Of Beleriand and its Vocabulary

Daniel Stride, antipodean writer, book-blogger, and remarkably-good US election forecaster, wonders if Denethor’s french-fried vocabulary applies to Fëanor’s mad rants, too.

There are some methodological problems here.

1. The Silmarillion isn’t a finished work.
2. The Silmarillion has multiple authors.
3. Fëanor doesn’t make any sane speeches for comparison.

But what the heck. Full speed ahead.  The longest verbatim speech we get is in Chapter IX, “Of the Flight of the Noldor”.  I won’t repeat the whole thing here, but it runs from “Why, O People of the Noldor…” and runs to “No other race shall oust us!” We can validate our presumption that this is a mad rant by noting that 11 of the last 13 sentences end with exclamation marks.

There are 27 French words out of 299, or 9%. The French words in Fëanor’s rant almost suffice to convey the entire meaning of the speech: race, oust, pursuit, beauty, levels, endure, ease, return, realm, people, vengeance, cowards, mountains, await, conquered, jealous, folly, city, journey, serve, war, regained, enemy, valiant.

This raises the question: How close is that to Denethor’s 10%? Most English prose will be loaded up with articles and prepositions that are all from Old English, so there’s a ceiling on how French a passage can be. Is 9% significantly different from 10%? What is the range of tolerable frenchification?

To look into that, I processed the first paragraphs from Chapter XIV, “Of Beleriand and its Realms”, which has to be the least-crazy part of the Quenta Silmarillion. That came out to 20 French words out of 266, or 7%. The words are ages, borders, fortress, defence, assault, dungeons, war, haste, destroy, search, tunnel, issued, mountains, furnaces, refuse, issued, desolation, plain, citadel. Morgoth definitely skews toward the Romance languages. Note the dungeon and the tunnel — they’ll be back shortly.

Who else isn’t crazy, besides the Narrator?  Beren comes immediately to mind.  He doesn’t make any long speeches [1] that I recall, but if I splice together everything he says to Thingol on their first meeting it adds up to 200 words.  Of those, 10 are French. Just 5%: perils, possess, jewels, powers, spy, price, perform, fate, rock, crown. (Not such a good plot summary, but it catches a lot of the flavor.)

In case anyone is wondering if the human/elf distinction matters, I decided Legolas was a sane elf. His speeches in LotR range from 2% French when he’s singing a lament for Boromir to 11% when he’s talking about visiting the Glittering Caves. [2] His average is 6±2.5%. In general, the Quenta Silmarillion has a higher French quotient than LotR, but they’re comparable. Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay took care to match J.R.R. Tolkien’s style and they picked up on this facet very well, arithmetically speaking.

So, with Sam’s permission we will call that settled. As long as they can stay above ground, sane people in Tolkien use less than 7% French words.

[1] This may be a better sign of sanity than any amount of etymology.

[2] It’s almost impossible to use English words to talk about caves.