elennalore

Day 10 of SWG 30-Day Character Study. My character is Mairon | Sauron | Annatar.

Today's prompt: What's in a Name? Research the meaning of your character's name. Think about how that name fits the character but also what the name might more subtly imply about your character.

Ah, Mairon. He has perhaps more names than any other Tolkien character, and yet, I learned his original name only when I returned to fandom in 2020. Was I aware of it before? I don't think I was. Learning that he was called "the admirable one, precious", changed the whole perspective of seeing him as a character for me. Mairon was not a faceless villain – Sauron, the abhorred one – but a multidimensional character whom someone had once named "precious" - like other people, much later, named the One Ring that perhaps had a piece of his spirit inside.

Mairon - "the admirable" and Tar-Mairon "King excellent" were the names he preferred to use for himself, at least until the fall of Númenor. (See also my day 1 post on this). I think that the name Mairon suits him very well. It's related to the Quenya adjective maira that means admirable, excellent, precious, splendid, sublime [Source: Eldamo]. Some of these words sound like something you describe a beautiful object, some of them speak about great skill. Mairon had many skills (metal-craft and con-lang maker, shape-shifter, inspirer, singer and poet) and he was beautiful to look at if he wanted – until he lost the ability to take a beautiful form in the downfall of Númenor.
Tar-Mairon is how he wanted to be remembered, but the claim is wildly exaggerated. He never was an excellent ruler.

Sauron was how the Elves and other free peoples of Middle-earth called him, and it sounds like it is a distortion of the name Mairon. It is related to Quenya adjective saura, meaning cruel, evil, vile; stinking, foul; bad, unhealthy, ill, wretched [Eldamo]. This adjective is used to describe stinking, bad smelling things, and Tolkien had mentioned that the Maiar had a definite smell and for the evil spirits it was an unpleasant one. The name Sauron could be translated as "Stinky", then. Did the good-looking Maia of many skills become a stinky spirit in the end? That's what Tolkien seems to point at here. Many of these descriptive words sound more like food gone bad than something formidable and scary. Even his villain-name has more ambiguity than being a simple villain. For all we know, he could be a piece of excellent cheese gone moldy.

Linguistic source: Eldamo

I started my Atanquesta lessons today with lesson 0 that introduces us the sounds and letters of Quenya. As I told before, this is a restart so some of this wasn’t quite new to me. The voice samples on the online page were very useful, though. I noticed the slight differences between the Finnish and Quenya vowels I hadn’t caught before. The basics of linguistics course I attended last year was very helpful now. I had the IPA chart beside me as I studied this chapter. The lesson also explained the difference between dipthongs and other vowel combinations.

The usage of a diaresis (two dots over a letter e or o to show that they should be fully pronounced, like in the name Fëanor) was explained. It’s meant to help the English-speaking audience, but the author of Atanquesta says that as all the vowels are fully pronounced in Quenya those are not necessarily needed. I usually find the diareses slightly confusing because in my native language ö is a totally different vowel, and feel I don’t need them to remind the pronounciation. But I have started to use diareses when I write Silmarillion fan fiction in English and there are Quenya names, for a better reading experience. I don’t use them when I write Silm fics in Finnish, though. I now decided that I won’t use them when writing general Quenya text. So I would write Eönwë in an English fan fic but Eonwe in a Quenya text.

Pronounciation of some palatalized consonants was a bit difficult for me, and I realized from the voice samples that I’d said them always a bit wrong. For me, the most difficult sounds were ty [c] and ly [ç], and also hy [ʎ]. Here, the voice samples and the IPA chart were extremely useful to understand where and how the sound was formed in the mouth cavity.

In this chapter it was explained how the words are stressed. It depends on two things: the number of syllables in a word and if those syllables are short or long. I won’t explain all the rules here, but here’s a perfect spot for my first homework practice. I’ll take the names of my two helpful elves, Maitimo and Findekáno, and try to find the long and short syllables in their names and which syllable receives the stress. I have made the long syllables bold in text.

And if I am not mistaken, it goes like this:

Maitimo
The first syllable contains a diphthong, so it is long. Others are short.

Findekáno
The first vowel is followed by consonant cluster so the first syllable is long. The third syllable contains a long vowel, so it’s also long. Others are short.

And the syllable which receives the stress is...ta-daa:
MAItimo
FindeKÁno

And that was all from my “Quenya study diary” today!