A Lorelai

A little poem I wrote as a thank you for Lorelai, since I enjoy her music a lot.

Lorelai is a Slovak musician who also happens to have a fondness for Lord of the Rings. On her own YouTube channel, she publishes covers mainly of soundtracks and traditionals, as well as original songs. Lorelai shows diverse talent with her beautiful voice and ability to play multiple instruments. She has an amazing dedication to arranging music herself, which is complemented by her creative video ideas, including self-made costumes. Lorelai always comes across as natural, with an honest passion for music. This makes her videos even more worth watching than high-budget productions of today's pop industry. Currently, she performes live with the "Swingless Jazz Ensemble" band as a flutist. I'm looking forward to more productions from Lorelai in the future (whether on YouTube, her own album or some other format), where we will see more of her extraordinary talent.

Contents

1. Classical Tengwar
2. Romanization
3. English Translation
4. Interlinear Translation
5. Translation Notes
6. Slovak Translation
7. Music
8. How do I write a poem in Elvish?

Classical Tengwar

Romanization

English Translation

O Lorelai, Dearest!
When you sang about The Doctor
I have found your songs
You are an excelling musician

You have gone to high mountains
You have gone to countries far from home
You have found unknown substances
And you went to the woods alone

From her heart, her music comes
And precious brown eyes she has

Oh, when you sing the Frozen-song
You touch my heart with your voice
Oh, when you sing Mezi Horami
With your music, you really touch me

From her heart, her music comes
And precious brown eyes she has

A beautiful voice, you have
When darkness is with us
You send to us happiness
With your music, always

You have a beautiful voice
And with your voice, you touch us
Oh, may a star shine on your
beautiful music, always

Interlinear Translation

Glossing Abbreviations

1SG	first person singular
1PE	first person plural (exclusive)
2SF	second person singular (familiar)
3SG	third person singular
ABL	ablative case
ALL	allative case
AOR	aorist tense
DU	dual number
EMPH	emphatic
INS	instrumental case
LOC	locative case
NEG	negation
OPT	optative mood
PERF	perfect tense
PL	plural number
POSS	possessive
PP	passive participle
PST	past tense
SUPL	superlative

Translation Notes

Quenya vocabulary is very sparse, so I had to make do with what's available. I tried to remain faithful to Tolkien's original creation and avoided fan-made additions. For the sake of consistency, I kept the whole poem in Late Quenya (c. 1950-1973).

A few linguistic remarks for the inclined reader:

1. The superlative prefix  (ari-) could be considered archaic, and perhaps  (ani-) would be a better choice, but as it is a poetic work, I chose to use the more ancient form. (line 1)
2. All references to specific songs were translated as well, so that English words wouldn't interrupt the beautiful flow of Quenya sounds. Therefore, I only referenced songs that I was able to translate meaningfully. In the Latin transcription, names are capitalized for clarity. (lines 2, 11, 13)
3. When not explicitely referring to the past, I used the aorist tense to convey a sense of timelessness instead of using the present tense. (lines 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22)
4. In general, the poem makes heavy use of subject pronoun suffixes, which I found to be an elegant way of expressing the subject, especially in a poem, instead of independent pronouns. (lines 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22)
5. In the object position, the independent first person pronouns were used, as Tolkien apparently did not intend to use object suffixes except for the third person, perhaps because it would lead to ambiguity. (lines 14, 22)
6. To highlight Lorelai's positive impact on her audience, the emphatic first person pronoun was used sometimes. (lines 18, 19)
7. I'm not entirely sure if the emphatic first person pronoun can be used with the locative case to convey "with us" like I did with  (elmesse), but as it rhymes so wunderfully with  (alasse) I had to keep it in. (lines 18, 19)
8.  (palla) is probably not the ideal translation for "far away from", as it is connotated with "beyond a certain point" (e.g. "far beyond the river"). A better translation in Middle Quenya may be the adverb  (haiya), but for consistency, I stuck to the probably more poetic sounding  (palla) from Late Quenya, which can also be used as a preposition. (line 6)
9. I'm not sure if  (erma) can actually be pluralized, but I found no better way of rendering "chemical substances", "chemical elements" in Quenya – a phrase I definitely wanted to keep in the poem as it is a direct reference to Lorelai's "Cake To Bake" cover song lyrics. (line 7)
10. I'm not entirely sure if  (taurennar) should get a definite article like in English "to the forests", "to the woods", but since no specific forests are mentioned, I decied to leave it out. (line 8)
11. It is worth mentioning that Quenya has rich vocabulary to describe various kinds of beauty, which I wasn't quite able to reflect in the English glossing. I initially translated "beautiful eyes" with  (vanya), but when I realized that this word is apparently related to "pale" or "blonde", I changed it to  (míre) "precious", which seemed a better fit for dark brown eyes. For translating "beautiful voice", I used  (vanima), which seems to refer to beauty in general. Another option would have been  (linda), which refers to beauty in the sense of melodious, sweet music, but I couldn't quite fit that into the rhythmic structure of the poem. To translate "beautiful music", I chose  (mirya), which specifically refers to lovely works of art. (lines 10, 16, 17, 21, 23)
12. It is also worth mentioning that Quenya has dual number, something that is not too common in contemporary languages anymore, and I could use it to pluralize "eyes":  (hendu) Apparently, there is no dual form for adjectives, so the accompanying adjective "brown"  (varni) is in the regular plural. (lines 10, 16)
13.  (imb') is a shortened version of  (imbe) "between", "among". (line 13)
14. Quenya has first-person clusivity (that is, separate inclusive and exclusive forms of the first person plural pronoun "we") – a feature especially uncommon among European languages. Thus, to refer to Lorelai's audience but not her, the exclusive form is used. (lines 18, 19, 22)

