Middle-Earth Names: Find Yours!

Some Background About Elvish Languages

There are two major Elvish languages in The Lord of the Rings. Sindarin is the common Elven-tongue in Middle-Earth, spoken by Aragorn, Legolas, Gandalf, Haldir, the Rangers, learned folk of Gondor and practically all the Elves. Quenya is what Tolkien called "elf-latin," an ancient language spoken in Valinor (the Undying Lands) which was banned in Middle-Earth after a terrible incident caused a rift of ill-will between Sindarin-speaking and Quenya-speaking Elves. That ill-will died down over the ages, but much like Latin, Quenya became a dead language used only by highly-educated people for books of lore and special ceremonial occasions. For example, Aragorn says something in Quenya when he's crowned.

The other thing you should know is that Tolkien never finished creating his Elvish languages. He invented words that suited his tastes and needs, but he never wrote a complete dictionary, never worked out all the grammar, and kept tinkering all his life like a model train enthusiast re-designing his favorite layouts. So there's a lot we don't know, like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces-- a jigsaw puzzle whose creator kept changing or replacing some of the pieces! Despite that, there's a lot of pieces we're sure about, or pretty sure about.

So, How Do I Get an Elvish Name?

The easiest way is to use an existing name from one of the books. Over a dozen books worth of Tolkien's notes and stories have been published since his death, so there's hundreds, maybe thousands of names to choose from! Creating an original Elvish name is harder because of the problem I just mentioned. We're sure about many words and their meanings, but for others there are questions, or Tolkien never invented a word that means what we want. Also, Sindarin has some tricky spelling rules that even the better websites tend to botch.

Option 1) Choose an Existing Elvish Name from the Books

Go to the back of the Tolkien books you own and skim the index for personal names that appeal to you. (Caution: look for personal names, not place names; some books list them in the same index.)

Several online websites also have great lists and/or mini-encyclopedia of hundreds of names from the books. Here's 3 sites you can try:

• Tuckborough.net's Elves of Middle-Earth
  
• Merin Essi ar Quenteli's index of Names of Existing Characters
  
• The Encyclopedia of Arda (see the sidebar)

Note that there are a few Quenya names in these lists belonging to First Age Elves who had not yet given up Quenya, or Elves who lived in the Undying Lands.

Once you've found a name you like, you may want to make sure you like the character it belongs to! You can look up the name on Tuckburough.net or Encyclopedia of Arda.

Option 2) Translate an English (or Other Real-World) Name into Sindarin

The Sindarin Name Finder on the Council of Elrond community website is fairly good, though I've noticed a couple problems.

First, some of the translations are more certain than others. If an entry says "Neo-Sindarin" instead of just "Sindarin," that means it's a reconstruction, like a scientist guessing missing pieces of a dinosaur skeleton. If an entry says "Noldorin," that means it's a name from Tolkien's early writings -- which could be just fine, but Tolkien tinkered with the languages a lot, so he might have changed those words, too, if he'd gotten back to them. So if you wanna be extra nitpicky, try to find a name labeled "Sindarin."

Second, the Sindarin Name Finder is only as good as its translation of real-world names. I noticed it translates "Ellen" (my real name) as "warrior." Nope: it means "light"! So their Sindarin translation of "Ellen" is wrong, too. That may be an isolated mistake, but I suggest double-checking their translation of real-world names with behindthename.com.

Option 3) Translate Real-World Names into Quenya

I personally don't use Quenya names for the reason I mentioned above: the Elves who spoke it in the Undying Lands adopted Sindarin names after they settled in Middle-Earth. But Quenya Lapseparma does such a great job of translating real-world names into Quenya that I've gotta mention it. Or check out the Merin Essi website's Quenya Names List.

Option 4) Create Your Own Sindarin Elvish Name

A majority of all Sindarin names are two-parters, "compounds" of two (or sometimes 3) roots. For example:
ELROND = êl "star" + rond "dome, vault" (as in the vault of stars, heaven)
FANGORN = "fang "beard" + orn "tree"
ARWEN = ar "noble, royal" + gwenn "maiden"

Wait, what happened to the g in Arwen's name? It went to the same place as the final s in Christ + mass! When words in Sindarin are combined, the roots change spellings to flow more easily, making the result sound better. Thikn of how English belief + -er becomes "believer." Unfortunately, Tolkien never wrote out all the rules for these spelling changes, and there's a lot more of these changes in Sindarin than English, making it easier to screw up.

I've found two websites that "construct" Sindarin compound names from the many root words found in Tolkien's writings about Middle-earth. So for example, you might grab the êl from Elrond's name and the (g)wenn from Arwen's name to make Elwen. Mixing and matching this way, we can come up with many more names than Tolkien invented. But again, we need to follow Sindarin spelling change rules, or we'll wind up with a word like "beliefer."

