A rather different theme than usual for this post, which has been inspired by my customary post-Christmas viewing of extended editions of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth films (based on two of my favourite childhood books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings). While watching, I got to thinking about the centrality of the theme of translation in Tolkien’s work, and this post includes some of those musings.
Tolkien himself, of course, was not only a lover of languages but an accomplished translator in his own right, especially from Old English. And Bilbo Baggins, the eponymous hero of The Hobbit, also becomes a translator in the years following his adventure, as the author of three volumes of Translations from the Elvish.
But it goes further than that: Tolkien’s conceit is that his fictional works about Middle Earth are themselves translations or adaptations of works written by characters like Bilbo and Frodo Baggins (so, in the case of the Translations from the Elvish, a translation of a translation). Unlike later authors who created fantasy worlds with invented languages (or, rather, individual words and phrases from fictional languages) that are bolted on as an essentially decorative element, for Tolkien the invented languages came first, and Middle Earth was created to provide a setting in which they were spoken. In the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, there is a section entitled ‘On Translation’ in which he discusses some of the issues involved in representing these fictional languages in a work intended for modern speakers of English. The section begins:
In presenting the matter of the Red Book, as a history for people of today to read, the whole of the linguistic setting has been translated as far as possible into terms of our own times. Only the languages alien to the Common Speech have been left in their original form; but these appear mainly in the names of persons and places.
The ‘Common Speech’, Westron, is the language that is ‘represented’ by English in The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s other works. The section ‘On Translation’, then, is Tolkien‘s ‘translator’s notes’ for The Lord of the Rings. He notes with some displeasure that the process of translation into English has ‘lessened’ the ‘difference between the varieties observable in the use of Westron’. Although he writes that he has attempted to use different varieties of English as a way of representing these varieties in the source language, he notes that it has not always been possible to replicate the differences in full in English. For example, the Hobbits from the Shire speak a variety in which, like in modern English, the distinction between familiar and deferential second-person pronouns has collapsed, whereas the people of Gondor still maintain this distinction. This creates a translation challenge for Tolkien: how to convey in English the scandalously informal form of address that one of the Hobbit characters, Pippin Took, uses when he addresses Denethor, the high-ranking Steward of Gondor? This is a familiar challenge to English translators of languages like French and German, which also have such a distinction. In a footnote, Tolkien remarks that he sometimes, albeit inconsistently, uses the archaic ‘Thou’ to represent ‘ceremonious language’ as a way of marking the difference.
Another translation choice that he defends in this section is his decision to translate ‘Westron names according to their senses’ rather than, as is often more common practice in translations of foreign works, leaving them in the original. He has done so because leaving ‘all the names in their original forms would obscure an essential feature of the times as perceived by the Hobbits (whose point of view I was mainly concerned to preserve)’. In a work already filled with plenty of obscure terms in invented languages, leaving the Westron names untranslated would mask the distinction between names that seemed everyday and familiar from the Hobbits’ perspective, and those that seemed strange and remote to them too. So he uses the term Rivendell rather than Karningul as the common name for the Elven haven of Imladris, or the Shire rather than Sûza.
Moving away from the metatextual conceit that The Lord of the Rings is itself a translation, there are also instances where translation is thematised within the story itself. Consider, for example, the famous scene in The Lord of the Rings when the protagonists are trying to enter Moria. Their way is barred by sealed doors inscribed with mysterious elven writing:
‘What does the writing say?’ asked Frodo, who was trying to decipher the inscription on the arch. ‘I thought I knew the elf-letters but I cannot read these.’
‘The words are in the elven-tongue of the West of Middle-earth in the Elder Days,’ answered Gandalf. ‘But they do not say anything of importance to us. They say only: The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter. And underneath small and faint is written: I, Narvi, made them. Celebrimbor of Hollin drew these signs.’
‘What does it mean by speak, friend, and enter?’ asked Merry.
‘That is plain enough,’ said Gimli. ‘If you are a friend, speak the password, and the doors will open, and you can enter.’
