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51-738: One of the languages of Arda in Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium , Adûnaic was spoken by the Men of Númenor during the Second Age . By the time of the War of the Ring at the end of the Third Age , it had developed into the common speech or Westron . Adûnaic was invented by the first Men as they awoke in Hildórien. It was the language of Númenor , and after its destruction in

102-571: A philologist of having to "translate" the ancient languages used in the manuscript. A frame story is a tale that encloses or frames the main story or set of stories. For example, in Mary Shelley 's 1818 novel Frankenstein , the main story is framed by a fictional correspondence between an explorer and his sister; in One Thousand and One Nights , compiled during the Islamic Golden Age ,

153-546: A credible mythology, needed to create a "credible book tradition". He went to "elaborate lengths" to achieve this, including many mentions of Bilbo's "diary" and "Translations from the Elvish", supposedly created during his years of retirement, complete with "the masses of notes and paper in his room at Rivendell". She observes that the simulated tradition is already in evidence, hidden in plain sight , in The Hobbit , whose dust jacket

204-464: A genuine mythology written and edited by many hands over a long period of time. He described in detail how his fictional characters wrote their books and transmitted them to others, and showed how later in-universe editors annotated the material. The frame story for both Tolkien's novels published in his lifetime, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , is that the eponymous Hobbit Bilbo Baggins wrote

255-463: A memoir of his adventures, which became The Red Book of Westmarch . This was continued by his relative Frodo Baggins , who carried the One Ring to Mount Doom , and then by Frodo's servant, Samwise Gamgee , who had accompanied him. The Lord of the Rings contains an appendix, " The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen ", which, being written by Men rather than Hobbits, has its own frame story. The legendarium,

306-399: A poem called "Imram" from his legendarium. Eventually, Tolkien gave the book not just a frame story, but an elaborate editorial frame of prologue and appendices that together imply the survival of a manuscript through the thousands of years since the end of the Third Age , along with the editing and annotation of that manuscript by many hands. This placed Tolkien in the congenial role for

357-541: A record of the events of The Lord of the Rings , including the exploits of his kinsman Frodo Baggins and others. He leaves the material for Frodo to complete and organize. Frodo writes down the bulk of the final work, using Bilbo's diary and "many pages of loose notes". At the close of Tolkien's main narrative, the work is almost complete, and Frodo leaves the task to his gardener and close friend and heir Samwise Gamgee . The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Tolkien, seeking to present his Middle-earth writings as

408-400: A suffix. There are three numbers, singular, plural and dual. Dual is used mainly for "natural pairs", like eyes and shoes. There are three cases, Normal, Subjective and Objective. The Subjective case is used as the subject of a verb. The Objective case is used only in compound expressions and appears only in the singular. The Normal case is used in all other circumstances, such as the object of

459-527: A third son, Heorrenda , a great poet of half-Elven descent, who in the fiction would go on to write the Old English epic poem Beowulf . This weaves together a mythology for England , connecting England's geography, poetry and mythology with the Legendarium as a plausibly reconstructed (though probably untrue) prehistory. The first title for The Book of Lost Tales , begun in 1917, framed its stories as

510-460: A title page" for his Red Book, showing Bilbo's "largely unsatisfactory tries" at finding an appropriate title. The final title is Frodo's: My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. And What Happened After. Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and the accounts of his friends. What we did in

561-447: A transmitted collection: In the fiction, a series of named Elves told the "lost tales" to Eriol/Ælfwine. He transmitted them via Heorrenda's written book. As edited by Christopher Tolkien , the 1983 Book of Lost Tales, Volume 1 is inscribed: Tolkien attempted to write two time-travel novels , but never completed either of them. Both can be seen as frame stories for his legendarium, as the father-son pair of time travellers in each of

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612-533: A verb. Example declensions: This Adûnaic text, part of the tale of the Fall of Númenor , appears in The Notion Club Papers . It is fragmentary because it appeared in a dream to Tolkien's frame story character Lowdham, and is only partially translated by him because he did not know the language. Words in bold are not translated at the point in the text where the translation is first given, but their translation

663-685: A visionary dream of Atlantis . Its grammar is sketched in the unfinished "Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language", included in Sauron Defeated . Tolkien remained undecided whether the language of the Men of Númenor should be derived from the original Mannish language (as in Adûnaic), or if it should be derived from "the Elvish Noldorin" (i.e. Quenya ) instead. In The Lost Road and Other Writings it

714-506: A voice that cannot be Bilbo's. In The Lord of the Rings , on the other hand, Tolkien carefully embedded the frame story in the text, from the earliest drafts. He has Bilbo talk in the Council of Elrond about getting on with his book, saying that he was "just writing an ending for it", but realising that it now needed "several more chapters" because of Frodo's adventures on the way to Rivendell. She comments that Tolkien "went so far as to draw up

