What Sindarin Is

Sindarin Grammar 1

Course 1 · Chapter 1 · What Sindarin Is

Tolkien's Languages gave a sketch of Sindarin. This course takes the grammar apart piece by piece. Before the first rule, though, you need to know what kind of language this is, because Sindarin is unlike Spanish or Japanese: there is no finished grammar to learn, only evidence to read. This chapter explains that evidence and the labels this course uses so you always know how sure a form is.

The idea in a box

Sindarin is a language we reconstruct. Tolkien left texts, word-lists and scattered notes. A grammar is built from them, and where the evidence stops, the grammar stops or becomes a guess.

What Sindarin Is

Sindarin is the Grey-elven language of Tolkien's later work, the everyday Elvish of Middle-earth in the Third Age. Its sound and part of its grammar were built on Welsh (see Tolkien's Languages 3). It is one of the two Elvish languages developed far enough to learn, with Quenya. Tolkien used the name Sindarin from about 1951; the same language was called Noldorin in his earlier writings, as Tolkien's Languages 9 explained.

Where the Evidence Comes From

Everything known about Sindarin falls into a few layers. They differ in how far you can trust them.

Layer	What it is	How much to trust it
Published texts	The poems, inscriptions and names in The Lord of the Rings and its appendices	Highest: Tolkien published them
Edited notes	Word-lists and grammar notes from Tolkien's papers, printed in the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship's journals	High, but they come from different stages of his work
Scholars' reconstructions	Grammars written by other people from the evidence, such as David Salo's	Useful, but scholars disagree
Fan extensions	New words and phrases invented to make the language usable	Not Tolkien's; only as good as their method

The attested texts are the short end of this table. A few poems and inscriptions are the only complete Sindarin sentences Tolkien published, and a learner's grammar has to stretch them a long way.

The Labels This Course Uses

To keep you honest about what you are learning, every Sindarin form in this course carries one of three labels:

Label	Meaning	Example
Attested	Found in a text or notes by Tolkien	pedo mellon a minno
Reconstructed	Not found as such, but worked out by a scholar from the evidence	a mutation form given in a scholar's table
Built by rule	Made by this course from a general rule, to practise the rule	an exercise form with no source of its own

Only the first kind is safe to quote as Tolkien's Sindarin. The other two are for learning.

Two Attested Phrases, Read Closely

The two best-known Sindarin texts in the books are the inscription on the Doors of Durin at Moria and the Elvish hymn to Elbereth. Their first lines are enough to practise the method.

# Attested: the Doors of Durin (the inscription)
Ennyn Durin Aran Moria
  the Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria

pedo mellon a minno
  speak, friend, and enter
  pedo     speak!         (imperative of a verb of speaking)
  mellon   friend
  a        and
  minno    enter!         (imperative)

# Attested: the opening of the hymn
A Elbereth Gilthoniel
  O Elbereth Starkindler

Notice what a grammar can already say about these lines, without a rule yet: pedo and minno both end in -o, the ending of the imperative (Chapter 7). The word a joins two commands. And there is an open question: after pedo one might expect the first letter of mellon to mutate (Chapter 4), and scholars debate it. A variant reading of the inscription even seems to write a different form. This is what the grammar looks like at its edge.

Watch out: a translation is not a source

Websites that offer to "translate English to Sindarin" usually do it by guesswork, mixing stages, inventing words and ignoring mutation. Treat any such output as built by rule at best.

Watch out: one attested example proves little

A form that appears once may be an exception, a slip, or from an earlier stage of the language. Grammar rules rest on patterns across many forms, and Sindarin has few forms to build patterns from.

Common myths

"Sindarin has a standard grammar book." It has several scholars' reconstructions, which differ in places.
"You can say anything in Sindarin." The vocabulary is limited and modern concepts are missing.
"If it is on a Tolkien website, it is Tolkien's." Many sites mix his words with fan inventions.

Hands-On Exercises

Exercise 1

List the four layers of evidence for Sindarin from most to least reliable, and give one thing a learner should do before trusting a form from each of the last two.

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Exercise 2

Take apart pedo mellon a minno word by word, giving the meaning of each word and noting which two words show the same ending. Label every item you give as attested, reconstructed or built by rule.

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Exercise 3

A website claims to translate "I love you" into Sindarin. List three questions you would ask before trusting the result, using the labels from this chapter.

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Chapter 1 Quick Reference

Sindarin = Grey-elven, Welsh-based, named from about 1951 (earlier Noldorin)
Evidence layers: published texts, edited notes, scholars' reconstructions, fan extensions
Labels: attested, reconstructed, built by rule
Attested: Ennyn Durin Aran Moria; pedo mellon a minno "speak, friend, and enter"; A Elbereth Gilthoniel
Imperatives end in -o (Chapter 7); whether mellon mutates after pedo is debated

Coming next

Sindarin Grammar 1, Chapter 2 returns to the sounds, now with the spelling rules (ph, dh, ng, long vowels) and the stress of compound words, so you can read every example in the rest of the course.