If you are interested in the phonological properties of Quenya, you can view the poem in the letter freqency analyzer (loading… requires JavaScript).

Slovak Translation

Notes: The Quenya definite article "i" is rendered as "tento". The names "The Doctor", "Frozen", and "Mezi Horami" are translated literally, as in the Quenya version.

Music

Originally, I just wanted to write the poem in Quenya. But since that makes it easier for me to feel if the poem "works", I went a step further and created a little tune to go along with it. You can listen to it here and sing along if you wish:

Downloads

• audio (MP3)
• audio (MIDI)
• sheet music (PDF)
• lyrics (UltraStar format)

Note that in the musical version the last two lines are repeated.

How do I write a poem in Elvish?

So, here's a little behind the scenes tour:

1. I knew from Lorelai's channel description that she feels like being Elvish at heart – but the problem is, Elvish is not actually a language! In fact, Tolkien created a variety of languages for his fictional world. (Rather, he created his fictional world for his languages, but that's a story for another time.) Quenya and Sindarin, two Elvish languages, are the most fully developed among these languages. So, I had to pick one of them: Quenya. I chose Quenya because I like the sound of it. No special reason for that.
2. I began brainstorming ideas for the poem: What do I know about Lorelai, her music, and my experience with it? I took some notes.
3. Next, I started browsing the Quenya dictionary for words related to my ideas, noted them down, and ruled out ideas I couldn't find a translation for.
4. Actually, Tolkien made many revisions to his languages over the course of his life. Paul Strack, in his research, divides Quenya further into Early, Middle and Late Quenya. So here comes another step: To remain consistent, I chose to stick with Late Quenya only, as it seemed the most mature to me, and ignored the others.
5. I realized I would go crazy if I tried to find rhyming phrases by randomly stringing words together, so I went for a more systematic approach: I compiled a list with various versions (second/third person, present/past tense, long/short subject suffix etc.) of phrases I wanted to use. In fact, this spreadsheet got quite large – about 900 lines.
6. In preparing the prases, I followed Paul Strack's grammar of Late Quenya to make sure that I would – hopefully – get the inflections and syntax right.
7. I sorted the phrase list by syllable count and final letter to see which phrases would fit into the same stanzas, and arranged the matching phrases in meaningful order. In fact, less than 3% of the phrases I originally translated ended up in the final version of the poem.
8. Finally, I converted the romanized phrases I've been working with into Classical Tengwar script to make the poem look beautiful.

This should give you a rough overview of the process, but of course, it is not quite linear, as the poem went through a few rounds of minor revisions.

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Copyright © 2021-2022 by Thomas Heller [ˈtoːmas ˈhɛlɐ]