“MORE HARD-TO-REMEMBER NAMES THAN A RUSSIAN NOVEL”; Special Names, Their Significance, Types, and Relative Hierarchy in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Quenta Silmarillion

Tommi Ojanperä

The number of special names in the Quenta Silmarillion is indeed great. A total of 613 different special names were counted in a work that spans some 220 pages102, which translates to a rough average of 2.75 different special names per page. This is a solid confirmation of what any reader can and will experience firsthand while reading the work in question. Further analysis of the special names revealed more interesting information. The total number of character names, 222, is quite staggering, and this alone begins to explain why The Silmarillion is so widely dubbed a difficult book. However, the total number of place names, 241, is even higher, and this highlights the importance of the spatial aspect of the work. In other words, the Quenta Silmarillion is, among other things, a description of a physical world. That world is a purely fictional creation of J. R. R. Tolkien and was therefore almost wholly alien to every potential reader. It was therefore necessary to explain at length what physical features there exist in that world — all the natural formations as well the unnatural ones such as realms and cities. For reasons that have been explained in this thesis, Tolkien also chose to name most of such formations, and hence the great number of place names.

These two aspects — the great number of character and place names — contribute to one primary characteristic of the Quenta Silmarillion which might be simply called vastness, in spite of the fact that it could be described as being a middle-length novel. It is certainly a little shorter than The Hobbit and much shorter than The Lord of the Rings, and yet its scope is much wider. The Quenta Silmarillion is concerned with a vast number of people, a vast geographical area, a vast length of time, and, arguably, a vast number of events, many of which have a far-reaching impact on the entire fictional world.

Its focus is not only a handful of major characters, as tends to be the case with most novels, but a large number of characters of various levels of prominence. However, it is not only concerned with individual characters, but also with entire sentient species, peoples, races, and their various subgroups, as well as deity-like creatures. All this is shown by the wide variety of special names that were found to occur relatively frequently.

As the number of occurrences of each individual special name was examined in detail, it was discovered that the numbers vary greatly. For instance, the most frequently occurring character name in the Quenta Silmarillion is Morgoth with its 271 occurrences (3.18 % of all occurrences of special names), while 51 character names (23.0 % of all character names) occur only once. Of the remaining 170 character names, 100 (45 %) occur 2–10 times, leaving us with 70 character names with 11–270 occurrences. When considering the characters of any given novel, one is tempted to simply label each character as being either major or minor in terms of prominence. However, such a simplistic approach to the Quenta Silmarillion would be misleading. The number of characters and the variation in their prominence is so great that a more complex approach is called for. In this thesis, a fairly mechanistic method was used to examine the prominence of each character, concentrating mainly on the characters that occur relatively often. Such complex criteria as the magnitude of impact of the actions performed by the characters or the relative activeness or passiveness of the characters have not been examined here. However, the validity of the approach adopted in this thesis is supported by the special nature and role of the names themselves in Tolkien's works, which has been commented on in detail earlier. One of the most interesting results of the quantitative analysis of the special names was the discovery of a remarkably large number of names that received only few occurrences in the Quenta Silmarillion. A particularly high proportion of the special names only occur once: 23.0 % of the character names and 26.6 % of the place names. Furthermore, exactly 50 % of the character names and 50.6 % of the place names occur only four or less times.

The figure is even higher, 65.3 %, for special names other than character and place names. It is rather tempting to speculate on whether it might be possible to eliminate altogether these apparently unimportant 331 special names and whether such a process might indeed render the novel less difficult to read.Certainly it would not be difficult to eliminate the 247 special names that occur only once or twice — 40.3 % of all the special names — and thereby almost certainly render the work much lighter to read. However, such an elimination would also deeply alter the very nature of the work itself and result in a radically different novel.

All speculations aside, it is obvious such names are an interesting and significant feature of the Quenta Silmarillion. There appear to be three main reasons for including so many special names of apparently negligible importance in the Quenta Silmarillion. Firstly, Tolkien had a love of words and euphony which is fully reflected in the creation and inclusion of these names that usually represent the main fictional languages that created for his Legendarium. It was therefore in Tolkien’s interests to create and mention names also for characters, places, and other entities that were otherwise of minor or negligible importance. Secondly, the nomenclature in languages that are alien yet plausible lends credibility to the Legendarium, contributing to the solid foundations Tolkien was striving to lay in order to support his fictional world. Tolkien would not allow even minor cracks to appear in this wall of credibility, and therefore even minute details were given names. Thirdly, the Quenta Silmarillion was partly written and presented as a depository of information, serving as an important record of names of persons, places, events, etc. From an internal, fictional perspective, it may be seen as a record of primarily historical information preserved by and for the Elves. On the other hand, from the external factual perspective, it is a record of information about the fictional world, created by Tolkien, for himself as well as for his readership. As The Silmarillion is, as has been noted, in many ways a summary presentation of the Legendarium, not all personas of interest, for instance, can be explored in great detail. Yet Tolkien rarely neglects to mention their names, thereby at the very least recording the most elementary information about them. Considering these three main reasons for including many rarely mentioned special names in the Quenta Silmarillion, it becomesevident that any tampering with such apparently insignificant special names could easily alter the very nature of the work itself. No matter how insignificant and inconsequential a single, once-occurring name may seem, the overall combined contribution of all such names to the fabric of the Quenta Silmarillion is so important that if they were to be removed, the fabric might still hold together, but it would certainly lose much of its colour.

