Translations of The Lord of The Rings - Tolkien's "Guide To The Names in The Lord of The Rings"

Tolkien's "Guide To The Names in The Lord of The Rings"

The Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings is a guideline on the nomenclature in The Lord of the Rings compiled by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1966 to 1967, intended for the benefit of translators, especially for translations into Germanic languages. The first translations to profit from the guideline were those into Danish (Ida Nyrop Ludvigsen) and German (Margaret Carroux), both appearing 1972.

Frustrated by his experience with the Dutch and Swedish translations, Tolkien asked that

when any further translations are negotiated, I should be consulted at an early stage. After all, I charge nothing, and can save a translator a good deal of time and puzzling; and if consulted at an early stage my remarks will appear far less in the light of peevish criticisms. —Letter of 7 December 1957 to Rayner Unwin, Letters, p. 263

With a view to the planned Danish translation, Tolkien decided to take action in order to avoid similar disappointments in the future. On 2 January 1967 he wrote to Otto B. Lindhardt, of the Danish publisher Gyldendals Bibliotek:

I have therefore recently been engaged in making, and have nearly completed, a commentary on the names in this story, with explanations and suggestions for the use of a translator, having especially in mind Danish and German. —Tolkien-George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins, cited after Hammond and Scull 2005

Photocopies of this "commentary" were sent to translators of The Lord of the Rings by Allen & Unwin from 1967. After Tolkien's death, it was published as Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, edited by Christopher Tolkien in A Tolkien Compass (1975). Hammond and Scull (2005) have newly transcribed and slightly edited Tolkien's typescript, and re-published it under the title of Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien uses the abbreviations CS for "Common Speech, in original text represented by English", and LT for the target language of the translation. His approach is the prescription that if in doubt, a proper name should not be altered but left as it appears in the English original:

All names not in the following list should be left entirely unchanged in any language used in translation (LT), except that inflexional s, es should be rendered according to the grammar of the LT.

The names in English form, such as Dead Marshes, should be translated straightforwardly, while the names in Elvish should be left unchanged. The difficult cases are those names where

the author, acting as translator of Elvish names already devised and used in this book or elsewhere, has taken pains to produce a CS name that is both a translation and also (to English ears) a euphonious name of familiar English style, even if it does not actually occur in England.

An example of such a case is Rivendell, the translation of Sindarin Imladris "Glen of the Cleft", or Westernesse, the translation of Númenor. The list gives suggestions for "old, obsolescent, or dialectal words in the Scandinavian and German languages".

The Danish (Ludvigsen) and German (Carroux) translations were the only ones profiting from Tolkien's "commentary" to be published before Tolkien's death in 1973. Since then, throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, new translations into numerous languages have continued to appear.