ORNGALADION

ORNGALADION

(about orne & alda in Quenya) by Leonid L.Korablev 1993

Very little about trees as

trees can be got into play.

J.R.R.Tolkien “On Fairy-Stories”

Of all the things dear to the Elves in their beloved Arda, only the stars they loved more than the trees, or perhaps just as much. And maybe the Old Norse myth of Askr and Embla is a distant echo of that elvish love in our lore, a remembrance of the past contacts of men with Sindar and Eldar. The story of creation of the first human pair out of trees – the man from an ash and the woman from an elm – besides conveying the feeling that trees are “important” and remarkable, is also reminiscent of the way Elves distinguished between two major kinds of trees, as far as we can judge by their language, that magic mirror of their thought and culture.

We find that …Ornē was originally applied to straighter and more slender trees such as birches, whereas stouter, more spreading trees such as oaks and beeches were called in the ancient language galadá, “great growth”, but later this distinction was not always observed in Quenya and disappeared in Sindarin, where all trees came to be called galadh and orn fell out of common use surviving only in verse and songs and in many names both of persons and trees…” (UT, pp. 266-267). Keeping in mind this and also the description from S.D. (“…alda means a tree and ornё when smaller and more slender like a birch or a rowan…”, p.302), we can try to reconstruct that classification (although somewhat roughly), dividing the trees whose elvish names we know into the following two groups.

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