Finnish Vocabulary
Finnish is a Uralic language. Unlike most of the other languages spoken in Europe, Finnish is not part of what is now known as the Indo-European family, a family that includes English, German, Russian, and Welsh. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. While words in English, German, and Russian are commonly recognizable to speakers of another Indo-European language, words in Finnish are not.
Compare:
• The Finnish Kuu (the Moon) with the Latin Lūna (the Moon), the Dutch Maan (the Moon), and the Russian Луна (luna).
• The Finnish yö (night) with the German Nacht (night), the French nuit (night), and the Russian ночь (noch’).
• The Finnish Aurinko (the Sun) & the Gnomish Aur | Aura (the Sun) with the German Sonne (the Sun), the French Soleil (the Sun), and the Russian Солнце (Solnce). (GL.20, 59)
Tolkien observed in a letter (L.214) that while in the Exeter College library, when he was supposed to be studying for Honour Mods, he found a Finnish Grammar. “It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; … and my ‘own language’—or series of invented languages—became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure.” The discovery of “Finnish nearly ruined my Hon. Mods, and was the original germ of The Silmarillion.” (L.87) In another letter, he said: “The archaic language of lore is meant to be a kind of 'Elven-latin', … Actually it might be said to be composed on a Latin basis with two other (main) ingredients that happen to give me ‘phonaesthetic’ pleasure: Finnish and Greek. It is, however, less consonantal than any of the three.” (L.176)
Finnish is a language well represented in Tolkien’s lexicon.1 The Elvish name (Súlimë) of the third month of the Elvish year is based on the Finnish tuuli (wind). The name of the ninth month is Yavannië, clearly named in honor of Yavanna, a name glossed as Fruit-giver in The Etymologies, under the entry for the root YAB– (fruit).
The second element (anna) in the name Yavanna is found in The Etymologies, under the root ANA1–, which yields *anta– (to present, give), and the Quenya anta– (give), anna (gift), ante (f., giver), anto (m., giver). (HoMe v.386) Tolkien’s asterisk verb form *anta (to give) points to the Finnish verb antaa which means to give, to present, to allow. Derivatives include the Finnish antaja (giver), anto (delivery, output), anti (an offering of shares). The Finnish anna is the second person imperative form of the verb antaa.
Tolkien’s mix-and-match use of Finnish in compound names is not restricted to the theonym Yavanna. The word Palantir, for example, is likewise a multilingual compound, the second element of which is Finnish in origin: the PIE *pelth2- (flat, wide, stretched out) + the Finnish tiirata (to look with difficulty) < kalatiira > Quenya halatir [literally] ‘fish-watcher’, i.e. kingfisher.2
lunta (ship)
The Gnomish Lexicon attests the form lunta (ship), and lud– (flow, stream, float). (GL.55) The Qenya Lexicon gives the cognate luntë (ship) under the root LUTU–, which yields lúto (flood) and the verb lutta–, lutu– (flow, float). The Etymologies gloss the Quenya lunte as boat under the root LUT– (float, swim), and offer the Noldorin forms lhunt and lhoda (float). (HoMe v.412)
In the context of a boat, the form lutta– (flow, float) prompts the comparative linguist to recall the Finnish lautta (raft, ferry, ship3), commonly derived from the Proto-Germanic *flauta–, *flautaz (float, stream). The loss of the initial ‘F’ of the Proto-Germanic form is explained by Fischer-Jørgensen, who observes that “in Finnish all initial clusters were simplified in older loanwords.”4 The earlier form of the loanword professor, for example, was rohvessori, but in contemporary Finnish the word has regained its original form: professori. The lack of an initial ‘P’ | ‘F’ for lunta | luntë (ship) points plainly to a Finnish origin for the root LUTU–.5
VENE– (originally: small boat)
The Qenya Lexicon attests VENE– (originally: small boat), which yields vene | venē (small boat, vessel, dish), and veniel (mariner). The gloss for the root VENE– was later changed to shape, cut out, scoop. (QL.100-101) The cognate given in the Gnomish Lexicon is benc | bent (small boat). (GL.22) This further confirms the cross-language sound change of initial Qenya ‘V’ and initial Gnomish ‘B’.
