Subject: New mission!
Author:
Posted on: 2019-08-18 09:58:00 UTC
In which a vaping Romanian vampire and her new partner deal with a pointless Tolkien torture fic.
(Warning for Tolkien fans: I've bent Tolkien naming rules a little. I know Tolkien names tend to be composed of two or more words and have a complex meaning, but I liked the idea of bird names too much. It won't happen again. :P)
https://rc746.dreamwidth.org/1465.html
What a pointless torturefic that was, and it wasn't even based on an original idea!
I like the vampire and vampire hunter combo.
Ah, I like seeing two former antagonists forced to work together. Hopefully Ruxanda and Edith get past that "antagonism" part fairly quickly. Incidentally, Edith isn't related to Magic: the Gathering's Sorin Markov, is she?
Glad we got the teenagers out of that story. I'm impressed that you were able to communicate the differences in their personalities through body language and level of talkativeness, even while both are suffering from the after-effects of trauma.
There are some spots where a characters words and actions are split into separate paragraphs. I probably missed some, because I was getting lost in the story, but here are the ones I noticed:
"Ruxanda raised an eyebrow.
'You do realize that after that amazingly suspicious reaction, I’ll stop at nothing to pry the story out of you?'"
"The girl pondered this question, and her eyes clouded over.
'I don’t think I have one,' she said."
"Ruxanda ran a hand through her hair.
'Right… makes sense, though, given the fic you came from. I think it’s time that you got proper names, then.' She looked at the siblings, who nodded in agreement, and then to Edith. 'And I think I know someone who can help you.'"
—doctorlit, insisting there are really three Xs
I honestly can't wait to explore more of Edith and Ruxanda's dynamic - there's endless possibilities in a pair of frenemies having to work as a team. And no, I first saw the name Markov in a text-based RPG (the fantastic Gothic romance Heart of the House which I much recommend).
Usually when I separate a character's actions and dialogue I intend it as an indication of a slight pause between the character doing and then saying something, but as far as I can see by you folks' reactions, it doesn't really work. I'll try to pay more attention to this in the future.
And as for my writing about the siblings, I'm really glad I managed to make them different and less of the blanks they were in the badfic. I haven't worked with this many OCs in one mission before, and these two characters had pretty much zero personality to start with (Tavor wasn't even in the fic save for a mention or two, but come on - if my agents rescued his sister, they wouldn't leave him there), so I was pretty much winging it in the last few scenes. Hopefully I'll be able to show even more of their personalities in later missions.
I sort of skimmed over this story to find the names (I was on my phone and in between tasks at the time), but what I saw looked pretty good. Anyway, on to the fun stuff!
I can confirm that Tuilinn is good Sindarin for 'Swallow' - rather delightfully it means 'spring-singer' - but Tavor is a bit trickier. There is a Quenya word Tambaro of that meaning, which certainly looks like it would become Sindarin Tavor, but Ardalambion doesn't provide the latter. A little hunting shows that it's actually a Noldorin (= Tolkien's early version of Sindarin) word, and that the Gnomish (= very early Sindarin) equivalent meant 'wood fay'. Still, so far as we know it's still valid in finished Sindarin, so I'm not complaining.
So: would names of this kind be used in Middle-earth? Among the Sindar, they would be - known Sindar include Amdir ('Hope'), Daeron ('Great [One]'), and Dior ('Successor'). But of course, T&T aren't elves.
Gondorian mortals do also use Sindarin for names, but more than that, they tend to use names of previous characters. Beregond the guard is named after Beregond the Steward, who ruled some 200 years earlier. Denethor is named for an Elvish king of Ossiriand. Faramir is named after the son of a King of Gondor (and prior to that it was a name Tolkien used for an elf of Nargothrond).
So for these to be valid 'inherited' names, all we have to do is postulate a pair of bird-named Elves back in the First Age. Maybe they're Tinuviel's ('Nightingale') handmaidens in Ossiriand, that would make sense.
So what about as new-coined names in Third Age Gondor? In that context alone, they look a bit sketchy; most of those names are of the kind you suggest. But then again, given that Ioreth the Healer's name literally means 'Old Woman', I'm not sure the Third Age Gondorians have much of a leg to stand on.
Ultimately, as Afternames bestowed by another, they can definitely follow the example of Tinuviel.
hS
PS: I'm curious what your source of the names was. Is there a list of Tolkien bird names out there, or did you find them from a vocab list?
