The Peoples of Middle-earth by J. R. R. Tolkien

was one of the things that helped to spread the popular rumour in the City that Pippin was a person of very high rank in his own country.
    $37. Only in a few places where it seemed specially important have I attempted to represent such distinctions in translation, though this cannot be done systematically. Thus thou and thee and thy have occasionally been used (as unusual and archaic in English) to represent a ceremonious use of the courteous form, as in the formal words spoken at the coronation of Aragorn. On the other hand the sudden use of thou, thee in the dialogue of Faramir and eowyn is meant to represent (there being no other means of doing this in English) a significant change from the courteous to the familiar. The thee used by Sam Gamgee to Rose at the end of the book is intentional, but corresponds there to his actual use of the old-fashioned courteous form as a sign of affection.

    $38. Passing from the translation of narrative and dialogue to names I found yet greater difficulties. For it seemed to me that to preserve all names, Elvish and Westron alike, in their original forms would obscure an essential feature of the times, as observed by the ears and eyes of Hobbits, through whom for the most part we are ourselves observing them: the contrast between a wide-spread language, as ordinary and diurnal to the people of that day as is English now to English-speakers, and the remains of far older more reverend and more secret tongues.

    All names, if merely transliterated, would seem to modern readers equally strange and remote.
    $39. For instance, if I had left unaltered not only the Elvish name Imladrist [> Imladris] but also the Westron name Carbandur, both would have appeared alien. But the contrast between Imladrist [> Imladris] and Rivendell, a translation of Carbandur (18) and like it having a plain meaning in everyday language, represents far more truly the actual feeling of the day, especially among Hobbits. To refer to Rivendell as Imladrist
    [> Imladris] was to Men and Hobbits as if one now was to speak of Winchester as Camelot. Save that the identity was certain, while in Rivendell there still dwelt a lord of renown older than Arthur would be, were he still living in Winchester today.
    $40. To translate the names in the Common Speech into English in this way has the advantage also that it often, as in the case of Rivendell, provides the key to the meaning of the Elvish name as well; for the one was frequently a direct translation of the other. This is not, however, always so. Some place-names have no meaning now discernible and derive, no doubt, from still older and forgotten days. In some cases the names had different meanings in different tongues. Thus the C.S. Dwarrowdelf *(19) was a translation of the Dwarvish name Khazad-dum, (* That is 'Dwarves' mine'. I have translated the actual C.S.
    Phuru-nargian as Dwarrowdelf, since in Bilbo's time the word phuru (related to phur- 'to delve') was obsolete in ordinary speech, and nargian contained a derivative form of narac 'dwarf' that had long disappeared from use. Dwarrow is what the ancient English genitive plural dwerga 'of dwarves' would have become had it survived in use or in a place-name.)
    whereas the Elvish name Moria (older Mornya) meant 'black pit'.
    $41. The nomenclature of the Hobbits themselves and of the places in which they lived has, nonetheless, presented some obstacles to the satisfactory carrying out of this process of translation. Their place-names, being (in the Shire especially) almost all originally of C.S. form, have proved least difficult. I have converted them into as nearly similar English terms as I could find, using the elements found in English place-names that seemed suitable both in sense and in period: that is in being still current (like hill), or slightly altered or reduced from current words (like ton beside town), or no longer found outside place-names (like wich, bold, bottle). The Shire seems to me very adequately to