765-445: Is "surreptitiously" ornamented by Tolkien with ancient-looking runes , which read: The Hobbit or There and Back Again, being the record of a year's journey made by Bilbo Baggins of Hobbiton; compiled from his memoirs by JRR Tolkien, and published by George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Flieger notes that The Hobbit ' s frame story is rather fragile, since the book's narrator often speaks in

816-507: Is absent or unconscious. Further, no other observer was present, especially at Mount Doom where Sam is the only person who sees Gollum fighting an invisible Frodo for the Ring . Flieger observes that on the stairs of the dangerous pass of Cirith Ungol , Frodo and Sam talk about what a story is. Sam says "We're in one, of course, but I mean put into words, you know ... read out of a great big book with red and black letters". Frodo answers "Why Sam ... to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if

867-683: Is given later in the story. Kadō and so zigūrun Sauron zabathān humbled unakkha he-came ... ... ēruhīnim Children of God Kadō zigūrun zabathān unakkha ... ēruhīnim {and so} Sauron humbled he-came ... { Children of God } dubdam fell ugru-dalad shadow-under ... ... ar-pharazōnun Ar-Pharazon azaggara was warring dubdam ugru-dalad ... ar-pharazōnun azaggara fell shadow-under ... Ar-Pharazon {was warring} avalōiyada against Powers ... ... bārim Lords an-adūn of-West yurahtam Languages of Arda Too Many Requests If you report this error to

918-518: Is implied that the Númenóreans spoke Quenya, and that Sauron , hating all things Elvish, taught the Númenóreans the old Mannish tongue they themselves had forgotten. The phonology is as follows: Adûnaic is fundamentally a three-vowel language, with a length distinction; the long eː and oː are derived from diphthongs aj and aw , as is the case in Hebrew and in most Arabic dialects , in line with

969-461: Is intended as the language from which Westron (also called Adûni ) is derived. This added a depth of historical development to the Mannish languages. Adûnaic was intended to have a "faintly Semitic flavour". Its development began with his 1945 work The Notion Club Papers . It is there that the most extensive sample of the language is found, revealed to one of the (modern-day) protagonists, Lowdham, in

1020-557: The Akallabêth , the "native speech" of the people of Elendil in the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor in the west of Middle-earth, though they usually spoke the Elvish language Sindarin . By the time of the War of the Ring , it had developed into the common speech or Westron . Tolkien called Adûnaic "the language of the culturally and politically influential Númenóreans." Although Tolkien created very few original words in Adûnaic, mostly names,

1071-457: The science fiction style frame story machinery that Lindsay had used – the back-rays and the crystal torpedo ship; he notes that in The Notion Club Papers , Tolkien makes one of the protagonists, Guildford, criticise those kinds of "contraptions". In The Lord of the Rings , Tolkien ultimately went much further than simply embedding a frame story in the text, though he did that too. Instead, he constructed an elaborate editorial frame, including

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1122-526: The "meta-textual frame [of The Lord of the Rings ] ... is duly harmonised in the text through the use of formal features; the appendixes are indeed full of scribal glosses, later notes, and editorial references that are meant to match the elaborate textual history detailed in the Note on the Shire Records." For example: Tolkien thought of his legendarium , the large body of documents of many kinds that lies behind

1173-450: The 1920 version of the Ælfwine story as "Tolkien's complicated penultimate version of the pseudo-historical and Anglo-Saxon frame-story", calling it important to any understanding of "Middle-earth's kernel mythology". Dale Nelson, in The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia , writes that Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis admired David Lindsay 's A Voyage to Arcturus , but that Tolkien "regretted"

1224-570: The Lonely Isle was no longer equated with England, and Eriol became the Anglo-Saxon Ælfwine; this began the process of revising the legendarium that continued throughout his life. He notes that in 1945 and 1946, Tolkien added The Notion Club Papers , visiting ancient Númenor by travelling in time rather than by ship, but with a poem about St Brendan's Imram sea-voyages that he revised as the 1955 "Imram". The Tolkien scholar Jane Chance describes

1275-591: The Ring , Bilbo's There and Back Again provided the basis for the voiceover for the scene "Concerning Hobbits"; this was greatly extended in the Special Extended Edition. The memoirs' title became the working title for the third of Jackson's The Hobbit Films in August 2012, but in 2014 he changed it to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies . The Lord of the Rings contains a second frame story, for

1326-702: The Rings ) was taken mainly from the Red Book of Westmarch , stating that this was begun as "Bilbo's private diary", continued by Frodo with an account of the War of the Ring, and extended by Sam. Near the end of the main text, Tolkien has Frodo give the Red Book to Sam. Flieger notes that, seeing it, Sam says "Why, you have nearly finished it, Mr. Frodo!", and describes Frodo's answer as "both definitive and revealing": " 'I have quite finished, Sam', said Frodo. 'The last pages are for you. ' " She comments that where Sam says "it", meaning

