Translation Spotlight: Quenya (Elvish)
The text above is translation—into J.R.R. Tolkien's Quenya (or "High Elvish") language—of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's epitaph for his uncle, the ill-fated polar explorer Sir John Franklin:
Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou
Heroic sailor-soul
Art passing on some happier voyage now
Toward no earthy pole.
The text can also be rendered in with the Latin alphabet:
Lá sinomë! Helcaraxë harya axotyar; ar etyë,
Mánë callociryando,
Autëa mestatyanen anvalima silumë
Lancanna lá cemeno.
Or even broken down into its grammatical components:
Not in-this-place! Grinding-Ice possess-aorist-tense bone-thy-plural; and even-thou
Departed-spirit hero-sailor-genitive,
Depart-present-tense journey-thy-instrumental comparative-happy at-this-time
Sharp-edge-allative not earth-genitive.
Since this is, to my knowledge, the first translation of these verses into Quenya, I have tried to retain the structure and vocabulary of the original English verses, at the expense of poetic concerns such as meter and rhyme, though my translation does preserve the epitaph’s ABAB rhyme scheme solely in terms of the final vowel sounds—where Tennyson uses the pure rhyming pairs “thou” / “now” and “soul” / “pole,” this translation uses –ë at the end of lines 1 and 3, and –o at the end of lines 2 and 4. In terms of vocabulary, I have prioritized words that allowed for assonance and consonance, while also reaching for terms that I felt made sense within the cosmology of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. For example, to render the idea of “the white North” as a place, I used the word “Helcaraxë,” a location to the far North of Middle-earth.
Image: Helcaraxë by Anérea, for the Silmarillion Writers' Guild.
Tolkien’s description of Helcaraxë as a region where “the sea-streams were filled with clashing hills of ice and the grinding of ice deep-sunken,” (Silmarillion, Chapter 9, “Of the Flight of the Noldor”) resonates with the harsh conditions of the Arctic archipelago where Franklin met his death. Furthermore, the “ks” sound at the end of “Helcaraxë” created a pleasing consonance with the word “axotyar” meaning “thy bones.” Similarly, I struggled initially to render the idea of a geo-magnetic pole (an idea which does not appear within Tolkien’s writings about Arda, the larger world of which Middle-earth is one part). I eventually found the Quenya noun “lanca,” referring to a sharp edge or sudden end, which Tolkien further defines as “e.g. a cliff-edge, or the clean edge of things made by hand or built, also used in transferred senses, as in kuivie-lankasse [cuivië-lancassë], literally ‘on the brink of life,’ of a perilous situation in which one is likely to fall into death” (Vinyar Tengwar 42, 8). Although Tolkien makes no mention of geo-magnetic poles in Arda, he created a unique explanation for why some ancient cosmologies understand the world as flat, and others depict the world as round: according to Tolkien, the world was originally flat, and was “made round” to punish the hubris of the men of Númenor, who dared to seek Valinor, the land of the Valar (Silmarillion, Akallabêth, “The Downfall of Númenor”).
Image: Downfall of Númenor by Ian Alexander via Wikipedia.
I thought that the term “lanca” (sharp edge) evoked the “Straight Road” used by Elves to reach Valinor even after rounding of the world, and this term allowed for consonance with the following phrase “lá cemeno,” meaning “not of the earth.” Within my conception of how the story of Sir John Franklin might transfer into the world of Middle-earth, I have imagined Franklin as an exceptional mortal Man to whom a temporary exemption from the “Gift of Ilúvatar” has been granted. Within this narrative conceit, Franklin’s soul—or more specifically his “mánë,” referring to a “spirit that has gone to the Valar” (The Book of Lost Tales, Vol. I, 260), likely deriving from the Latin term manes or the “the departed spirit, ghost, shade of a person” (Lewis & Short, s.v. Manes, Manium)—will live with the Valar before he eventually departs “whither the Elves know not” (Silmarillion, Chapter 1, “Of the Beginning of Days”).
Image: The Travel of Eärendil to Valinor with Elwing, by Giovanni Calore.
If you found this interesting, you can read more about the history of translating Tennyson's epitaph HERE, and consider submitting a translation of your own for publication! More info on that HERE.