Elvish - Blog Posts

reblog and tag the languages you speak/understand in order of proficiency!!

Arwen's Vision

thîr vain lín darn thûl nín. guren min gaim lín, a le uivelin. nínion ned i vened lîn, ach no allen i ngelu e-belain. harthon ad-govatham adh meleth. novaer nîn muin mellon.

your beautiful face took my breath away. my heart is in your hands, and i will always love you. i cry upon your leaving, but may the blessings of the valar be with you. i hope we will meet again with love. farewell my dear friend.

I dont know if anyone caught this and I really hope people see this but I have come to a realization:

"Solas" in Dalish quite literally translates to pride, further more there are common phrases within the Dalish language that speak of pride ruining everything and blah blah blah here's my source.

What I find funny is that Fen'Harel/Solas shows up and is like "YEaH iTs ME, YOuRE LocaL ELVen ApOSTAte PrIDe" and if your playing a Dalish inky they don't question it or mention it, it's even funnier if your a Dalish Mage because then you're the First of your clan and you're supposed to know this shit. Like they're literally like "Suspicious amount of Fade knowledge, weird ass name, able to drag me into the Fade... Yeah isn't shady at all lemme continue to trust this guy."

Furthermore, Solas' fear is dying alone and the Dalish sayings are quite literally "Dirth ma, harellan. Ma banal enasalin. Mar solas ena mar din." Which roughly means: "Your pride is responsible for everything that has gone wrong; you will die alone." And there's another one thats: "Dirth ma banal. Mar solas ena mar din" which means "You have learned nothing. Your pride be your downfall." The wiki also says that these are common Dalish phrases so...

This likely means that Solas is probably super self aware and we, the fandom, can take this a bajillion ways. One way is that past Fen'Harel was often told that he was prideful and that it would lead to his misfortune and so in DAI he brands himself by his shortcoming to stick it in the faces of his fellow mages but fast forward to DAD, pride will be Solas' downfall and the DAD protagonist will leave him to die alone and pondering what would of happened if he wasn't so arrogant because he wouldn't have lost his friends, his lover (if romanced), or his future.

My trusty sketchbook. Complete with Tolkein’s Elvish.

Okay, so, today on deeply nerdy things I'm working on (and also looking for advice on; vote at the end of the post!)...

So I've been working on coloring Worm's page from the quarantine coloring book (this is what I have so far), and I decided that I needed to put a name on the side of the boat. Because this stream was the first thing I watched with Gerard and Worm, I decided that “Daydream Believer” would be a good name for the boat (fair warning, it’s a pretty violent game they’re playing in that stream, but to summarize, the part I’m referencing is from Gerard’s turn as the murderer when he starts playing Daydream Believer by the Monkees to creep out Worm and the other dude they’re playing with, which is the moment I linked to.)

But then I thought, this is an alien creature’s magical space-boat. I can’t just title it Daydream Believer in English. So I whipped out my D&D player’s handbook (5e) and went to the Elvish alphabet.

But then I thought, I can’t just write Daydream Believer in English with Elvish letters. I need to translate it into proper Elvish first. Which, of course, the only correct Elvish languages to use are Tolkien’s--Sindarin and Quenya. (In any case, I don’t believe that there is a complete D&D Elvish language.) 

So, I brought up a few Sindarin and Quenya online dictionaries and translators, and I came up with a few different translations for “Daydream Believer”, and I wrote them out and transcribed my favorites to try and see which ones looked best in the D&D Elvish alphabet (I know Tengwar is technically the correct Tolkien-based Elvish script to be writing in, but I was already rolling with the D&D Elvish transcriptions, and I think I like the look of them for an alien space boat better, so I stuck with the D&D Elvish). But now I’m kind of stuck between three, and I thought, why not ask tumblr?

The two on the left with the blue highlights are Sindarin translations, and the one on the right with the green highlight is Quenya; I know there are differences in use between the two languages but I figured there’s no particular reason an alien couldn’t speak either of them. The first of the two Sindarin translations is “celain ely thenid pen”. ‘Celain’ means daylight, ‘ely’ means dream, and since I couldn’t find the word ‘believe’ in Sindarin anywhere I looked, I used ‘thenid’ which means ‘faithful’ and ‘pen’ as a pronoun meaning ‘one’. So, the first translation is really “daylightdream faithfulone”, which is fairly close. But I chose that translation mostly for aesthetics, and I worried I had strayed from the truest translation of the words, so I did another. 

The second Sindarin translation I did was “eraid ely esteliad pen”. ‘Eraid’ is just ‘day’ instead of ‘daylight’, and ‘esteliad’ is ‘trusting’, which seemed closer to the meaning of a daydream believer as one who is trusting in their daydreams rather than one who is faithful to their daydreams, although that could lead to a whole debate on the meaning of the original song, which--let’s be honest I’m way overthinking this already. I’m just trying to find pretty letters to write on the side of this boat, lol :) But nerdy linguistic overanalysis for a random obscure reference that pretty much no one is going to get is what I’m here for, haha. 

So, the third and final of my top three translations is the Quenya one, “árë maur savindo”. Quenya actually seemed to translate the phrase more easily, if only because there’s a word for “believer”. ‘Árë’ is day, ‘maur’ is dream or vision (which, I like the idea that the daydream believer’s daydreams are visions of a sort--oh no I’m analyzing the song again, I said I wouldn’t do that, I’ll stop, haha. I actually have thought about the meaning of the song quite a lot), and ‘savindo’ is believer. The Quenya translator that gave me ‘savindo’ warned that it was fan-created, but ‘sav-’ is in fact the Quenya verb for believe, and there was a whole section in the Quenya-English dictionary I looked at for “one who ___” verbs and they all ended in ‘indo’, so I think it’s a correctly derived translation. 

Tl;dr--those are the three best translations I came up with, and I highlighted where I wrote each of them out in Elvish in the image above. So, now I’m asking you to vote: which Elvish translation of Daydream Believer should I write on the boat on my coloring page? “Celain ely thenid pen”, “eraid ely esteliad pen”, or “árë maur savindo”? Vote in the replies or reblog with your vote! :) 

Postscript: If anyone wants to see my full Elvish translation scribblings which led to this, here’s what my process in my sketchbook looked like:

(There was a reflection from an old art class in the top left so that’s what I roughly photoshopped out if you were wondering.)

It’s always fun to have an excuse to mess around with translations and practice writing things in Elvish script :)