I used Hiswelókë's Sindarin dictionary - it's my go-to source when I quickly need to look up a word's meaning (I do use other sources as well for more in-depth research). I had the idea of naming the characters after birds before I found these specific names, and once I did I especially liked the idea of giving the siblings names that start with the same letter, so ultimately, these ones stuck. I did name another Tolkien fic character recruited in my next mission, and I was careful to put together a legitimate-sounding elf name in Sindarin to go with the character's background (with the help of Zingenmir, who's been very kind in helping me out in Tolkien matters); but these two characters were practically blanks before I took them into the PPC, so I thought I might get a little... creative with their names.
I'm glad to hear that I wasn't too far off, though.
... I've thrown together a run-down of Tolkienian bird names, over the ~4 periods of his writing (ie, Gnomish, Early Noldorin, Noldorin, and Sindarin).
As the table shows, there are seven birds with names from Tolkien's latest writings: the swan, lark, eagle, crow, chicken (provided you happen to be writing in Primitive Quendian), finch, and nightingale. These are all definitely valid in the 'canonical' languages.
The majority of the other species, though, have names from the middle period, and these can probably be taken as valid. Other than some minor spelling corrections, you can probably still talk about a sparrow, sea-mew, yellowhammer, kingfisher, dove, petrel, or woodpecker in 'canonical' Quenya or Sindarin (or, indeed, Primitive Quendian, Old Sindarin, Doriathrin Sindarin, Telerin, and in one case Nandorian, AKA Legolas' mother-tongue).
If you happen to be a huge fan of robins, ducks, swallows, swifts, or albatrosses, however, you're out of luck; however charming the word qá for a duck is, it's such an early term that Tolkien would almost certainly have changed it had he gotten round to it.
hS
Look at the word for swan - alqua, alkwa, et cetera. I think it might transliterate in the early form to "white duck". Thus, the later words for swan are corruptions of this original! =]
Per Eldamo, and thence per the Qenya Lexicon, qá comes from the Primitive Quendian root QAHA. That root also gave us the words qaina, 'wailing', and - I kid you not - qaqa-, 'to quack or cackle' (past tense qanqe- or qāqe). It doesn't have any known Gnomish/Noldorin derivations.
Alqa, meanwhile, comes from the root (I)ḶKḶ, with dots underneath the Ls for some reason. From that root we get Primitive Quendian alchwa, 'swan', which gives rise to Gnomish alfa and Qenya alqa, both meaning 'swan'. It also, by some weird process, gives Qenya ilk-, 'to seem', and ilke, 'appearance'; what that means for the original meaning of the root, I don't know.
So does that bump 'white duck' on the head? Maybe not! Or rather, it does the 'white' part, which in Qenya would probably be 'nin-'. But 'ala' is a verb for 'to grow', and also a word meaning 'wing' - as well as an interjection, 'behold!'. Any one of those could reasonably combine with 'duck' to give alqa.
So what we'd be looking at would be a folk etymology which altered the pronunciation of the word. "What's with all those weird dots under the Ls?" the young Elves would ask. "Why are you trying to get 'swan' from 'appearance'? It's clearly big duck! Alqaaaaaaa, alqaaaaa."
And that is why I now believe that the 'a' vowel in Qenya mutated over time into a long 'a', but only when it followed a q.
Because of the ducks.
hS
From ducks going quaaaa. Like how the Egyptian Mau breed of cat is named after the fact that the ancient Egyptian word for cat - mau - is just the noise they made. =]
And the reason for that is that the words for 'cat' in various languages are:
Miog (Gnomish)
Meoi (Qenya)
Miue (Middle Quenya)
Gnomish also gives us Hû for 'dog' (Hû! Hû!), and Muin/Mûs for 'cow'. Qenya has nark, a word meaning 'spiteful remark', but originally 'a dog snapping'.
Tolkien's early languages were stuffed with onomatopoeia, and are utterly charming because of it. And also because they have weirdly specific words for things, like how there's a word 'tolipinke' for 'little doll' (as opposed to a manequin 'tolipin', or a generic doll 'toli').
hS
Definitely liking the dynamic between Ruxanda and Edith, the 'mini-city', adopting the kids instead of simply writing them off as Sue-and-Stu...
No typos spotted on this run (though I expect I won't be the only one making that check), so overall good work!
Thank you very much for writing. :)
I'm glad you liked the mission, and I'm especially glad you like the characters. As for adopting the kids, I don't recruit *every* badfic character I ever see (says the chick who's planning on adopting a character from the very next badfic I'm missioning... I really won't make it a habit, I swear), but I felt a lot of pity for these poor throwaway OCs, stuck in a badfic only to suffer. I plan a shining future for them in the PPC. :D
Dang, I almost forgot to thank Tomash for betaing this mission. Many thanks, friend Tomash.