1377-557: The Semitic flavour that Tolkien intended for both Adûnaic and Khuzdul, which influenced it. Most information about Adûnaic grammar comes from an incomplete typescript Lowdham's Report on the Adûnaic Language , written by Tolkien to accompany The Notion Club Papers . The report discusses phonology and morphological processes in some detail, and starts to discuss nouns, but breaks off before saying much about verbs, other parts of speech or

1428-607: The War of the Ring. THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING (as seen by the Little People ; being the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire , supplemented by the accounts of their friends and the learning of the Wise.) Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo in Rivendell . Flieger writes that at the time of the release of

1479-491: The Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.150 via cp1114 cp1114, Varnish XID 491713477 Upstream caches: cp1114 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Fri, 29 Nov 2024 08:41:25 GMT Tolkien%27s frame stories J. R. R. Tolkien used frame stories throughout his Middle-earth writings, especially his legendarium , to make the works resemble

1530-471: The appendix " The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen ". The tale describes how the hero Aragorn came to marry an immortal Elf-woman, Arwen . Tolkien stated that it was "really essential" to the work. Its frame story is that the tale was written by Faramir and Éowyn's grandson Barahir after Aragorn's death, and that an abbreviated version of the tale was included in a copy of the Thain's Book made by Findegil. This in turn

1581-665: The body of writing behind the posthumously-published The Silmarillion , has a frame story that evolved over Tolkien's long writing career. It centred on a character, Aelfwine the mariner , whose name, like those of several later reincarnations of the frame-characters, means "Elf-friend". He sails the seas and is shipwrecked on an island where the Elves narrate their tales to him. The legendarium contains two incomplete time-travel novels , The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers , which are framed by various "Elf-friend" characters who by dream or other means visit earlier ages, step by step all

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1632-474: The book, Frodo does not, leaving open whether he means the book or his life in Middle-earth as he has recorded in the book. She briefly considers what Sam might have been supposed to have added, if the suggestion is to be taken at all seriously. She points out that they could have been books 4 and 6 of The Lord of the Rings , where Frodo is never seen without Sam, but there are times when Sam is alert while Frodo

1683-551: The changing walls of faërie", where they hear and narrate legends including "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon"; Tolkien's Lost Tales II contains one of the legendarium's foundation-poems that similarly describes the "Wanderer" Earendel (forerunner of Tolkien's Eärendil ), who sails " West of the Moon, east of the Sun ". Tolkien's biographer John Garth , in the same volume, writes that in 1920, Tolkien revised his frame story so that

1734-500: The character who becomes Ælfwine the mariner is named Ottor Wǽfre (called Eriol by the Elves), and his tale serves as frame story for the tales of the Elves. He sets out from what is today Heligoland on a voyage with a small crew, but is the lone survivor after his ship crashes upon the rocks near an island. The island is inhabited by an old man who gives him directions to Eressëa. After he finds

1785-596: The end of the given story it becomes clear that Alwin Lowdham himself is a reincarnation of sorts of Elendil . Tolkien selected the names of these characters (in both novels) to indicate their affinity: Alwin is another form of the Old English name "Aelfwine", meaning "Elf-friend", while the Quenya name Elendil can carry the same meaning. Anna Vaninskaya , in Blackwell's 2014 A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien , notes that Tolkien

1836-399: The events described in the book. Bilbo thinks of calling his work There and Back Again, A Hobbit's Holiday . Tolkien's full name for the novel is indeed The Hobbit or There and Back Again . In the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings , Bilbo's There and Back Again tale is said to be written in his red leather-bound diary . While living in Rivendell , Bilbo expands his memoirs into

1887-436: The first edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1954, Tolkien had not yet included that text in the Red Book; its prologue spoke of The Hobbit as containing "a selection from the Red Book of Westmarch ". Tolkien went on developing the frame story, and in the second edition he added a "Note on the Shire Records" to the prologue. It explains, in the voice of the fictional editor , that the "account" (the main text of The Lord of

1938-535: The grammar as a whole. It appears that Tolkien abandoned work on the language after writing this portion of the Report, and never returned to it. Most Adûnaic nouns are triconsonantal, but there are a number of biconsonantal nouns as well. Nouns can be divided into three declensions, called Strong I, Strong II and Weak. The two strong declensions form their various cases by modifying the last vowel, similarly to English man/men . The weak declension forms its cases by appending

