Hail and well met friends! We are a bit behind schedule but at last we have another featured website for your enjoyment. Today we bring to you Merin Essi ar Quenteli by member and linguist in training dreamingfifi. As some of you may know, she has a great love of Tolkien and languages, two loves that meet in her study of Sindarin. So sit down, grab a drink and enjoy getting to know more about dreamingfifi and her love of Sindarin!
Viking: Your site on the network is mostly news and updates for your main site. Could you explain the relationship between the two?
Dreamingfifi: This is pretty complex actually… I was approached by Elvishmouse back in May about the possibility of becoming a partner with Middle-earth Network. I liked the idea, but was a little concerned about how the website would be hosted. So, I talked with Tyler and Elvishmouse on Skype for a few hours, and by the end, we’d realized that the way my website is designed and the plans I had for it (the phrasebook database) wouldn’t work with Word Press very well – even possibly destabilizing the Middle-earth Network website and making it vulnerable to hacking! So, a full partnership was simply impossible. Rather than give up on the idea completely, we came to a compromise. I moved over the only sections that made sense to move over: the News and Updates. Then I went off and hunted down all of the updates for my website that I could find. My website has been around in one way or another since 2002, but I could only find records reaching back to 2005. I didn’t have my own computer until then. I probably lost all of the old updates when I transferred over to my first laptop.
Viking: You cover a wide range of topics on your website but the main focus is the study of Sindarin. How does this language fit into Tolkien’s larger world?
Dreamingfifi: Languages are the centerpiece of Arda. Go back and think of all the times in LotR that everything stops so that the characters can discuss some linguistic detail. My second favorite part of LotR is when Bilbo and Frodo are chatting, and Bilbo explains at length what ”Dúnadan” means, and why it is Aragorn’s nickname.
Sindarin is the common Elven language in Middle-earth at the end of the 3rd Age. Upper-class Gondorians speak it and write in it as a second language (Bilbo had taken up teaching other Hobbits Sindarin and the Tengwar, a Middle-earth version of a classical education, it seems), and it’s mostly supplanted the Nandorin languages, so various dialects of Sindarin are spoken by Elves all over Middle-earth.
Sindarin developed as a language in Beleriand. During and after the war with Morgoth, the Sindar were scattered all over Middle-earth. They became leaders amongst the Nandorin elves, who looked up to them, and therefore adopted their speech. I remember that Treebeard talked about that a bit when talking about the names for Lothlórien.
Viking: You also teach Sindarin. How does your program work? And how difficult is it to learn for the average person?
Dreamingfifi: I don’t teach Sindarin; I teach about Sindarin. Huge difference. It’s impossible to study it like studying a real language. It’s just not developed to that extent. There are huge gaps in the language, ones that we don’t know how to begin filling – no matter how hard we lean on Neo-Sindarin constructions.
I run my lessons by semesters – a short semester during the winter and a long semester during the summer. Students turn in their homework every Monday through e-mail, and we correspond (through e-mail and/or Skype) throughout the week until the assignment is 100% correct. That means every student gets one-on-one instruction, and I can adjust my teaching method to suit the needs of each individual student. This also means I can teach a wide variety of skill levels in Linguistics, or even skill levels in English. I’ve had some English as a second language students, which is an interesting challenge.
I think that my class is quite difficult. I’ve had only a handful of people make it to the end, and only 2 people have completed the final exam. My guess is that most people go into it thinking it will be like a regular language class, but as I said at the beginning of my answer to this question, it isn’t. The focus of my class is describing Sindarin. Being able to use Sindarin is secondary.
Viking: Having browsed through all of the updates, it is striking how long you’ve been promoting Sindarin. How did you develop this obvious dedication to and love of the language?
Dreamingfifi: I’ve always been interested in Linguistics. In Highschool, I was terribly bored. My friends were studying French, but my PE (Physical Education) classes got in the way of taking French. So, terribly jealous, and not satisfied by studying the speech of the animals at my folks’ ranch, I started analyzing Tolkien’s languages, and trying to build names and short phrases. I was writing LotR fanfiction by then, and people liked the names I made for my characters because they sounded more 
authentic. So I made names for them. Then I posted a list of names I made by mining the back of the Silmarillion. Soon, I was getting lots of requests. Seeing a niche that needed filling, I dived in, and made the first version of my website in Freewebs. I was working on my own for the first 3 years, and didn’t know that places like Ardalambion existed. Then I met an older fan, who introduced me to all of the previous scholarship that had been done. I was hopelessly in love with Tolkien languages from then on.
Viking: On your main site, you have a number essays directed towards writers of Tolkien fan fiction. What in particular motivated you to write these?
Dreamingfifi: I started out as a fanfiction writer. The essays are very simple, to-the-point, not getting in depth into the concepts at all. They aren’t very good if you want to study Tolkien’s grand creation – but if you want a quick reminder on what happened during the Council of Elrond or want to know if Elves can shoot fireballs out of their hands, there it is. I’d gotten into critiquing fanfiction by then, and saw the same mistakes being made over and over. I was responding to a need more than a personal interest. My fascination with Tolkien’s work has always been in the languages, not as much in the canon.
Viking: Is there any fan fiction that you would recommend?
Dreamingfifi: Yes… but I’ve been out of it for a while. I’ve been far too busy with being a college student and building and rebuilding large chunks of my website to read fanfiction lately.
