I am comfortable in agreement on all but one point,
Thorondor_ said:
I don't think that
Sauron had a "right name", only the
valar did, according to HoME XI
is, in my opinion, a bit too precise. As all the
Ainur were individuals, I think they all had “right names.” Closing this to only a dozen or so in the “first rank” means that the others are … what? unimportant? insignificant?
How would a
Maia be addressed by a
Vala if it had no “right names”? “Hey, you! Yeah, you with the shiny eyes…” It would be like walking through any crowded venue and saying, “You there!” and 50 people turn around to see who’s talking. Logically, I think even the Maia must have “right names”: they are of the same order as the Valar but of lesser degree.” (
Silmarillion “
Valaquenta”, “Of the
Maiar”) This passage then continues,
Their number is not known to the
Elves, and few have names in any of the tongues of the Children of
Ilúvatar; for though it is otherwise in
Aman, in
Middle-earth the Maiar have seldom appeared in form visible to Elves and
Men.
I take three things from this passage:
- That “few have names in any of the tongues of the Children of Ilúvatar” means to me that like the Valar, they may have “right names” that are not revealed, but they have never been tagged with epessë or “nicknames” by the Eruhíni, in particular the Elves.
- The Maiar who have names seem to be “the Maiar have seldom appeared in form visible to Elves and Men” in Middle-earth,” or at least remembered by the Elves who dwelt in Middle-earth and “made the histories” that Tolkien “transmitted.”
- There are a lot of Maiar that the Eldar encountered in Aman, and to some of them the Eldar gave names; but even for many of these, their names were not recalled in Middle-earth, where they were not “in form visible to Elves and Men.”
Tolkien is not as strict about names as Le Guin in her
Earthsea books, where knowing the name of someone or something can give you absolute power over it; but at least in dealing with
dragons, “you don’t want to reveal your proper name” (
The Hobbit, “Inside Information”).
Glaurung seems also to have relied upon the use of proper names in enchanting
Turin and
Nienor.
Treebeard was secretive of his name, and considered
Merry and
Pippin “hasty” for revealing theirs (although perhaps it helped to win his confidence). The
Dwarves were secretive of their “true names,” which they “never revealed to any one of alien
race.” (
RotK, “Appendix F”) In
FotR, “Shadow of the Past”,
Gandalf remarks that “
Bilbo very foolishly told
Gollum” his name, with the result that Gollum and a troop of
Black Riders were all looking for “
Baggins.”
I’m reading Hammond and Scull’s
Reader’s Companion for the first time. On page 383 of that text, they quote Treebeard:
Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language – Tolkien felt much the same about words and names, and what they reveal about those who had spoken the language in which they occurred.
On pp 595-6, they quote Paul H. Kocher’s from
Master of Middle-earth, p67, concerning the
Mouth of Sauron,
… ‘Mouth of Sauron’ he calls himself, a man without any name of his own, ‘for he himself had forgotten it.’ Considering the high value placed in Tolkien’s Middle-earth upon real names as indices of identity – Treebeard and the whole race of dwarves refuse to reveal their names to anybody, and virtually nobody will even pronounce Sauron’s aloud in the
Black Speech – such namelessness is the acme of total surrender…
The bottom line is that I think the Maiar must all have “right names” given to them at their creation, but these are not known to Elves and Men, nor is their number known. (This reflects traditional Christian beliefs about angels. That’s not intended as a religious comment, but an observation on what seems to be a clear relationship between the Ainur his subcreation and what Tolkien believed.)
Finally,
War of the Jewels ([/i]HoMe XI[/i]) also says, in “Quendi and Eldar”, “Note on the ‘Language of the Valar’”, that
Few of the Eldar ever learned to speak
Valarin, even haltingly…
Fëanor … is said to have learned more of this tongue than any others before his time… but what he knew he kept to himself…
‘…For the tongues of the Valar are great and stern, but also swift and subtle in movement, making sounds that we [the Eldar] find hard to counterfeit; and their words are mostly long and rapid, like the glitter of
swords, like the rush of leaves in a great wind or the fall of stones in the
mountains.’
Pengolodh comments, ‘Plainly the effect of Valarin upon
elvish ears was not pleasing.’
Finally, this section says,
…Now the names we have for the Valar or the Maiar, whether adapted from the Valarin or translated, are not right names but
titles, referring to some function of character of the person; for though the Valar have right names, they do not reveal them. Save in the case of
Orome. [sic] … [The Elves] asked him his name, and he answered:
Orome. Then they asked him what it signified, and again he answered:
Orome. To me only it is given; for I am Orome.
I think this is the passage to which you referred. But it is clear from the beginning of the passage that the Maiar also have names in Valarin. And the nature of
Oromë’s clearly signifies that it is a “right name,” a tag by which this particular Ainu might be addressed without any ambiguity. They must all have been given individual “right names” at creation.