Let us return briefly to Yamamoto’s complaint about the great number of “hard-to-remember names” in The Silmarillion. In light of the results of the quantitative analysis conducted in this thesis, it may be said that it would not in fact be necessary to remember many of the names occurring in the work in order to understand it or to follow the narrative. Certainly it is quite unnecessary to remember the names that occur only once. The problem lies in the fact that it is at the very least extremely difficult and probably almost impossible for first-time readers to predict which names should be remembered and which will prove to be so unimportant and so rarely occurring that they can be practically ignored. It is also arguably impossible for most readers to have a clear memory of even half the 613 special names that occur in the Quenta Silmarillion, not to mention the 798 names of The Silmarillion as a whole. Furthermore, although it is fairly easy and indeed quite natural to remember the names which occur very often and to effectively ignore the ones which occur only once or twice, each reader must still tackle with a very large number of special names that fall somewhere in between the two extremes. It is therefore perhaps the 327 special names which occur more than two times but at most 50 times that cause the greatest difficulties. It seems there is no simple and easy way around the obstacle posed by these special names and this quite naturally leads to the kind of frustration that is also reflected in Yamamoto’s comments.

Therefore the question still begs itself: In light of this thesis, what, if anything, might be done in order to make the Quenta Silmarillion less difficult to read? First, it must be acknowledged that much was already done when The Silmarillion was originally published. The “Index of Names”, the maps, and other aids provided in The Silmarillion all make the readers’ task easier. Subsequently a number of encyclopaedias concerning the Legendarium and other reference works — most of them commercially motivated — have been published that may be used in conjunction to assist in the reading of The Silmarillion. Furthermore, scholars such as T. A. Shippey and Randel Helms have written commentaries with the express intent of assisting readers intackling The Silmarillion. In this thesis, levels of importance based on the numbers of occurrences have been established for all special names that occur in the Quenta Silmarillion. This information might prove to be helpful to first-time readers, but admittedly presenting and providing it in a readily usable form is rather problematic. Although this is an entirely theoretical and, what is more, a dreadfully presumptuous idea, some of the results of this thesis could be directly incorporated into The Silmarillion, so that the level of importance for each special name might, for instance, be provided in the “Index of Names”. A much more straightforward implementation would be to provide a list of principal characters, locations, and perhaps groups in the beginning of the novel. Such a list of course should not be overly long. It might include, for instance, the 12 characters, 8 places, and 7 groups of Critical and Great importance, as given in Table 11. A brief description could be provided for each entity. More complex implementations might be devised for a hypertext version of the novel, such as a colour coding scheme where all the special names occurring in the text would be printed in different colours corresponding to their level of importance. This way the reader would be ableto see immediately the relative level of importance of a special name and perhaps process and react to it accordingly. Clicking the mouse on a special name would show the description of the special name as given in the “Index of Names”.

It is naturally entirely impossible to begin to estimate the functionality, potential benefits or problems of such implementations without actually creating different versions of the Quenta Silmarillion that incorporate them, followed by experimentation with real first-time readers of the work.

Nevertheless, the ideas presented above are of course mere examples of what kind of measures might possibly be taken in order to make the Quenta Silmarillion easier to read, and to show that there may indeed be ways to reach that goal. Whether striving toward such a goal is important, practical, or even desirable is of course a moot question.

In this thesis, it was discovered that the special names appear to form clusters based on their number of occurrences. This provided an obvious basis for building an octopartite system of levels of importance for the special names. As has been noted earlier, the most prominent cluster was formed by special names occurring only once in the work. Interestingly, perhaps the second most prominent group was formed by the most frequently occurring special names, which were subsequently determined to compose the level of importance labelled “Critical”. The data was further explored, whereby eight named entities of Critical importance were discovered, each named entity occurring from 185 to 410 times. Although the Quenta Silmarillion is a sprawling, multilayered work of great breadth and complexity, spanning a great length of fictional time and history, it can still be said that it does appear to have a rather clear primary focus: the eight named entities that rise far above the remaining 605 special names. Distilling the results even further, it can be said that the three that occur most frequently out of those eight entities form the very heart of the Quenta Silmarillion, those three being Morgoth (i.e. Melkor) with 410 occurrences, Elves with 284 occurrences, and Noldor with 265 occurrences. Based on this it might therefore be said that the Quenta Silmarillion primarily focuses on Morgoth and the Noldor Elves.

