1957 or soon after. This work is discussed in War of the Jewels and Morgoth’s Ring.

As Tolkien worked Galadriel into the history of Middle-earth, her story grew much larger. She was no longer just the Lady of Lothlórien anymore. She was a foil to Fëanor. She was a student of Melian. She was a chief foe of Sauron. Tree-Queen or Tree-Lady was no longer a particularly suitable name for her, from a narrative point of view.

While he was working on both of these text, Tolkien wrote Galadriel’s name variously as Galadriel or Galaðriel. CT notes (War of the Jewels, 119) that it isn’t clear if this variation is meaningful, because it is only a difference in whether he placed a cross-stroke on the d. The important thing is that this shows he was still thinking of the name as being derived from the word for ‘tree’ for years after the Lord of the Rings was published. And it is interesting that he chose to write it, not as he had fixed it for publication, but in a way that reflected its accurate etymology (and presumably pronunciation).

However, one draft copy of the Quenta Silmarillion has an undated note added to it that rejects the entire tree-basis for the name. It says that her Quenya name was Altariellë ‘Lady with garland of sunlight’, coming from an older galata-ríg-elle, which would come out in Sindarin as Galadriel, thus making the similarity with Sindarin galadh or Silvan galad ‘tree’ an accident.

This was a complete reworking of the origins and meaning of her name, in a one small note.

The next time we see a discussion of the name is in the essay titled “The Shibboleth of Fëanor”, published in The Peoples of Middle-earth. This essay explains that Celeborn gave Galadriel a Telerin name Alatáriel(lë). This name was adapted into Quenya as Altariel. (The loss of the vowel in the second syllable is a regular occurrence between Telerin and Quenya of this era.) This is an adaptation based on sound, though, because the “etymologically correct” correspondence would have been Ñaltariel. (That ñ is a velar nasal, like the ng in ring.) When the name was rendered in Sindarin, the form Galadriel was chosen. (Note that this is not an adaptation of the pronunciation, as Altariel was, but seems to be a post-hoc derivation of her name, as if she had had a name from before Quenya and Sindarin split.)

The new first root was ÑAL- ‘shine by reflection’, and the Common Eldarin word was ñalata ‘radiance, glittering reflection’, which evolved into Telerin alata, Quenya ñalta, and Sindarin galad. (Note that Tolkien has changed from his explicit use of ð in the Grey Annals and Quenta Silmarillion.) The next root was RIG- ‘twine, wreathe’ (no longer ‘crown’ as in the Etymologies), with rīgā ‘wreath, garland’ becoming Telerin and Quenya ría, and Sindarin rî (no longer voiceless rhî). From that root plus the common feminine suffix, there was Quenya and Telerin riel(lë) ‘a maiden crowned with a festival garland’.

At last, the r between galad- and -iel is accounted for, via a complete reworking of the conceptual basis of the name.

Overview

If we step back from the details and look at the development of the name, I think we can see three phases:

1. Establishing the name based on a concept and a meaning
2. Reworking the name to get the right sound
3. Reworking the meaning to be linguistically and narratively satisfying

Tolkien started out with the idea that she was the queen of this woodland realm, so he gave her a name that meant ‘Queen’, and then more specifically ‘Tree-Queen’. He played around with the forms Galdrien, Galadrien, Galadriel, Galadhriel, until he found the shape and sound he liked. Once the character had grown out beyond the scope of her original purpose, the original meaning wasn’t suitable anymore, so he began reworking the languages to fit the name. A new root ÑAL was invented. The root RIG, which originally meant ‘crown’ when deriving the name Rhien, was redefined to mean ‘wreathe’.

There is not a strict uni-directional pattern to the name creation. It isn’t that the language came first, or the story came first. There was a back-and-forth between the languages and the story. They influenced each other. They co-evolved.