The sites are: Merin Essi ar Quinteli, with an extensive Chart of Sindarin Names, and Elffetish.com's Sindarin Name Generator that attempts to handle the spelling changes using a computer program.

Both of these sites screw up the compound spelling rules. So what can we do, if we don't want to study Elvish for several years to learn how to catch the mistakes? Simple: go to people who have, and ask them very nicely for help!

So, if you want to construct a name that's NOT from canon (Tolkien's books) but is, most likely, a good Elvish name -- used not only by Elves, but by Ents, the people of Gondor, and even wizards -- here's what you do:

I. Use one of those two sites to find a name that means what you want, or pick out your own words to combine from Hisewelókë's Sindarin Dictionary.

II. Go to the Language Help Desk in the Middle-earth Languages forum of the Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza. Tell (a) what meaning you're aiming for, (b) what roots you've found that you hope will work, (c) what compound form you've found (if you used Merin Essi's chart or the Sindarin name generator), and (d) ask if it's spelled correctly, or what the spelling should be. Most of the linguists there appreciate it when you make the effort to find the roots yourself instead of just barging in and saying, "Give me an Elvish name that means X!"

Then...be patient and wait for the reply! These folks have real lives and aren't on every single day. But if you plan to use a name for years, it's worth the wait!

The people of Gondor, as well as Rangers like Aragorn, are descended from humans who were allies and friends the Elves in past Ages. In fact, they were such good friends that they adopted the Elven-tongues! By Aragorn's day only a few noble families in Minas Tirith still used Sindarin Elvish as their everyday language, but nearly all Gondorian personal names and place-names are Sindarin.

So if you want a Gondorian name, you need a Sindarin Elvish name. See the last section!

One exception: kings and queens of Gondor traditionally used Quenya names as their official royal names. That's why Aragorn switched to Elessar after he was crowned. See Quenya Lapseparma or the Merin Essi website's Quenya Names List for Quenya names. Note that the latter list is not from the books, but is a list of compounds reconstructed by Elvish language enthusiasts with a pretty good idea what they're doing.

Finally, there was a period during the Second Age when Númenoreans, the ancestors of the people of Gondor, got fed up with Elves and reverted to their original language, Adûnaic. Here's Merin Essi's Adûnaic name list. Some of Aragorn's ancestors at the beginning of the Third Age were using Adûnaic, but eventually they reverted back to using Elvish.

The Riders of Rohan had a separate history and language from Gondor. See the next section for Rohirric names!

Tolkien used Old English (Anglo-Saxon) to represent the language of the Riddermark. (He pretended he was "translating" their language into ours, using an old version of English to get across the fact that their language was archaic.) So, if you want to name someone from Rohan, what you want is an Old English/Anglo-Saxon name.

There's numerous online resources for Old English. I recommend:

• The Anglo-Saxon section of the Medieval Names Archive, a site put together by a learned group of medieval reenactors called the Academy of St. Gabriel.
  
• The short Old English section of behindthename.com.

Also, an old Rohirric Nicknames Thread on the Plaza recommends this Old English to Modern English (and vice versa) Dictionary.

Photo Credit: Cayusa on Flickr

Hobbits have rather English names. Unusually for Middle-earth, they have a first and last name. The easiest place to go for hobbit-names is the family tree charts of the Baggins, Brandybucks, Tooks and Gamgees in the appendices of Return of the King.

Online, I recommend Tuckburough.net's People Index, an encyclopedia of Middle-Eearth with an exhaustive list of Hobbit-names.

You can take an existing name from those lists, or invent your own:

For last names, skim Bilbo's farewell speech to get most of the surnames in the Shire: Baggins, Took, Brandybuck, Grubb, Chubb, Burrows, Hornblower, Boffin, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Goodbody, Brockhouse, Proudfoot. A few other last names crop up outside the Speech: Maggot, Underhill, Banks, Longholes, Sandheaver, Sandyman, Tunnelly, Sackville.

In far-off Bree lived some Hobbit families whose names sounded odd to Frodo and his friends. "Mugwort" is the only example given, but apparently these names tended to be herb names. (The Men of Bree like Butterbur and Ferny are also unusual in having last names, and like the Bree-Hobbits their surnames tend to be plant-names.)

For female Hobbit first names, Hobbits often (but not always -- see below) used flowers, sometimes jewels: Diamond, Daisy, Marigold, Rose, Primula, Lobelia, Belladonna, for example.

