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Galadriel's Lament for Eldamar from LOTR, read in Old English translation
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A passage from my Old English translation of Lord of the Rings, read aloud by yours truly. This bit, from "The Fellowship of the Ring" contains Galadriel's Lament for Eldamar.
The pronunciation I use is meant to reflect a rather late period, when monophthongization of the old diphthongs was extensive and contrasts of unstressed final vowels were growing unstable. That's why you hear things like the "eo" grapheme read as /œ/ or /ø:~øʉ/ and why those final vowels are often schwa-ified.
Most of the proper names involved here self-evident. Legolas and Gimli don't need anglicizing. Merry seemed worth half-ængliscizing as Mǽring (though I suppose Myrig would be justifiable too). Frodo's "Fróda" is just reverting to the original form of the name as Tolkien found it. The word Ever-eve can be translated morpheme-for-morpheme as Sinæfen, or rather Sinefen in Galadriel's dialect. All elves in my Middeleorðe speak (or, in this case, sing) a Midland dialect of Late Mercian, and thus the Mercian "Second Fronting" is found here in loanwords from Elvish. Ilmarin is "Ilmærin", Eldamar is "Eldæmær" etc. The names Galadriel and Lorien are given a purely diacritic glide G to indicated that the "i" and "e" are not part of the same syllable. Pippin, though, is Elsīþ. Supposedly his Westron name Razanur was the name of a famous traveler, with morphemes meaning "foreign" or "strange". Now, since Wīdsīþ is a famous fictional traveler to Anglo-Saxonists, I took that name and simply replaced Wīd- with the appropriate El- ("exo-"). The resulting name might mean "Alien Journeyer" or "Traveler Abroad".
If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon.
There you can get access to all kinds of subscriber-only stuff like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents, and you'll get advance access to most of my public recordings as well.
The pronunciation I use is meant to reflect a rather late period, when monophthongization of the old diphthongs was extensive and contrasts of unstressed final vowels were growing unstable. That's why you hear things like the "eo" grapheme read as /œ/ or /ø:~øʉ/ and why those final vowels are often schwa-ified.
Most of the proper names involved here self-evident. Legolas and Gimli don't need anglicizing. Merry seemed worth half-ængliscizing as Mǽring (though I suppose Myrig would be justifiable too). Frodo's "Fróda" is just reverting to the original form of the name as Tolkien found it. The word Ever-eve can be translated morpheme-for-morpheme as Sinæfen, or rather Sinefen in Galadriel's dialect. All elves in my Middeleorðe speak (or, in this case, sing) a Midland dialect of Late Mercian, and thus the Mercian "Second Fronting" is found here in loanwords from Elvish. Ilmarin is "Ilmærin", Eldamar is "Eldæmær" etc. The names Galadriel and Lorien are given a purely diacritic glide G to indicated that the "i" and "e" are not part of the same syllable. Pippin, though, is Elsīþ. Supposedly his Westron name Razanur was the name of a famous traveler, with morphemes meaning "foreign" or "strange". Now, since Wīdsīþ is a famous fictional traveler to Anglo-Saxonists, I took that name and simply replaced Wīd- with the appropriate El- ("exo-"). The resulting name might mean "Alien Journeyer" or "Traveler Abroad".
If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon.
There you can get access to all kinds of subscriber-only stuff like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents, and you'll get advance access to most of my public recordings as well.
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