LOL! Thanks Jax Nova. Sometimes my silliness gets a bit silly
Quote:
When you say the Dwarves were given Norse names which were not their real names who gave them the Norse names? Is this something Tolkien did or something that has been done since?
Yes Tolkien I would say, and I would only add "in his guise as translator" (of some copy of the Red Book of Westmarch). In "real life" for
The Hobbit Tolkien casually lifted many names from the section of the Norse Völuspá called the
Dvergatal, or "Catalogue of Dwarves". Gandalf is a Dwarf-name from there as well...
... however, when
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings became part of Tolkien's world (which generally started with early poetry,
The Book of Lost Tales and later "Silmarillion" related writings and poems), how did Old Norse fit into the linguistic scenario of the "new" Middle-earth?
It didn't, and couldn't. Tolkien's Dwarves lived long before these modern languages (if old to us) came to exist, so the Dwarves could hardly have names made from Old Norse elements with Old Norse meanings...
... but Tolkien wrangled a way to explain it all (if not all perfectly, perhaps), in
Appendix F, On Translation. The Dwarves inner names were in Dwarvish, but remained secret to them, usually.
But you have to call them something, so they had not-secret "outer names" too, but again these would be in some Mannish tongue spoken way (way) back in Bilbo's and Frodo's day, so still way before Old Norse existed: enter translation! Tolkien's conceit is that the Old Norse names are translations of the actual outer mannish names of the Dwarves, which we don't know because Tolkien didn't bother to invent the actual names.
According to Carl Hostetter
Gimli is Old Norse for the site of the hall in which the righteous will dwell after the final conflagration, with a possible meaning 'Fire-lee'. In letter 297 Tolkien notes that:
"Actually the poetic word gim in archaic O. N. verse is probably not related to gimm […] "gem", though possibly it was later associated with it: its meaning seems to have been "fire". Gimli's outer Mannish name probably means something similar... to what Gimli means in Old Norse
Anyway, various names of various characters are not actually their real names, if they hail from languages like Old English (Eowyn should mean "Horse-joy" in Old English for instance), or Old Norse, or English of course. But it can get a bit complicated, and for example the name
Orthanc is a bit problematic here, as it is not only Old English but said to be Elvish as well, and of course Elvish was spoken back in Frodo's day!
I suspect Tolkien just couldn't resist having his fun with
Orthanc. Quite the coincidence!