However, the wizard Gandalf does not know what the password is, and the party is unable to progress as he tries in vain to make the doors open. In the film version of this scene, Frodo suddenly realises: ‘It’s a riddle. Speak “friend” and enter. What’s the Elvish word for friend?’ And when Gandalf utters the Elvish word for friend, ‘Mellon’, the doors open. But the scene plays out slightly differently in the book:
With a suddenness that startled them all the wizard sprang to his feet. He was laughing! ‘I have it!’ he cried. ‘Of course, of course! Absurdly simple, like most riddles when you see the answer.’
Picking up his staff he stood before the rock and said in a clear voice: Mellon!
The star shone out briefly and faded again. Then silently a great doorway was outlined, though not a crack or joint had been visible before. Slowly it divided in the middle and swung outwards inch by inch, until both doors lay back against the wall. Through the opening a shadowy stair could be seen....
‘I was wrong after all,’ said Gandalf,... ‘The opening word was inscribed on the archway all the time! The translation should have been: Say “Friend” and enter. I had only to speak the Elvish word for friend and the doors opened.... Too simple for a learned lore-master in these suspicious days.’
Here, Gandalf does not directly state that the words on the door are a riddle; he only says that the solution is simple like a riddle. What we have here is a case not of a riddle but of a mistranslation. Gandalf has misconstrued the meaning of the text (in part, perhaps, his translation has been guided by mistaken assumptions about the purpose of the text, such as that the password must be something hidden and hence that the text would not reveal anything ‘of importance’ in that regard; furthermore, Gandalf is perhaps forgetting that a password is already well hidden if it is written in a language that only learned lore-masters can read). And having mistranslated it, he is blinded by his own construal so that he cannot see things differently (he is stuck with Gimli’s interpretation, which is hard to shake off precisely because it seems ‘plain enough’). The problem, and the moment when the solution suddenly clicks, will be familiar to any translator. The language of the text is not transparent to the understanding, and it does not automatically resolve itself into an interchangeable expression in another language.
It’s these sorts of small details, which permeate Tolkien’s writings, that show an awareness of the richly textured character of language and languages, and in particular the process of representing one language in another. It would be possible to catalogue countless more examples, or to develop a more fleshed-out theory of what Tolkien can say or show to us about translation. I’ll limit myself to just giving a small taster here, since my musings on this topic only go so far. Still, it’s definitely a theme I will pay attention to next time I reread the books, and a reminder of the new aspects we can find as adults in things we first enjoyed as children.
But it goes further than that: Tolkien’s conceit is that his fictional works about Middle Earth are themselves translations or adaptations of works written by characters like Bilbo and Frodo Baggins (so, in the case of the Translations from the Elvish, a translation of a translation). Unlike later authors who created fantasy worlds with invented languages (or, rather, individual words and phrases from fictional languages) that are bolted on as an essentially decorative element, for Tolkien the invented languages came first, and Middle Earth was created to provide a setting in which they were spoken. In the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, there is a section entitled ‘On Translation’ in which he discusses some of the issues involved in representing these fictional languages in a work intended for modern speakers of English. The section begins:
In presenting the matter of the Red Book, as a history for people of today to read, the whole of the linguistic setting has been translated as far as possible into terms of our own times. Only the languages alien to the Common Speech have been left in their original form; but these appear mainly in the names of persons and places.
The ‘Common Speech’, Westron, is the language that is ‘represented’ by English in The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s other works. The section ‘On Translation’, then, is Tolkien‘s ‘translator’s notes’ for The Lord of the Rings. He notes with some displeasure that the process of translation into English has ‘lessened’ the ‘difference between the varieties observable in the use of Westron’. Although he writes that he has attempted to use different varieties of English as a way of representing these varieties in the source language, he notes that it has not always been possible to replicate the differences in full in English. For example, the Hobbits from the Shire speak a variety in which, like in modern English, the distinction between familiar and deferential second-person pronouns has collapsed, whereas the people of Gondor still maintain this distinction. This creates a translation challenge for Tolkien: how to convey in English the scandalously informal form of address that one of the Hobbit characters, Pippin Took, uses when he addresses Denethor, the high-ranking Steward of Gondor? This is a familiar challenge to English translators of languages like French and German, which also have such a distinction. In a footnote, Tolkien remarks that he sometimes, albeit inconsistently, uses the archaic ‘Thou’ to represent ‘ceremonious language’ as a way of marking the difference.
