5-20-01

Liv's Elvish speech translated.
Tehanu @ 5:24 am EST
Thanks to Androg, we know more about what Liv Tyler SAID in Elvish, and he asks some interesting questions about it. He pointed us towards an amazing website run by people who know Elvish well enough to translate and speak it. Here's Androg:

"As reported on the 26th of April, Liv Tyler spoke one of her Elvish lines in an interview with Conan O'Brien (see here )

Not surprisingly, this sentence was translated and analysed by some of the Sindarin experts; the analysis can be found at galadhorn's website

The line was said by Liv to mean "Now my lord, winter has not yet come. Would you before your time leave your people?"

I immediately recognised this as being based on the line, "Would you then, lord, before your time leave your people that live by your word?", from 'The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen' in Appendix A to LotR.

The curious thing is that this is what Arwen says to Aragorn just before his death -- could this mean that Aragorn's death will be shown in the movie also?"

I wonder what sort of ending that would make - where that would fit into the Grey Havens and the people who leave, and Sam's return home which is the final end. It would be hard to make the trilogy end with an exhaustive bio of the eventual fate of every character. That's WHY Tolkien left that stuff in the appendices. It doesn't work, in story terms.

It could be worked into the story in other ways - for instance having that conversation as a precognitive dream could work because it'd give us a chance to see how fearful Arwen must be about mortality. It'd give us a chance to know her a bit better if we saw the inward struggle she had between her love for Aragorn and her fear of death. Well, that's my 2c worth. - Tehanu