– A brighter day @abrokendawn - Tumblr Blog

Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, 25.01.25, by Manusia dan Langit (composite picture of the alignment also called “planet parade”)

mournfulroses

Oscar Wilde, from a letter featured in The Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde

rueyam

to be loved softly in the harshness of this world

doctorsiren

Day 20 of Sirentober / Doctober

Hands / Journal

You can tell who never made a deal

Available as a print on my Etsy Shop

petaltexturedskies

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

feativen

— where's the walkthrough site that'll show me how to beat this deathloop of worry

sad--beep

edensbackyard

Tape recorder click sound my beloved

mikonez

psikonauti

John Singer Sargent (American,1856-1925)

A sketch of Polly Barnard for “Clove”, 1885

Pencil on paper

dduane

Tolkien’s original (1937) first page of The Lord of the Rings

penny-anna

Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

penny-anna

~*~earlier~*~

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Frodo: Merry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll wait.

penny-anna

#legolas’ hick accent vs #frodo’s ‘i learned it out of a book’ accent #FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Frodo: :)

storywonker

Frodo: Hello. My name is Frodo. I am a Hobbit. How are you?

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo, crying: please I can’t understand what you’r saying

ramshacklefey

Ok, but Frodo didn’t just learn out of a book. He learned like… Chaucerian Elvish. So actually:

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

Aragorn: *laughing too hard to walk*

reformedkingsmanagent

@ghostriderofthearagon

cryptidscrypticcrosswordclub

dYinGggGggg…

whetstonefires

i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.

whetstonefires

to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!

bowditch

Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.

Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*

linguisticparadox

Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.

sainamoonshine

Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man

Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s

esser-z

Tolkien would be SO PROUD of this post

runiaimperii

It got better

blackat-t7t

Ok but what I got from the part about Frodo’s books being written during Elrond’s childhood is that… Frodo would use outdated slang. So consider-

Legolas: y'all’d’ve

Frodo: Far out, man, I dig it

petermorwood

Elvish? Don’t talk to me about Elvish. Before you get started on Elvish, listen to that lot from Buckland speaking what they think is Westron. They don’t sound anything like us honest folk from Hobbiton. And as for Bree…

Frodo’s book-learned Elvish probably sounds ridiculous; Not just like Chaucerian Middle English, but I doubt there were any pronunciation guides and he’s murdering Elvish equivalents of Cholmondely (chumey), Worcester (wurster), Menzies (mingiss), Arkansas (arkensaw) and so on.

As for his accent, it’s probably either as ridiculously misplaced as his pronunciation, or vastly outdated. Compare the voice-over of a British 1930s newsreel to a modern documentary narration, or listen to how Elizabeth II sounded just after she took the throne in 1952, and how she sounded 70 years later.

Pippin Took, meanwhile - IIRC this is canonical in an Appendix but I haven’t looked up which one - is completely unaware that, unlike in the Shire, Westron in Gondor retains what in German would be Sie / Du address (formal and informal).

So he speaks in his usual (informal) way to everyone from a small boy to Lord Denethor, and gets away with it because he’s presumed to be a prince of his people. It’s not clear what presumption comes first: he speaks like that because he’s noble, or, he must be noble to dare speak like that…

IIRC Pippin’s more like the son of a squire, but Denethor and the rest don’t know it and Gandalf, who does, keeps the information to himself. He merely warns Pippin against “hobbit pertness”. Even as Gandalf the White he probably finds the situation amusing; Gandalf the Grey certainly would…

dduane

(snicker)(cc: @petermorwood)