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Pearl's Pearls - A New String  by Pearl Took 3 Review(s)
Baggins BabeReviewed Chapter: 11 on 8/17/2008
A wonderful look at the Entmoot and the way the discussion went. I am always so moved by the March of the Ents. It is a great pity we can't have a march of the Ents on some of the logging companies destroying the rainforest!

I always laugh at the movie moment when Treebeard tells the hobbits that the Ents have decided they are not Orcs! I'm glad they put hobbits into the list.

Author Reply: Thank you so much, Baggins Babe :-)

I also always liked the Ents and how they dealt with Saruman. It would be incredible if some would rise up of the rain forests!

I was glad they added the hobbits too. :-)

eilujReviewed Chapter: 11 on 8/13/2008
A very persuasive portrayal of the Entish culture. I’ve never thought about Ents having cousins.


I'm not an Elvish expert either, but I'd like to give you a bunch of links (which range from Excellent-according-to-Real-Experts to Looks-very-useful-to-me-but-I'm-not-qualified-to-say-for-certain. ;-)


Trustworthy sites for Sindarin names:

1. Council of Elrond's Sindarin Name Finder. This gives translations of *modern* names, so while they are accurate Sindarin, not all are appropriate in Middle-earth’s culture. The names are supposed to have been put together by site staff who are competent in Sindarin.
www.councilofelrond.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Semantics&file=index&options=SemanticsMenu&volume=4

If you examine the names while consulting a Sindarin dictionary, you can deduce a bit about name construction.

You can also use CoE's list to locate Sindarin names with particular meanings, in a limited way. Use an index which gives meanings for modern names to find a modern name with the meaning you want. Then look up the modern name in CoE's list to see if you like their Sindarin translation.

2. Merin Essi ar Quenteli's list of name lists. The site belongs to Dreamingfifi, a writer at ff.net. Brief, limited, and not perfect, it provides a basic introduction to Sindarin names -- the best I've seen. She also offers names for other cultures and languages.
realelvish.net/namelists.php

Here is her page which lists *good* Elvish web sites. There’s also a link at the top of the page for sites she thinks you *shouldn’t* trust.
realelvish.net/trustworthywebsites.php

3. Elffetish's Sindarin Name Generator. A build-your-own name site which is not for the faint-hearted, this gives more info on name construction than I’ve seen anywhere. I hope he knows what he’s talking about; it certainly looks good.
elffetish.com/sindanames.html

There are also pages for Quenya names, and guidelines on whether to choose Sindarin or Quenya.


But please, whatever you do, *don’t* use the Arwen-Undomiel site. It is apparently less inaccurate now than it used to be, but still contains *bad* information. I didn’t look at it again today, but problems I saw recently included mixing Sindarin and Quenya, listing a female suffix for male names, and altering names so they look more “Elvish” -- that last was actually stated in the page info!


Dictionaries:

= Hiswelókë (Dragon Flame) is the best online Sindarin dictionary.
Free download of old edition: www.jrrvf.com/hisweloke/sindar/downloads.html
Beta version of new edition: www.jrrvf.com/hisweloke/sindar/online/english.html

Dragon Flame gives much more info (parts of speech, derivations, etc.) than the site you were using. If you download the Elvish fonts, you can see what the words look like in the appropriate script. Warning: navigating around the site is not as easy as it should be, and the last time I used it, one of his dictionaries seemed to be mis-labelled on a links page. Hopefully things will improve.

= Real Experts in Elvish cite the excellent Quenya dictionaries on this page. I copied some of the lists to my hard drive, because they don’t seem to be Firefox-friendly.
www.uib.no/People/hnohf/wordlists.htm


You might also want to look at the Encyclopedia of Arda’s page of links.


Apologies for overwhelming you, but I’m a librarian, and I *do* have a certain compulsion to give people information whether or not they’re interested, and more than they might ask for....

Author Reply: Dear eiluj, Thank you so much!

I will admit I was a bit overwhelmed, but when I saw you are a librarian I completely understood. One of my best friends is a librarian. She always said they should do a version of Trivial Pursuit for librarians where you didn't have to know the answer but where to find it. :-)

I will check those out and see what feels comfortable for me to use. I know so little about any of the Elven matters - languages, history, people, etc., and I use it so rarely that I like something simple and easy to figure out.

Thank you for finding my portrayal of Ent culture persuasive. They did once have the Entwives and Entings, so I would think there would have been family structure as we know it with aunts, uncles and cousins.

Again, thank you for all the help :-)

VirtuellaReviewed Chapter: 11 on 8/13/2008
How lovely to see a story about ents, there seem to be hardly any of these around! I like this retelling of the entmoot, you have captured the feel of entish debate very well. I could almost hear their voices rumble!

Author Reply: Thank you so very much, Virtuella! I have written a little with Ents before this but never with them as the main POV. I'm glad you feel it turned out well :-)

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