Within the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien uses four words to refer to snakes or kinds of snakes: snake, serpent, grass-snake, and adder. The last two are only used once each. The former two are used in fairly easy to understand and predictable contexts, without much interplay or complexity. The goal of this post is simply to describe how Tolkien used these terms, and how I chose to translate them into the Conlang.
Adders and Grass-snakes
Let’s do the one-off words first.
Gandalf catches Sam eavesdropping outside the window at Bag End, while he is pretending to cut the grass. Frodo admonishes Sam to keep his departure secret. He says: “if you even breathe a word of what you’ve heard here, then I hope Gandalf will turn you into a spotted toad and fill the garden full of grass-snakes.”
Grass snakes are a variety of snake found in England. They live near water and primarily eat amphibians, especially toads. I will note that Tolkien included the hyphen in his text: “grass-snake”, not “grass snake”. Potentially, then, Tolkien is not referring to a specific species, but any snake found in the grass. The reference to Sam being turned into a toad, though, feels too specific for that. I take Tolkien’s use to be specific, not general. (Using “spotted toad”, rather than just a plain, ordinary “toad” also suggests an intended specificity in the admonishment. Meaningless specificity often adds an element of levity.)
The only time adder gets used, it is not even a reference to the snake. It is an exclamation, uttered by an unhappy Sam upon seeing Gollum following them. “Snakes and adders! And to think I thought that we’d puzzle him with our bit of a climb!” I assume Sam’s word refers to England’s only venomous snake, but it does not really matter, since Sam isn’t actually talking about snakes at all. He’s just grumpy. Nevertheless, accuracy to Tolkien’s vision is important, so we’ll stick with snake expressions.
Grass-snake, since it is a specific species, will be translated into the Conlang with a simple word: tahut, accusative plural tatahuda. The word for a venomous snake is sïïwït, plural sïsïwït.
Snakes and Serpents
The words snake and serpent occur somewhat regularly throughout the text. There is a little bit of overlap in their usage, but not much. Essentially, though, serpent is the more formal word, and snake the more colloquial.
Most of the time snake is used, it is part of an analogy. Gollum is “quick as a snake.” Gandalf describes the Balrog as “stronger than a strangling snake.” When the fireworks at Bilbo’s party fell into the Water, they hissed “like a hundred hot snakes”. The road to Dunharrow wound up the mountainside “like a snake”. There are many more: tree roots, the Watcher in the Water’s tentacles, the oliphaunt’s nose, etc.
The oliphaunt’s trunk is also compared to a “serpent”; that is one of the contexts where serpent and snake seem to mean essentially the same thing. Conceivably there is a size difference, subjective to the point-of-view characters, implied in the two phrasings, but that would be hard to demonstrate, and I don’t see that anything significant would come from the effort.
Serpent also gets used to mean “snake” in a few others contexts. One is when Treebeard is reciting the names of living creatures, trying to see where Merry and Pippin fit into it. “Swan the whitest, serpent coldest,” he says. As a poem for memorizing the names of animals, it has a more formal ring to it than the uses of snake we talked about above, but the reference is clear.
Two artistic uses of serpent occur. The barrow blades Tom Bombadil distributes to the Hobbits are decorated with the shapes of snakes:
For each of the hobbits he chose a dagger, long, leaf-shaped, and keen, of marvellous workmanship, damasked with serpent-forms in red and gold.
The Fellowship of the Rings
One of the lords of the Haradrim at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields uses the image of a serpent on his flag:
Then he was filled with a red wrath and shouted aloud, and displaying his standard, black serpent upon scarlet, he came against the white horse and the green with great press of men; and the drawing of the scimitars of the Southrons was like a glitter of stars.
The Return of the King
In both of these cases, the use of serpent instead of snake probably has something to do with the high class of the items in question: the standard of a Lord, a sword in a prince’s burial mound. Both of these are quite formal, and the use of a more formal word seems appropriate.
There are two more basic uses of snake and serpent, referring to people. The easier case is that of the Haradrim Lord just mentioned. Subsequent to the description of the flag, the Lord is referred to as “the black serpent” by Theoden. There is nothing especially noteworthy here. Theoden did not know the name of his enemy, so he called him by the symbol on his flag.
More significant is the use of snake and serpent in reference to people the speaker wants to characterize as untrustworthy or dangerous. Gandalf repeatedly calls Gríma a snake. Treebeard compares Saruman to a toothless snake, suggesting he is untrustworthy, even despicable, but essentially harmless. And Saruman himself calls Éomer “young serpent” during the parlay at the front door of Isengard.
I think we can break this down to two uses then. Both snake and serpent can refer to the same animal, the legless reptile oft maligned in stories. The difference between the two is just in the formality of the situation. High formality, serpent; low formality, snake. The shapes on the swords and the standard are clearly depictions of the same type of animal. The other use, again of both words, is for an untrustworthy and/0r despicable person.
I don’t see a reason to maintain a difference between the animal snake and serpent in the Conlang. Both words get used for essentially the same stuff. The formal/informal distinction is a quirk of the history of English: serpent comes from Latin, so is more formal; snake comes from Germanic, so is more casual. A lot of word pairs share this pattern, and it is not the kind of thing that would necessarily be found in another language. (It can be; English isn’t unique. I’m just saying it isn’t the kind of thing a linguist would just expect to find in any random language.)
The Conlang word for ‘snake’ and ‘serpent’, then, will be kongwat. It will occur frequently in the phrase kongwatï puni ‘like a snake, as a snake’.
The more interesting question is whether or not it is appropriate to use kongwat to mean ‘an untrustworthy person’. This meaning in English is tied up with Christianity, with the snake who deceived Adam and Eve. There is nothing in the text of the Lord of the Rings or the Silmarillion to say that snakes are evil. This is an artifact of English (or European) culture and language. So should it be imported into the Conlang?
My first reaction is to say “No”. To be honest, I like snakes. I had pet snakes as a child. I don’t see them as treacherous, though they can certainly be dangerous if not handled wisely.
On the other hand, Tolkien uses the snake imagery plenty of times without using the word. Éomer refers to Saruman’s “forked tongue”, and Gandalf uses the same phrase of Wormtongue. Treebeard talks about Saruman as a toothless snake, a quite specific image. Gandalf makes Wormtongue crawl on his belly on the floor. Using a word other than snake for ‘untrustworthy person’ would complicate the translations of all these scenes. The central image tying them together would be lost.
In this case, I am going to let these considerations overpower my personal objections. Kongwat will also carry a meaning of ‘treacherous person’.
Some Conlang Details
To end the post, I will layout the words discussed above and show parts of their paradigms. The words in bold appear in the translation, the others are just provided for completeness.
| ‘snake’ | ‘adder’ | ‘grass snake’ | |
| nominative | kongwat | sïïwït | tahut |
| nom. plural | kokongwat | sïsïwït | tatahut |
| accusative | kongwata | sïïwïta | tahuda |
| acc. plural | kokongwata | sïsïwïta | tatahuda |
| genitive | kongwatï | sïïwïtï | tahudï |
| gen. plural | kokongwatï | sïsïwïtï | tatahudï |
Sam’s curse when he sees Gollum in the Two Towers comes out as: Kokongwat pïp sïsïwït! ‘Snakes and adders!’
The many analogical uses of snake make use of the phrases kongwatï puni ‘like a snake’ or kokongwatï punni ‘like snakes’.
That is just a little bit of morphology and syntax for the interested parties out there to look at. Pretty simple stuff, but it is a start.
A Hobby for the Tome 