Another translation choice that he defends in this section is his decision to translate ‘Westron names according to their senses’ rather than, as is often more common practice in translations of foreign works, leaving them in the original. He has done so because leaving ‘all the names in their original forms would obscure an essential feature of the times as perceived by the Hobbits (whose point of view I was mainly concerned to preserve)’. In a work already filled with plenty of obscure terms in invented languages, leaving the Westron names untranslated would mask the distinction between names that seemed everyday and familiar from the Hobbits’ perspective, and those that seemed strange and remote to them too. So he uses the term Rivendell rather than Karningul as the common name for the Elven haven of Imladris, or the Shire rather than Sûza.
Moving away from the metatextual conceit that The Lord of the Rings is itself a translation, there are also instances where translation is thematised within the story itself. Consider, for example, the famous scene in The Lord of the Rings when the protagonists are trying to enter Moria. Their way is barred by sealed doors inscribed with mysterious elven writing:
‘What does the writing say?’ asked Frodo, who was trying to decipher the inscription on the arch. ‘I thought I knew the elf-letters but I cannot read these.’
‘The words are in the elven-tongue of the West of Middle-earth in the Elder Days,’ answered Gandalf. ‘But they do not say anything of importance to us. They say only: The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter. And underneath small and faint is written: I, Narvi, made them. Celebrimbor of Hollin drew these signs.’
‘What does it mean by speak, friend, and enter?’ asked Merry.
‘That is plain enough,’ said Gimli. ‘If you are a friend, speak the password, and the doors will open, and you can enter.’
However, the wizard Gandalf does not know what the password is, and the party is unable to progress as he tries in vain to make the doors open. In the film version of this scene, Frodo suddenly realises: ‘It’s a riddle. Speak “friend” and enter. What’s the Elvish word for friend?’ And when Gandalf utters the Elvish word for friend, ‘Mellon’, the doors open. But the scene plays out slightly differently in the book:
With a suddenness that startled them all the wizard sprang to his feet. He was laughing! ‘I have it!’ he cried. ‘Of course, of course! Absurdly simple, like most riddles when you see the answer.’
Picking up his staff he stood before the rock and said in a clear voice: Mellon!
The star shone out briefly and faded again. Then silently a great doorway was outlined, though not a crack or joint had been visible before. Slowly it divided in the middle and swung outwards inch by inch, until both doors lay back against the wall. Through the opening a shadowy stair could be seen....
‘I was wrong after all,’ said Gandalf,... ‘The opening word was inscribed on the archway all the time! The translation should have been: Say “Friend” and enter. I had only to speak the Elvish word for friend and the doors opened.... Too simple for a learned lore-master in these suspicious days.’
Here, Gandalf does not directly state that the words on the door are a riddle; he only says that the solution is simple like a riddle. What we have here is a case not of a riddle but of a mistranslation. Gandalf has misconstrued the meaning of the text (in part, perhaps, his translation has been guided by mistaken assumptions about the purpose of the text, such as that the password must be something hidden and hence that the text would not reveal anything ‘of importance’ in that regard; furthermore, Gandalf is perhaps forgetting that a password is already well hidden if it is written in a language that only learned lore-masters can read). And having mistranslated it, he is blinded by his own construal so that he cannot see things differently (he is stuck with Gimli’s interpretation, which is hard to shake off precisely because it seems ‘plain enough’). The problem, and the moment when the solution suddenly clicks, will be familiar to any translator. The language of the text is not transparent to the understanding, and it does not automatically resolve itself into an interchangeable expression in another language.
It’s these sorts of small details, which permeate Tolkien’s writings, that show an awareness of the richly textured character of language and languages, and in particular the process of representing one language in another. It would be possible to catalogue countless more examples, or to develop a more fleshed-out theory of what Tolkien can say or show to us about translation. I’ll limit myself to just giving a small taster here, since my musings on this topic only go so far. Still, it’s definitely a theme I will pay attention to next time I reread the books, and a reminder of the new aspects we can find as adults in things we first enjoyed as children.
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