Welcome Finde... is this your real name [as seems suggested in an earlier post]?

When I saw it I thought "hair", especially when I saw your avatar picture [which I now know isn't you though]. Your parents probably know, but Quenya finde also means "hair", as there are two roots in play, one being SPIN- "fine thread, filament", and the other being the root PHIN- "skillful, neat, clever". For examples of the hair element, we have Quenya finde, findele "tress, lock", noting Laurefindele Sindarized as Glorfindel "Golden haired"

The two roots allowed Tolkien to change his mind about the name Finwe, for example, which he said (even after The Lord of the Rings was published) meant "man of manual skill", but in a later text he noted that the first element in Finwe was often later explained by the Common Eldarin PHIN "hair" [why it's not SPIN here, I can't say] "as in Quenya fine "a hair", finde "hair, especially of the head"... ... though then [same text] JRRT adds that this explanation seems doubtful, as all the Eldar had beautiful hair, and that "... there is no reference to Finwe as having had hair of exceptional length, abundance, or beauty beyond the measure of his people." JRRT, The Shibboleth of Feanor, The Peoples of Middle-earth

So Tolkien, in this late text, appears to leave the etymology of Finwe up in the air, playing his role of translator rather than author. Another name once associated with "cunning skill, magic" was Fingolfin for example, but in a late text Fingolfin became a Sindarization of the Quenya name Finwe Nolofinwe, which, if I write it this way, might help: Finwe N[g]olofinwe.


Actually, given the texts I've looked at, I'm not sure the exact form finde "cunning" survived from Qenya [an early form of the language that Tolkien imagined as a young man] into Quenya as it was imagined in the 1950s and later ["later" meaning after The Lord of the Rings was published]. The text known as Words Phrases And Passages [or WPP, a post-Lord of the Rings text] notes two forms finca "clever (in petty ways)" and finya "clever", but not finde specifically, as clever or cunning...

... but the good news is, also in WPP we still have attested finda "fine and delicately made" from the root PHIN "skillful, neat, clever", which itself is still in play as a root...

... and so, if finda were altered to a female name, its form could be Finde! [as -e can be a feminine suffix itself, displacing final -a here]. So your name still works out in the same semantic bowl as "cunning", in the sense of "skillful, clever", even if early Qenya finde "cunning" became obsolete in the much later linguistic scenario (it's certainly attested in early texts, in any case)

I know, it seemed like a lot of work to get full circle here... but for myself, I had fun doing it. And your name can still have a double meaning too, which is neat I think.

By the way... I'm interested in names