LAST EDITED ON Jan-10-07 AT 08:46 PM (EST)
 
>However, your surmise about Old Norse being the "common tongue" in the
>Upper Worlds is correct. Like many things that have been around since
>the dawn of Asgard/Alfheim/Vanaheim, it has many names; "Westron" is
>what the elves of Alfheim, who live in the eastern parts of that
>realm, call it, because it originally comes from Asgard, which lies to
>the west if you're in the elvish kingdoms.

That clarifies another point, both as to the basic geography of the Upper Worlds and as to where the Professor got the idea for the relative placement of Middle-earth and the so-called "Blessed Realm".

>
>Tolkien himself claimed that Old Norse was a translation of the
>language used by the Men of Dale, mentioned in The Hobbit, as a
>way of explaining why all the dwarves in that book have Norse names,
>but we may safely assume that that was just a further dodge, since
>we're making all this stuff up anyway. :)

I ought to have thought of that myself, especially since I had been thinking earlier today about the Norse names of the dwarves. (No reason why they couldn't really have them, of course.)

Speaking of elves and dwarves, here's this little bit from Ash Knight:

Noticing the look on Anne's face, Corwin grinned. "This is
Dwarventown," he confirmed. "Mostly immigrants from the mountains of
Alfheim - craftsmen, mainly. Some mountain elves, too, like Gunnr.
They're the only breed of elves who really -like- dwarves."

This makes me wonder if Gunnr and her fellow mountain elves may be descendants of the elven people that Tolkien called the Noldor. According to the source material, the Noldor were the only elves who ever had a real friendship with dwarves, as in the quoted paragraph. The Noldor were also the elves most partial to things mechanical and artificial, so to speak, and to lives of action; virtually all of the elven heroes and heroines we see in Tolkien's work, except for Legolas, are of the Noldor. (Cf. Gunnr's self-introduction to Juniper in On The Road Again, where she explains that she's not into being a "fountain of obscure mystic wisdom".)

>
>>I further conjecture that Quenya and
>>Sindarin are either actual languages of ancient Alfheim/Vanaheim, or
>>else that Tolkien created fictional versions of those languages as
>>part of the great blind.
>
>Essentially, Quenya = Old Alvish and Sindarin = Modern Alvish
>(also-also known as Elvish, and very similar to the language spoken on
>most of Hyeruul, such that Corwin, who is fluent in Elvish, can
>understand most of what Umi's saying when she speaks in her native
>language in Knights 2).
>
Which buttresses my "fictional-version-language" theory, since Modern Alvish and Hyelian are, going by Umi's dialogue, completely unlike any human language to the extent that Tolkien may well have found it too difficult to transcribe accurately with just pen and paper, not, presumably, having more modern recording equipment to hand (we know that most people can't even pronounce Hyelian names properly, after all). It also suggests the possibility that there may have been emigration from Alfheim to Hyeruul in the distant past.

(EDIT - On the other hand, I just saw your reply to Offsides about "Mithrandir" being a Modern Alvish word, which means I may have to reconsider the above paragraph. Real-world Tolkien based Sindarin on Welsh, after all, which is a notoriously difficult language, and he didn't seem to have any problem with that.)

>>(Incidentially, UF-Tolkien would likely be eligible for Valhalla by
>>dint of his World War I service on the Western Front, so if anyone
>>with access to Asgard cared to, they could probably look him up and
>>ask him themselves.
>
>Oh, I'm not at all convinced that he's actually dead. He was a
>great friend of the Vanir and the various other peoples of Vanaheim
>and Alfheim, and traveled widely in the celestial realms during his
>lifetime; it's entirely possible that on one of his later journeys, he
>simply never returned to Midgard.

I like this theory better than my original one. After the death of his wife and his retirement from Oxford, he wouldn't have had any real reason to remain in Midgard, it seems to me, and I imagine it wouldn't have been too difficult for his friends to get permission from Odin.

>>If, that is, they could find him at home...I like
>>to think of him, if he ended up in Valhalla, still tramping the byways
>>of Alfheim and Vanaheim, walking staff in hand, collecting the legends
>>and tongues of those lands.)
>
>In Alfheim, unsurprisingly, they call him Mithrandir.
>
Very fitting!