Tolkien Meta Week, December 8-14
We will be hosting a Tolkien Meta Week in December, here on the archive and on our Tumblr, for nonfiction fanworks about Tolkien.
This piece is more of a concept, really. You will probably want to read the (rather long) end notes for explanation.
Hail, morning star, brightest of stars, sent to men over middle-earth.
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Aiya Earendil elenion ancalima was originally adapted from a line of Old English poetry from the poem Crist I (which itself is an adaptation of a Latin antiphon). The first line in the chapter text above is a sort of medley of the original line and Tolkien's version. I was aiming at a version that might work cross-culturally.
I ran that line through Google Translate three times, once for Mongolian, once for Hindi, and once for Kyrgyz. I took the transliterations from Google Translate and ran them through Tecendil in Westron Mode to output Tengwar and took screenshots. This process is not likely to have produced anything like an accurate translation and transcription and achieving correctness wasn't really the point.
The idea was to try and suggest the Blue Wizards encountering communities speaking languages not known in the West in their journeys and trying to write them down in a script they knew, with necessary imperfections and errors. I was also trying to suggest that, although Tolkien's take on Earendil is sometimes framed as applicable specifically to the West, other cultures would have seen the Morning Star appear as well and have their own thoughts.