Although the title of the work means “The Story of the Silmarils”, it is more concerned with the two parties most closely linked to those objects rather than the objects themselves. The 24 chapters of the work were examined separately in order to determine the level of chapter dominance of each named entity, but the two primary entities remained Morgoth and Noldor. They were also found to be the two named entities with the highest overall level of prominence. One of the most important discoveries must indeed be the extremely high prominence of Morgoth. It is not surprising that he should be among the more important entities, but it is very interesting that no other named entity comes even close to him, neither in terms of total number of occurrences or chapter dominance. It was also determined that all other characters or groups that might be described as evil — i.e., as serving Morgoth — are relatively few and occur relatively rarely. Morgoth therefore is very much the personification of evil or perhaps rather the physical manifestation of evil, and consequently his name becomes almost synonymous with “evil”. This perspective is of course one of the many reflections of the fact that the implied narrator of the work is an Elf (or Elves) or at least non-evil.

Examining the 24 chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion, it was discovered that not only the length of the chapters but also the frequency of different special names in them varies greatly. Chapter 21, “Of Túrin Turambar”, is by far the longest chapter with its 1115.1 lines. It has also the second lowest frequency of different special names, with 0.148 different special names occurring per line. On the other hand, chapter 4, “Of Thingol and Melian”, is the shortest chapter with its 49.8 lines. It has the highestfrequency of different special names, with 0.823 different special names occurring per line. To put these results in simple terms, the reader encounters special names previously unmentioned in that particular chapter about 5.5 times more often when reading chapter 4 than when reading chapter 21. It may be argued that the higher frequency of different special names, the more difficult the text is to process, as the frequency of different special names essentially reflects the rate at which new information is provided to the reader.

From the data gathered it appears that shorter chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion tend to have a fairly high density of different special names, as opposed to the longer chapters, which tend to have a relatively low density of different special names. Based on this a theory may be posited that the frequency of different special names in a given chapter reflects the degree to which that particular chapter has been condensed. This seems to be an interesting postulation and one that deserves to be examined further, although that would admittedly be a difficult and arduous task. One possible approach to examining its validity would be to compare the chapters with other existing writings that relate to those particular narratives. At present it may only said that the Quenta Silmarillion is a summary of a major part of the Legendarium and that some parts of it are clearly more heavily summarized than others. It is however almost certain that the frequency of different special names in a particular part reflects the degree of summarization of that part. However, more evidence and research is required to validate this postulation.

The secondary goal was to explore, whether fairly simple and rudimentary research methods can yield fruitful results when examining an arguably unusual work of fiction like the Quenta Silmarillion. Considering the results summarized above, it may at least be said that such methods do seem to be of some value. In this case an essential feature of the work, the special names, was examined using a fairly straightforward, commonsense method, leading to several interesting results. A number of tentative notions and estimations, such as the large number of special names, were not only confirmed, but, more importantly, could be presented and explored in detail, revealing the full complexity of such issues. Other results, including most of the details, were not predictable, and therefore provide new insights into the Quenta Silmarillion. Nevertheless, it is obvious that not only simple, rudimentary methods can be used if we are to fully examine the Quenta Silmarillion. Such methods seem to work quite well when examining major, basic structures of the work. However, detailed and nuanced research on more intricate aspects would naturally require the use of similarly intricate tools.

Providing a large amount of quantitative data as well as elementary classification and analysis of the nomenclature of the Quenta Silmarillion, this thesis is a work of basic research. What has been established and presented here is, therefore, a platform of a kind which might be used as a starting point or a support for further study of various aspects of the Quenta Silmarillion.The data presented in this thesis may even provide supporting evidence when examining a particular character of the novel in detail, especially when comparing and contrasting two or more characters. It would also be of great interest to conduct a similar quantitative analysis of The Lord of the Rings. Such an analysis would undoubtedly shed light on certain fascinating aspects of that expansive novel, but, perhaps more importantly, it would also provide a fresh new opportunity to compare The Lord of the Rings with the Quenta Silmarillion — arguably Tolkien’s two main works.

Finally, based on this thesis, it may be claimed that thirty years after its publication there can still be found major areas and aspects in The Silmarillion that remain largely unexamined. Hopefully the time is now ripe for a renewed interest in this seminal work.

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