A Hobby for the Tome

In this post I am going to go through some of the less important animals that show up in the Lord of the Rings. Horses, ponies, and eagles will wait for more interesting discussion. Today, this will just be about bears, cats, and the like.

General Words for “Animal”

Let’s start with talking about the words for “animal” in general. The Conlang makes a distinction between what we can call ‘tame animals’ and ‘wild animals’. Humans, elves, dwarves, hobbits, and so forth do not fit into either category. (Eagles are an interesting case to talk about in the future.)

The word for “wild animal” is pukkut. A wild animal is simply any animal that is not possessed. In fact, it is not possible to add a possessive prefix to the word pukkut, because “my wild animal” does not make sense. It is self-contradictory.

A “tame animal” is -so’iga. It can mean any kind of animal that is kept by one of the sentient races: a pet, livestock, working animal, beast of burden, etc. The hyphen at the beginning shows that the word is incomplete without a possessive prefix. That is, tame animals always belong to somebody, and you have to say who: nïso’iga ‘my pet’, puso’iga ‘her livestock’.

There is no umbrella term that covers both pukkut and -so’iga, but excludes the sentient races. The next level up above these words would just be “living thing”.

Some Basic Animal Words

Some words for animals in the Conlang don’t have any alternative or deeper meaning. They are simply the word, and there is not much to say about them. Here is a small list and some grammatical forms: the nominative, plural, and accusative. (Note, these are just the principal parts of the nouns; there are other forms, which are predictable from these three.)

Some Complex Animal Names

There are a some animal words that are based on words above.

In the above table, we had the word wakkat ‘toad’. The word for ‘frog’ is pawakkat. The initial pa- is from the word pappin ‘water’; so ‘pa-wakkat’ is ‘water-toad’.

Tolkien uses the word ‘water-rat’ once in the text. ‘Water-rat’ is a common word for the small rodent more formally known as a ‘water vole’. These animals burrow into the banks of rivers, streams, and ponds. In the Conlang, this animal is called a wanipa’it. The final -pa’it is clearly from the word paa’it ‘mouse’ above; the initial wani- comes from wanebai ‘river’. So, the ‘water rat’ is, in the Conlang, a ‘river mouse’.