For male Hobbit first names, Tolkien says, "To their man-children they usually gave names that had no meaning at all in their daily language, and some of their women's names were similar. Of this kind are Bilbo, Bungo, Polo, Lotho, Tanta, Nina, and so on. There are many inevitable but accidental resemblances to names we now have or know: for instance Otho, Odo, Drogo, Dora, Cora, and the like... In some old families, especially those of Fallohide origin such as the Tooks and the Bolgers, it was, however, the custom to give high-sounding first-names...most of these seem to have been drawn from legends of the past, of Men as well as Hobbits." (Appendix F, Return of the King)

"Fallowhide" refers to a distant ancestral clan from which the Tooks were descended. These "high-sounding" names, used for some members of the aristocratic Took and Brandybuck families, actually come from Frankish, Gothic, or (rarely) Celtic, real-world languages from the early Middle Ages. Examples: Peregrin, Meriadoc, Gorbadoc, Fredegar. If you want to get fancy with a Took or Brandybuck name, you might Google "Medieval Gothic names" or "Frankish names" and see what's out there. Watch out with Gothic: if you Google for "Gothic names," you'll probably wind up with modern-day "Goth" Hobbits! Also remember that Hobbits are very down-to-earth folks, so they use nicknames like Merry and Pippin for "high-sounding names" in everyday conversation.

Otherwise, just make up one of those male names ending in -o, or the female names ending in -a.

Finally, some Hobbit first names are just old-fashioned English names, like "Samwise son of Hamfast" and "Ted" and "Andy." The Merin Essi website suggests using the English Names List on behindthename.com, sticking ONLY to English names with Old English roots. (Tolkien explicitly stated he wasn't using Biblical names; he didn't like mixing his invented fantasy with his real-world religion.)

Hobbit-names have such a distinctive sound that it's fairly easy to invent a new one. For instance, my good friend Blackrose Bugg used a flower-name for her first name, following Hobbit custom, then, for her last name, took her beloved VW Bug and "Hobbitized" it based on the names Grubb and Chubb.

Photo Credit: Heather F on Flickr

Tolkien's Dwarf-names (and "Gandalf," by the way) are Norse, lifted straight from the Dwarf-names in the Völuspá, part of a longer Icelandic Norse saga. There are a lot of Dwarf-names Tolkien didn't use from that poem; you can find the rest by clicking that link and scrolling down to verse 10.

Geir, an expert on Dwarves at the Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza, recommends two sources for Norse names to use for Dwarves (especially handy, she notes, for female names, since Tolkien only mentions one female Dwarf-name, Dis, which is also Norse).

• Viking Names Found in the Landnamabok
  
• Old Norse Names from the Viking Answer Lady.

Merin Essi recommends the Norse Mythology section of behindthenames.com.

Norse names also work for the people of Dale and Lake-Town.

Tolkien grabbed those Norse names rather casually when writing The Hobbit, and later felt a little embarrassed about it (I think). He eventually "explained" that the Dwarves has secret names in their own language, Khudzul, which they almost never spoke in front of non-Dwarves. About the only examples we have of "real" Dwarvish names are a few well-known place names like Khazad-dûm. For their "everyday names," he was "translating" them into Norse, just as he was "translating" the language of Rohan into Old English.

Yep, I know, this guy's a really hardcore language scholar, isn't he?

But that kind of obsessiveness is why Middle-Earth feels so real. Even when you don't speak a foreign country's language, it gives it a certain flavor. He wanted Middle-Earth to sound like a real place!

Photo Credit: khaalis on Flickr

In The Lord of the Rings, only five "wizards" ever came to Middle-Earth. Most have a Quenya name they used in Valinor, and a whole slew of nicknames collected in Middle-Earth from the various people they met. (Remember Wormtongue naming Gandalf "Lathspell," ill news.) For example:

'Mithrandir we called him in elf-fashion,' said Faramir, 'and he was content. Many are my names in many countries, he said. Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not.'

(The Two Towers)

TolkienWiki covers all the names of the Istari and explains a little about them here: (a) the Silmarillion's blurb about the Istari and (b) Unfinished Tales' notes about the Blue Wizards.

Gandalf's names and nicknames include Norse (Gandalf), Old English / Middle English (Greyhame, Lathspell), Sindarin (Mithrandir), and Quenya (Olórin), plus Incánus, which looks suspiciously like the Latin for "grey-haired" to me! (I have no idea what race or country he visited in "the south" -- oh, Tolkien, you always leave us more to wonder about!)

In short, a wizard might be named in almost any Middle-Earth language. Scroll back through the previous sections to pick a name based on where your wizard hangs out the most.

Photo Credit: MollyJolly on Flickr

'I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.' A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. 'For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.'

(Treebeard, The Two Towers)

With Ents we run into the same trouble as we do with Orcs: we don't have enough examples of their native language to know how to make names in it, and/or we don't have many examples period. Also, as Treebeard says in his roundabout fashion, their names in their own language take forever to say, plus they don't generally share them with outsiders.

