Thoughts on translation. "Son of the Sunlit Swordsman"

[Backyard Professor]

Only in Early Qenya and Gnomish (if you are asking specifically about the noun – otherwise see this verb and its cognates). But I do not think lalaith is problematic because it is only attested in a name, and I do not think Elthir thinks so. I believe he was merely pointing out the strangeness of the fact that Backyard Professor used a word only attested in a name while arguing that another word (with no attested alternatives, too) was dubious for that very reason.

I responded to Glorfindel when it should have been situated here since this is where the misunderstanding stems from. Good question — and there’s no contradiction once we separate the two categories.

Lalaith is the glossed meaning of a personal name given directly by Tolkien in narrative prose (“Laughter”). Using it as a semantic reference is entirely straightforward, the same way we use Tinúviel to understand “nightingale.” Name glosses come from Tolkien himself as part of the storytelling.

Magor, on the other hand, is a lexical role-word whose status in late Sindarin is less clear because Tolkien sometimes moved older role-forms (-dor, -thor, -magor, etc.) into poetic or name-only registers. That doesn’t make magor wrong — it just means we read it with attention to phase and register.

So the difference isn’t “this attested in a name vs. that attested in a name,” but whether Tolkien himself used the form as a name-gloss in narrative versus as a free-form common noun in late Sindarin vocabulary.

Both can be used — they just sit in different categories of evidence.