Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien [245]
On this assumption an etymology is proposed from the Quenya elements in(id) - ‘mind’ and kan - ‘ruler’, especially in cáno, cánu ‘ruler, governor, chieftain’ (which latter constitutes the second element in the names Turgon and Fingon). In this note my father referred to the Latin word incánus ‘grey-haired’ in such a way as to suggest that this was the actual origin of this name of Gandalf’s when The Lord of the Rings was written, which if true would be very surprising; and at the end of the discussion he remarked that the coincidence in form of the Quenya name and the Latin word must be regarded as an ‘accident’, in the same way that Sindarin Orthanc ‘forked height’ happens to coincide with the Anglo-Saxon word orpanc ‘cunning device’, which is the translation of the actual name in the language of the Rohirrim.
NOTES
1 In The Two Towers III 8 it is said that Saruman was ‘accounted by many the chief of Wizards’, and at the Council of Elrond (The Fellowship of the Ring II 2) Gandalf explicitly stated this: ‘Saruman the White is the greatest of my order.’
2 Another version of Círdan’s words to Gandalf on giving him the Ring of Fire at the Grey Havens is found in Of the Rings of Power (The Silmarillion p. 304), and in closely similar words in Appendix B to The Lord of the Rings (headnote to the Tale of Years of the Third Age).
3 In a letter written in 1958 my father said that he knew nothing clearly about ‘the other two’, since they were not concerned in the history of the North-west of Middle-earth. ‘I think,’ he wrote, ‘they went as emissaries to distant regions, East and South, far out of Númenórean range: missionaries to “enemy-occupied” lands, as it were. What success they had I do not know; but I fear that they failed, as Saruman did, though doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and “magic” traditions that outlasted the fall of Sauron.’
4 In a very late note on the names of the Istari Radagast is said to be a name deriving from the Men of the Vales of Anduin, ‘not now clearly interpretable’. Rhosgobel, called ‘the old home of Radagast’ in The Fellowship of the Ring II 3, is said to have been ‘in the forest borders between the Carrock and the Old Forest Road’.
5 It appears indeed from the mention of Olórin in the Valaquenta (The Silmarillion pp. 30 –1) that the Istari were Maiar; for Olórin was Gandalf.
6 Curumo would seem to be Saruman’s name in Quenya, recorded nowhere else; Curunír was the Sindarin form. Saruman, his name among Northern men, contains the Anglo-Saxon word searu, saru ‘skill, cunning, cunning device’. Aiwendil must mean ‘lover of birds’ cf. Linaewen ‘lake of birds’ in Nevrast (see the Appendix to The Silmaril-lion, entry lin (1).) For the meaning of Radagast see p. 505 and note 4. Pallando, despite the spelling, perhaps contains palan ‘afar’, as in palantír and in Palarran ‘Far Wanderer’, the name of Aldarion’s ship.
7 In a letter written in 1956 my father said that ‘There is hardly any reference in The Lord of the Rings to things that do not actually exist, on its own plane (of secondary or sub-creational reality)’, and added in a footnote to this: ‘The cats of Queen Berúthiel and the names of the other two wizards (five minus Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast) are all that I recollect.’ (In Moria Aragorn said of Gandalf that ‘He is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Berúthiel’ (The Fellowship of the Ring II 4).)
Even the story of Queen Berúthiel does exist, however, if only in a very ‘primitive’ outline, in one part illegible. She was the nefarious, solitary, and loveless wife of Tarannon, twelfth King of Gondor (Third Age 830 – 913) and first of the ‘Ship-kings