The Gnomish form is also found in the term Glorvent (literally: Boat of Gold = The Sun) (GL.40): Glor (gold) + bent (small boat) L> vent. The Elvish title of the “World Ship” drawing is I Vene Kemen. (HoMe i.85) The Elvish name of The Sun (i-Kalaventë: The Ship of Light) repeats this lexeme. (HoMe i.188, 198, 254)
A comparative linguist immediately sees the relationship with the Finnish vene (boat), which is cognate with the Estonian vene (small boat ⟨cut out of a tree trunk⟩). The Qenya veniel (mariner) is obviously echoic of the Finnish veneilijä (boater).
In The Kalevala, Runo XVI — ‘Väinämöinen in Tuonela,’ Väinämöinen is building a boat by singing magic spells, but he cannot remember three words that are necessary to complete the spell for the boat and has to go to Tuonela to get them.
Then the aged Väinämöinen,
He the great primeval sorcerer,
Fashioned then the boat with wisdom,
Built with magic songs the vessel. (lines 101-104)
The words for boat in the original are vene and its derivatives, eg. venettä (partitive singular of vene [boat]) and venoista (partitive singular of venoinen, the diminutive of vene [boat].6
kantl (harp)
The Qenya Lexicon attests kantl (a large harp) under the root KANTAN (make a twang | play a harp). The original entry read kantil (a small harp). (QL.45) There is no readily identifiable cognate in the Gnomish Lexicon, but The Etymologies give an obvious Noldorin cognate: gandel | gannel as well as an Ilkorin form gangel | genglin (pl.) under the root ÑGAN | ÑGÁNAD. (HoMe v.420)
The “Glossary of Finnish Names”7 in Kirby’s translation of The Kalevala—the one Tolkien is known to have read (L.214)—gives:
• Kantele, the Finnish harp or zither.
• Kanteletar, the Daughter of the Harp; name given by Lönnrot to his published collection of Finnish ballads.
The resemblance of the Qenya kantl (a large harp) | kantil (a small harp) to the Finnish kantele can hardly be a coincidence, given Tolkien’s fascination with The Kalevala, and the other Finnish words sprinkled about Elvish.
In his The Traditional Poetry of the Finns8, Comparetti observes that the Finnish word Kantele is not a native Finnic root.
It exists in Esthonian (kannel) and in Livonian (kändlä), but does not occur in other Ugro-Finnic tongues. In my belief it is of Slav origin; but its form shows that it passed from the Slavs to the Finns in fairly ancient times. It is the Old Slav gansl (corruption of gandtl), cithern; the verb gansti means cithara canere; the Polish has gensl, cithern; and the name of the Serbian gusla (gunsla) is of the same origin. The Lithuanian kañklès, cithern, also comes very near to kantele. It is in fact the cithern mentioned by the Byzantines as an instrument very commonly used among the Slavs in ancient times.”
The Noldorin form gannel is patently echoic of the Estonian kannel. This is the kind of thing a philologist of Tolkien’s caliber would be aware of. The sound change of the initial Qenya ‘K’ to Gnomish (Noldorin) ‘G’ is common at the early stage of development of Elvish, and is expected. (QV: ‘K’[c] > ‘G’) Compare the entries in The Etymologies for: GAL– (shine); variant of KAL–. (HoMe v.396, 402)
The sound change of medial Qenya ‘T’ to Gnomish ‘D’ is likewise expected. ‘D’ L> ‘T’ form a lenition pair; eg. tal L> dal: Ramdal (Wall’s End). This sound change is also seen in a comparison of the Livonian kändlä, and the corrupted Slav form gandtl.