Five of the six Ents named in The Lord of the Rings have a Sindarin Name but usually go by its translation in the Common Tongue:

• Fangorn -- "Treebeard"
  
• Bregalad -- "Quickbeam" (as in "beam of light," I assume -- galad is "light")
  
• Fladrif -- "Skinbark"
  
• Finglas -- "Leaflock" (as in "lock of hair" -- cf. Glorfindel, "Golden-hair-elf")
  
• Fimbrethil -- "Wandlimb" (literally "slender birch" -- this is the only Entwife name we have)

Treebeard also rambles on in Quenya now and then, so it's possible the Ents had Quenya names at some point. If so, we have no examples of them.

In short, I recommend creating a tree-ish name in Sindarin Elvish, and/or using its English translation. Jump back to the "Finding Your Elvish Name" section!

Photo Credit: suburbanbloke on Flickr

Occasionally, the baddies of Middle-Earth are known only by the Sindarin Elvish names that Elves and their allies use to say nasty things about them. Sauron and Morgoth are Sindarin names.

Usually, baddies are named in the Black Speech of Mordor (as heard on the Ring-Inscription). There aren't enough examples to know much about this language, other than the fact that it's got a lot of harsh consonants.

Sometimes, we don't know a villain's real name; he/she just gets an ominous-sounding title like "The Mouth of Sauron" or "The Witch-King of Angmar."

Merin Essi, as usual, has tried to provide for Middle-Earth naming needs by taking what few snippets we have of the Black Speech and combining them to make as many plausible names as possible on its Black Speech Names List. Since our knowledge of the Black Speech is so limited, these are just educated guesses - but they're better guesses than most of us could make since we're not language experts!

Below, I've compiled a list of baddie names in canon for you to claim or use as inspiration for making up your own Minions of Mordor names.

Orcs and Uruk-Hai
Here are the orc and uruk-hai names from the books, all in Black Speech: Azôg, Bôlg, Boldog, Shagrat, Radbug, Lagduf, Muzgash, Grishnakh, Gorbag, Snaga, Lugdush, Mauhúr, Ufthak, and Uglúk. The orcs called Saruman Sharku, "old man" in Black Speech.

Trolls
The trolls in The Hobbit have startlingly normal English names, but that was written before Tolkien had nailed down all the details of Middle-Earth languages. I suspect trolls would usually have names like orcs and uruk-hai.

Balrogs
The only named Balrog is Gothmog (yes, someone* got named after him in the War of the Ring). Gothmog is a rather ugly-sounding Sindarin Elvish name.

Dragons
Tolkien names four different dragons: Scatha, Smaug, Glaurung the Golden and Ancalagon the Black. The latter two dragons are named in Sindarin, since they gave the First Age Elves fits. Scatha is Rohirric (Old English); Smaug was coined from Old Germanic, closely related to Old English. Since most of the dragons in the later Ages of Middle-Earth come from the north, you could use Old English (i.e. the language of the Riddermark), Germanic, or perhaps Norse for a dragon bothering the Dwarves (how about Fafnir?)

Evil Men
There are a few known Easterlings, Men who served the dark powers like the Men of Harad. In the First Age we have some of their names: Uldor the Accursed, Ulfand, Ulband, Ulfang the Black, Ulfast, Ulwar, Ulwarth, Lorgan, Brodda. Most of these look Sindarin, but Tolkien eventually decided they weren't from any of the known languages of Middle-Earth. So basically: make something up.
Another batch of evil men, the Black Númenoreans, settled in Umbar south of Gondor: this is where the Black Ships came from. We don't know what kind of names the ordinary folk of Umbar used, but one of Tolkien's notes hints that they spoke a language developed from Adûnaic, the old tongue of Men before they became friends with Elves and adopted their language. On the other hand, two leaders of Umbar, Herumor and Fuinur, have Quenya names, styling themselves as royalty!

Nazgûl (Link for handy info)
We know the Ringwraiths' second-in-command Nazgûl is named Khamûl, "The Black Easterling," but we don't know any other names, nor even where most of them were from. Three were Númenorean. Those three may have had Adûnaic names, like the Númenorean kings who rejected Elves and the Valar.

*Gothmog in Return of the King: Tolkien doesn't specify his race, only that he's the lieutenant of [Minas] Morgul. However, I doubt that Peter Jackson's crippled orc would have found employment in Tolkien's Mordor, save as a treat for Shelob.

Photo Credit: gutavo on Flickr

Why does the subtitle of this page show that it's version 2.0?

This guide is loosely based on "How to Find a Fabulous Middle-Earth Name," an FAQ compiled by myself and several members of The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza in 2004. Since I haven't been in touch with these folks for years and don't have permission to repost their work, and since a lot of new resources have come out since we wrote that guide, I thought it best to rewrite everything from scratch. Any mistakes are therefore my own!

However, this page is fondly dedicated to my collaborators on that old project: Geir, Theodwyn Thaiya, Nienna, Alhòrië and Trey Andúrandir.