Tradiling

“The Fellowship of the Ring”, the first volume of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, appeared on 29 July 1954, some seventy years ago. To mark the anniversary, Tradiling is publishing this short article on the challenges of translating Tolkien’s masterpiece.

Title page of the first edition of “The Fellowship of the Ring”

The Lord of the Rings is an extraordinary phenomenon in many ways. With this work, Tolkien more or less created the high fantasy genre. Though it has countless imitations, in the opinion of many this work remains unsurpassed. And its popularity has only grown as a result of Peter Jackson’s wonderful screen adaptation, 20 years on still considered an awe-inspiring cinematic triumph.

Translating “The Lord of the Rings” is a major challenge because of all the made-up languages in the original text and because that text itself in the frame story of the novel is a translation into English of the imagined Westron text that the story was originally written in. In fact, of course, the novel was first written in English and the Westron names, when they do appear, were made up by Tolkien subsequently.

The much-loved novel and film series has generated a voluminous authoritative fan bibliography. In this article we discuss only the names of some key characters in the trilogy. To compile it we have reread the original texts and also used the unsurpassed Tolkien Gateway wiki. Of course, there are many other texts that cover this field, at least in part. One such is Miquel Pujol’s research project Traduir la Terra Mitjana (2008).

Tolkien himself took a great interest in the translations of his work and was so upset by the “errors” in the first Dutch (1957) and Swedish (1959-1961) translations of his work that he compiled a single-spaced 23-page Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings (first published in 1975). The guide starts with this short paragraph:

All names not in the following list should be left entirely [Tolkien’s emphasis] unchanged in any language used in translation, except that inflexional -s, -es should be rendered according to the grammar of the language.

As a result of these considerations most of the names in the novel should be left relatively unchanged in translation, apart from accents and other spelling/pronunciation conventions. Here are some of the main characters in this group: Aragorn, Arwen Undómiel, Tom Bombadil, Boromir, Celeborn, Denethor, Elendil, Elrond, Éomer, Éomund, Éothain, Éowyn, Faramir, Galadriel, Gandalf, Gimli, Glorfindel, Gollum, Isildur, Legolas, Nazgûl, Radagast, Saruman, Théoden. (I have chosen not to italicise all names in this text, merely those that are referred to as names, rather than characters, in the discussion.)

The main exceptions to this copying approach are the English-sounding names of some of the other characters, as listed below. Continue reading →