A drawing by Acerbi[9], who visited those countries at the end of last century (1798),” notes Comparetti, “gives the interior of a pirtti (the old, rustic Finnish dwelling, which is also now giving place to houses of a different form) with two men seated opposite each other singing runes, while at a little distance there is another, playing an instrument which he holds upon his knees. This is the kantele, a kind of cithern played with the fingers and placed either on the knees or on a table. It formerly had not more than five strings, originally of horse-hair, afterwards of wire. Later on, like the Greek lyre, it had more; at present it may have as many as twelve or sixteen. Recently it has been made with a closed body, anciently it consisted of a thick plank of birch wood, hollowed out on one side, and on the other furnished with five strings stretched by means of pegs. Thus the body was not closed in; the sounding-board was formed by the table on which the player put the instrument.”
O’Curry10 observes that:
A [horse-] hair-strung harp would produce a very buzzing sound, not at all unlike that of bumble bees. Before the introduction of catgut and metal strings, horse-hair strings were probably used in all the imperfect instruments of early nations. In Finland the Jouhi Kantele, an instrument in shape somewhat like a guitar, is mounted with three-horse-hair strings. In the curious Finnish legend of the invention of the Kantele, the strings are made of the hair of the wild horse of Hiisi, a Finnish god.”
Kirby’s “Glossary of Finnish Names”11 gives: “Hiisi, the same a Lempo, the Evil Power, somewhat resembling the Scandinavian Loki in Character.”
Playing a Ten-string Kantele
• Because Tolkien’s idea is that Qenya is over 12,000 years old, the correlation of the Finnish Kantele with the Qenya kantl (a large harp) | kantil (a small harp) validates Tolkien’s Elvo-Indo-European conceit, and implies that the ancestors of the Finns got the word for Kantele (harp) from Elvish, undoubtedly along with the technique for making harps with horse-hair and playing them.
An obviously related Qenya form (qintl | qintele = lyre) is also attested in the Qenya Lexicon. (QL.77) Initial ‘Q’ becomes initial ‘K’ in a number of related Elvish words. Compare the Qenya qelu (a well, spring, source) and the Qenya kelu (fountain, spring) (QL.46, 76), the Noldorin celw (spring, source) and et-kelē (spring, issue of water). (HoMe v.403)
In its headword article for Lyre, The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia12 records that a lyre is:
“a stringed instrument of Egyptian origin, which became the national instrument of ancient Greece. It belonged essentially to the harp family. It resembled closely the cithara which was derived from Asia … The lyre was the instrument most used by the Greeks for accompanying singing and recitation; hence the terms lyric and lyrical.”
Lyra is also the name of a small constellation, one of the 48 listed by the second-century astronomer Ptolemy. In Greek mythology, the constellation Lyra represents the lyre of Orpheus, whose music was said to have the power to charm even inanimate objects such as trees, streams, and rocks.
The Greek Lyre
Grothorf (potato)
The parse of the Gnomish Lexicon entry Grothorf (potato) shows its European ‘roots:’
groth (earth, soil) + orf (apple)
(GL.42, 63)
The Gnomish compound word Grothorf is clearly a calque of a form that is unique to Western Europe. Compare: Latin terrae tūber (tuber of the earth), the French pomme de terre, the Dutch aardappel, the Frisian ierappel, the German Erdapfel (dialect of Southern Germany, Switzerland, Austria), the Icelandic jarðepli (uncommon in normal use), the Danish jordæbler13, the Slovak zemiak, the Polish ziemniak, the Russian яблоки земляные [jabloki zemlenye],14 the Greek Γαιόμηλον (gaiómelon),15 the Breton aval-douar, and the Cornish aval dor, all of which literally mean the same thing: apple of the earth.
Other languages have different words for potato. Compare: the Spanish & Italian patata, the German Kartoffel, the Yiddish kartofl, the Russian картофель (kartofelʹ), the Czech brambor, and the Welsh taten (pl. tatws). In The Lord of the Rings, the Gaffer says both potatoes (F.47) and taters (R.362).
Potatoes are, of course, an anachronism in a story of ‘Europe’ 6,000 years ago. (QV: Elvo-Indo-European) A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, and Historical, of Commerce and Commercial Navigation16 gives a “Historical Notice” in its headword article on Potatoes: “The potato, which is at present [1850] to be met with everywhere in Europe, and forms a principal part of the food of a considerable proportion of its inhabitants, was entirely unknown in this quarter of the world till the latter part of the 16th century.”