1989-509: The island, the Elves host him in the Cottage of Lost Play and narrate their tales to him. He afterwards learns from them that the old man he met was actually " Ylmir ". He is taught most of the tales by the old Elf Rúmil, Eressëa's lore master. In these early versions, Tol Eressea is seen as the island of Britain. He earned the name Ælfwine from the Elves; his first wife, Cwén, was the mother of Hengest and Horsa ; his second wife, Naimi, bore him

2040-412: The king's thane, full of grand stories, mindful of songs, who remembered much, a great many of the old tales, found other words truly bound together; he began again to recite with skill the adventure of Beowulf, adeptly tell an apt tale, and weave his words. Peter Jackson chose to continue the use of the frame story of Bilbo's memoirs in his film adaptations. In his 2001 The Fellowship of

2091-504: The language serves his concept as the ancestor of a lingua franca for Middle-earth , Westron, a shared language for many different peoples . Tolkien devised Adûnaic (or Númenórean), the language spoken in Númenor , shortly after World War II, and thus at about the time he completed The Lord of the Rings , but before he wrote the linguistic background information of the Appendices. Adûnaic

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2142-504: The main text to amplify its effect, making it more believable. Several of these contribute to his frame stories, which place him not as author but as the last of a line of philological editors of ancient documents originally written by characters such as the Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins . These paratexts thus support a found manuscript conceit, which in turn supports the frame story. The Tolkien scholar Giuseppe Pezzini writes that

2193-484: The many stories are framed by a tale that Scheherazade keeps the king from executing her by telling him a story every night, each time not completing the story by daybreak so that he spares her life for just one more day. In the last chapter of The Hobbit , Tolkien writes of the protagonist and titular character Bilbo Baggins returning from the journey to the Lonely Mountain and composing his memoirs, to record

2244-471: The novels successively approach the ancient period of the downfall of Númenor . He began The Lost Road in 1937, writing four chapters before setting it aside. He returned to the theme with The Notion Club Papers , which he began and abandoned between 1944 and 1946. In its frame story, a Mr. Green finds documents in sacks of waste paper at Oxford in 2012. These documents, the Notion Club Papers of

2295-595: The poem sings of a poet singing about Beowulf. In her view, Sam's "put into words, you know" is a deliberate echo of Beowulf ' s "glorying in words".         ...     Hwīlum cyninges þegn, guma gilphlæden,     gidda gemyndig, se ðe ealfela     ealdgesegena worn gemunde     —word oþer fand soðe gebunden—     secg eft ongan sið Bēowulfes     snyttrum styrian, ond on sped wrecan     spel gerade, wordum wrixlan;     ...          At times

2346-399: The story were already written". Flieger writes that this is "the most self-referential and post-modern moment in the entire book", since it constitutes the book itself looking both back at its own creation, and forward to the printed book that the reader is holding. She compares this with a passage that Tolkien certainly knew , lines 867–874 of Beowulf , where the scop who is reciting

2397-566: The text of the 1977 book The Silmarillion , as a presented collection, with a frame story that changed over the years, first with an Ælfwine-type character who translates the "Golden Book" of the sages Rumil or Pengoloð; later, having the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins collect the stories into the Red Book of Westmarch , translating mythological Elvish documents in Rivendell . In The Book of Lost Tales , begun early in Tolkien's writing career,

2448-628: The title, are the incomplete notes of meetings of the Notion Club; these meetings are said to have occurred in the 1980s. During these meetings, Alwin Arundel Lowdham discusses his lucid dreams about Númenor, a lost civilisation connected with Atlantis and with Tolkien's Middle-earth . Through these dreams, he "discovers" much about the Númenor story and the languages of Middle-earth (notably Quenya , Sindarin , and Adûnaic ). While not finished, at

2499-548: The way back to the ancient, Atlantis -like lost civilisation of Númenor . Tolkien was influenced by William Morris 's use of a frame story in his 1868–1870 epic poem The Earthly Paradise , in which mariners of Norway set sail for the mythical place, where they hear and narrate tales, one of them of a wanderer much like Eärendil . Tolkien was familiar, too, with the Celtic Imram sea-voyage legends such as those of St Brendan , who returned to tell many stories, and published

2550-580: Was annotated, corrected, and extended in Minas Tirith . The narrative voice and the story's point of view are examined by the scholar Christine Barkley, who considers the main part of the tale to have been narrated by Aragorn. Tolkien included a mass of paratexts – prefaces, notes, and appendices of all kinds – in The Lord of the Rings , and some in The Hobbit . The Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft comments that these "resonat[e]" or "collaborat[e]" with

2601-472: Was directly influenced by William Morris . She suggests that the legendarium's frame story, starting from the travels of Ælfwine the mariner, was modelled on Morris's 1868–1870 epic poem The Earthly Paradise , whose frame story is that "mariners of Norway, having ... heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it". She notes that Morris's "wanderers" reach "A nameless city in a distant sea / White as

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