Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/19/25: Elf-maids of The Silmarillion

Luthien Tinuviel, by Aerankenai @ Deviantart. One of the major heroines of The Silmarillion.

Since I’ve been reading The Silmarillion, I thought I’d generate some names of Elven women, or as Tolkien might put it, elf-maids.

Elf names all meant something in the languages he created – he was a linguist after all. In the text of the book they are explained to you, and defined again in the glossary and appendixes at the rear. So Eärendil means “Lover of the Sea” and Aredhel “Noble Elf.” Not only that, elves can have multiple names: their birth name, their mother-name, their father-name, a Quenya name, a Sindarin name, a title, a nickname, and an honorific. Which results, at least for me, a flurry of energetic flipping to the appendix pages to figure out exactly who is who.

Although Tolkien was likely aping Norse or Germanic naming traditions, or the traditions as depicted in the ballads he studied, these names don’t seem very practical in real life, especially in battle and other life or death situations where it’s important to know who is who and where they are. Most elves lived in groups, in cities, which makes it even more important to distinguish between them for tax purposes and such.

Since Quenya and Sindarin are created languages and don’t follow the rules of English, it also means it’s harder to distinguish the male names from the female names. Female names like Idril and Indis don’t sound much different from male ones like Beren and Amras. I do sense a difference though. Few female names begin with C, G and T, hard-sounding letters, and none with B, and they tend to be more multisyllabic, though not always; they are also more likely to begin with vowels. So in the vein I made my list.

Elf-maids of The Silmarillion