This anachronism is, however, of no more consequence than the anachronisms of an “express train” (F.52), and an “umbrella” (F.66) in The Lord of the Rings; or a “football” (H.66), and a “clock” (H.25) in The Hobbit. As Tolkien said in a letter about the Blunderbuss in “Farmer Giles of Ham,” “it was I fear written very light-heartedly, originally of a ‘no time’ in which blunderbusses or anything might occur. Its slightly donnish touching up, as read to the Lovelace Soc., and as published, makes the Blunderbuss rather glaring — though not really worse than all mediæval treatments of Arthurian matter. But it was too embedded to be changed, and some people find the anachronisms amusing.” (L.133)
rim (peace, quietness, calm)
The Gnomish Lexicon attests rim (peace, quietness, calm) and an adjective form rimin | rim (quiet, calm, peaceful). (GL.65)
Ever alert to Tolkien’s use of drow-s, the comparative linguist is quick to spot Tokien’s source for the Gnomish rim (peace) in the Russian мир (mir, peace). The Russian title of Lev Tolstoy’s world-famous War and Peace is Война и Мир (Vojna i Mir). Russian left more than its share of footprints in Elvish.17 An early name for the character Beorn was Medwed, the Russian word for bear (медведь) spelled with German transliteration instead of English (medved).
1 For more on Tolkien’s use of Finnish, see: Hooker, “Finnish Roots of Tolkiennyms,” The Tolkienæum, Llyfrawr, 2014, pp. 159-166.
2 For a more nuanced discussion, see Hooker, The Tolkienæum (Llyfrawr 2014), “Palantir,” pp. 224, 225; and “Fish,” pp. 162-164.
3 Eliot glosses lautta as ship. Charles Eliot, A Finnish Grammar, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1890, p. 242.
4 Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, “On the Definition of Phoneme Categories,” Readings in Linguistics I & II, Eric P. Hamp (ed.), University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 274.
5 For a more nuanced discussion of LUT–, see: Hooker, “LUT– (float, swim),” The Tolkiennymicon, Llyfrawr, 2018, pp. 167-169.
6 Charles Eliot, A Finnish Grammar, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1890, pp. 250-251, lines 249 & 259.
7 Kalevala: The Land of Heroes, translated from the original Finnish by W.F. Kirby, volume 2, London & Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons, first issue of this edition: 1907, reprinted 1915, p. 282.
8 Domenico Comparetti, The Traditional Poetry of the Finns, London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1898, p. 72, 323.
9 With reference to the Italian naturalist and explorer: Giuseppe Acerbi (1773–1846), who wrote Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland to the North Cape in the Years 1798 and 1799 (London: Joseph Mawman, 1802).
10 Eugene O’Curry, On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish: A Series of Lectures, volume 1 (Introduction), London: Williams and Norgate, 1873, pp. ccccxciv-ccccxcv.
11 Kalevala: The Land of Heroes, p. 281.
12 The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, volume IV of X, New York: The Century Company, 1903, p. 3555.
13 C. H. Kauffman, The Dictionary of Merchandize, and Nomenclature in All Languages: For the Use of Counting-houses: Containing, the History, Places of Growth, Culture, Use, and Marks of Excellency, of Such Natural Productions, as Form Articles of Commerce, with Their Names in All European Languages, London: privately printed, 1803, p. 267.
14 C. H. Kauffman, p. 267.
15 John Yeats, The Natural History of the Raw Materials of Commerce, London: George Philip & Son, 1887, p. 461. See also Svensson (below), p. 458.
16 John Ramsay McCulloch, A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, and Historical, of Commerce and Commercial Navigation, a new edition, corrected, enlarged, and improved, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850, p. 1047.
17 For a more nuanced discussion of Russian in Elvish, see: Hooker, “Slavic Roots of Tolkiennyms,” The Tolkienaeum, Llyfrawr, 2014, pp. 153-158.
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