I like Fish-out-of-water stories. Let’s see… the ”Don’t Panic!” series by boz4PM is pretty good, ”Thursday” by ”Willow Myst” is good, but I don’t think she ever finished it. ”There Is No Applause” by JennyJoy4 I quite like too. I remember that ”Pyres of Illusion” by Tindomiel was very well written. Ach, there’s too many to list.
Viking: Finally, do you have any ambitions to enter into professional Tolkien scholarship?
Dreamingfifi: Maybe. I’m more interested at this point in getting to do linguistic research. I’m interested in studying what happens when two languages or dialects meet – what and how features transfer between languages, and how language changes over time. I’m also interested in constructed languages, and want to build languages for movies/TV shows/video games. My linguistic interests are a lot broader than just Tolkien’s languages, but they being my first, they’ll always have a special place in my heart.
Thanks for doing this!
August 4, 2012 at 3:06 pm
My pleasure! May it bring you many students!
August 5, 2012 at 4:28 pm
Cool as ever.
I would like to point out that Middle-earth Fan fiction can take on many more forms that just Tolkien’s focus upon Language.
Tolkien was a philologist, and thus, this would obviously be what he used to give his world depth, and it obviously is VERY, very important for that job.
But there are many other things which Tolkien could not use to give his world increasing depth.
For instance, his mythology of the world is far too monolithic for a “Real” world – even though he provides reason for this – and things like the work of Joseph Campbell can shed light on various aspects of his world that even Tolkien was unaware.
Then there is anthropology, which shows that Tolkien’s world is influenced far too much by his own Pastoralist & Romantic beliefs. His world is almost empty save for the Characters and those immediately in contact with them. He mentions various peoples, yet he fails to understand the real-world implications of many of the assumptions he puts forward about these peoples (The Northmen of Rhovanion are one example where he drops the ball, but I can’t go into that here).
Just these two facets are another way in which one might approach fan-fiction, where the use of the lenses of Comparative Mythology & Religion, and Anthropology & Sociology can create a different type of “Story” about, and within Middle-earth than the Chivalric Romances that Tolkien writes.
Lastly, as an example… I have written several accounts of the Wars of Gondor Against the Wainriders in the 19th c Third Age, from the Point of view of various members of the Royal Court of Narmacil and Calimehtar (the two kings who fought in the initial phases of that war), and I am working on an account of the finale of the wars with the Wainriders (which culminates with the death of Calimehtar, and Ëarnil leading the surviving armies of Gondor and Northmen to attach the combined armies of Wainriders, Haradrim, and Khandirim at the “Battle of the Camp”).
These accounts read more like Procopius, or Eusubius’ accounts of the Wars of Byzantium than they do the Norse epics, or Myths, or the Medieval Chivalric Romances that Tolkien used as a template.
This is yet another way to write fan-fic, and by using Templates of other types of Historical works, Folklore, or just fiction, one might find ways of seeing Middle-earth in a new light, and adding yet more depth, and additional layers to the world.
August 21, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Well put indeed. And the fact that we have so many people here exploring all these different ways to write fan-fic makes this community what it is. This comment here made me think, that I believe we should regularly hold some form of Tolkien evenings, where all that share this passion can discuss their views and thoughts concerning one topic (be it language, religion in Middle-Earth, specific characters, etc… ) I’m sure it would attracked many and provide very interesting sessions.
August 22, 2012 at 3:05 am
Yes… This would be a great idea.
August 22, 2012 at 5:39 am
That’s one of the reasons that fanfiction and other transformative works are so much fun. You can play with these concepts and make something fascinating and moving. It’d be nice if people would take transformative fiction/art more seriously as art, but meh, what can you do?
August 22, 2012 at 3:33 am
I’m trying… It’s been many years since I drew (but I used to be extraordinarily good), and I have been doing digital work more recently (specifically, 3D digital models of the cities of Middle-earth based upon the Anthropological, Sociological, and Logistical results found by examining cities in Ancient Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, and in Medieval Europe and the the territories of these national groups.
I started this particular project when I got hold of some high-resolution images of the Minas Tirith that Peter Jackson used in the movies, and with a professor in the Digital Humanities dept at UCLA, I discovered that the city Jackson created for the movies would have a hard time holding 5,000 people, much less the 250,00 – 500,00 that Minas Tirith was supposed to be able to hold. So I got together with the professor and a few others to determine how big, and what sort of resources Minas Tirith would need to support 250,000 – 500,00 people.
Eventually, I’d like to do 3D digital models for different peoples of Middle-earth as well (that are more 1000CE – 1200CE than the 1400CE that Peter Jackson used).
But all of this is so that I can do a series of stories set in Middle-earth that telll the story of the Invasions of the Wainriders in 1851 TA, from the point of view of a minor official at the courts of the kings Narmacil and Calimahtar. If you have ever read Eusebius, or Procopius, the work would be far more gossipy, and show the less glamorous side of life in Middle-earth (the affairs of the court officials, the court politics from an inside perspective that none of the court would think was a danger, and thus they tended to let their guard down a little too much)….
On the subject of languages though… I really wish that I had more time to study the languages. But I am already stretching things, as I have returned to school (UCLA) to get a degree in Cybernetics and Cognitive Science.
August 22, 2012 at 5:39 am