Namárië or Galadriel's Lament in Lórien

This is a recitation of the longest piece of Quenya in the Lord of the Rings. I was fortunate, back in The Day, to hear a recording of JRR Tolkien reciting it and I've followed his pronunciation as I remember it. However, the word emphases are mine, based on their meanings regardless of where they fell in the lines. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• tolkien
• namarie
• poem
• poetry
• lament
• quenya
• lord_of_the_rings
• elvish

[cr4374]

you dont continuously pronounce the letter ë the same, in "andunë" you pronounced "an-doon-ay" in "lissë" you pronounced "li-ss-eh", as far as i know, and i have heard the recordings also, it is supposed to be "ay" rather that "eh". also in "Yéni" it should be said "en-ya-ee" as that is how tolkein orrigonally pronounced it. other than that it sounds good :)

[shevek07]

Yes, the difference between the "short e", "long e" and the "ei diphthong" is difficult for me.  You should hear my English sometimes. As for "yeni", I think that, in the Tolkien recording, he is saying a different word, perhaps reciting from an earlier version of the poem. It sounds like "inyar" to me.

[srcforce]

sindarin and quenya are bassed on welsh, but they do kinda sound italien or latin

[shevek07]

Sindarin was inspired by Welsh, to be sure. For example, both share the characteristic of initial consonant mutation. But Quenya was inspired by Finnish. These two languages feature extensive suffix-based case systems for nouns with Finnish having the more extensive despite what has been written elsewhere.

[nakenmil]

sounds finnish. as it is supposed to do. :)

[Sovairu]

To be honest, Tolkien would say that one should pronounce Quenya like Quenya, not Latin, Finnish, or anything else.

[Usmcspartan420]

the lanquage of Gog is more akin to orc speach than that of any race of elves or men... in particular those who have been born in the noontide of heaven? Man, where is the sexy sounding chick... where the hell is Galadriel... alas, Lothlorien lies as bare an Amon Lanc!!!

[mirielsbokblogg]

...and this doesn´t sound like Finnish, actually it sounds *exactly* like a weather-report in Samic :P

I cannot say weather it should sound more like Finnish or Italian, but it should definitely NOT sound Nordic (that would mean Swedish, Norwegian and Danish).

Well anyway the poem in itself is superb! Thank you for putting it here :)

[mirielsbokblogg]

Quenya is definitely based on Finnish (amongst other languages). For example in this poem we find the word "tier" - "road". Finnish word for a road is "tie".

Btw. Finnish is not even a bit like Swedish or any other scandinavian language, they´re not related at all. Swedish is related to English, German, Italian etc etc. These languages belong to the Indo-European group. Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugric group.

[fhdfba007]

i think it's a mixture of latin and northern european languages.

[MobiusDragon89]

@F0reseer Sure, but relatively. There are accent-related grammar rules that make vowels harder to pronounce unless people know 100% what they're saying.

The point is - but that is partially subjective - that many Quenya words are more akin to Italian ones than Finnish. I could notice it myself. I read a few texts in Finnish, and the general style of the words was... a bit different. Vowels and syllabs are undoubtely based on Scandinavian languages, but most words follow a different style.

[F0reseer]

@MobiusDragon89 Italian has 7 vowel phonemes. English (RP) has 12. Chinese has 14. Both English and Chinese are monosyllabic analytical languages and are lacking in inflection. All I was saying is that a speaker of a polysyllabic, synthetic language will have an easier time with Quenya. Vowels of the Romance languages are relatively simpler than Germanic ones.

[MobiusDragon89]

@MobiusDragon89 In poor words, let's not take things so seriously and simply admit that Quenya is the result of Tolkien's study on many languages, as we know that he studied many of them during his life. Heh, I even read articles about Sauron's language being based on some North African language (if I remember well). Sure, Scandinavian languages are very close it, but IMHO not enough to justify some of the claims I use to read).

And of course, I knew why Quenya was named "Latin Elvish". :-)

[MobiusDragon89]

@F0reseer "Simple 5-vowel system." Well, from now on I'll give for sure that you don't know Italian enough to even find the differences (or analogies) with Quenya. You're basically judging our vowel system without even knowing how it works, as it's much more complex than "a, e, i, o, u" suggests.

We know from his letters that Tolkien preferred Spanish over Italian, but his fictional languages show otherwise.

[F0reseer]

@MobiusDragon89 True, but so would a random Japanese person. In fact, any speaker of an inflected, semi to full agglutinating language with simple 5-vowel system will pronounce it fine at a superficial level. However, the sound of it is still noticeably different. Tolkien had Scandinavia in mind when making Quenya, not Rome. Quenya is referred to as "Latin Elvish" due to its historical status, not linguistic status.

[MobiusDragon89]

@F0reseer That's much for the "should" part, though. Despite the obvious analogies with nordic, I've personally found Quenya much closer to Italian and Latin than many other languages. If you pick up a random Italian, I'm pretty sure he/she would pronounce correctly the gross majority of Quenya words without even taking a look at the "rules".

In fact, but I don't remember where/when, I read of people pointing Quenya out as "Latin Elvish".