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silwritersguildHi! *waves* Newbie coming bearing a discussion topic.
I'm working on a femslash fic in mid-Second Age Imladris and was pondering possible ways to describe sexual orientation (or some analogous concept) in Sindarin or Quenya. I'd welcome people's thoughts on the matter.
I started off looking for an analogue to "queer" - something along the lines of "strange, odd" seems like a natural piece of vocabulary for the majority to apply to minority sexuality of whatever stripe - but the closest I could find in any Sindarin or Quenya dictionary was "foreigner" (S. athal, Q. ettelëa), which is a bit far off.
"Gay" is more fruitful - e.g. Sindarin gelir even has "gay person" as the suggested translation in the dictionary I checked (although I'm pretty sure that isn't the meaning they intend! ;)) However, the etymological shift for "gay" to go from "happy" to mean "someone who experiences (only) same-gender attraction" strikes me as more involved than "queer". Looking it up, it looks as if "gay" first started meaning something like "carefree and uninhibited", then took on a connotation of sexual behaviour which encompassed same-gender sexual relations (along with prostitution), then shifted until that was its sole meaning, and finally took on the meaning we know today. (Disclaimer: this is from Wikipedia, so anyone who knows more about this feel free to correct me.) So I figure positing "gelir" or something like it as Sindarin vocabulary for queer people would imply it underwent a similar shift, which means that cultural attitudes towards same-sex relationships among Elves would have been similar to those in the US (or UK?) at the time - in particular, the connection with being sexually uninhibited and, potentially, sex work.
"Lesbian" apparently comes from Sappho of Lesbos, along with the less-used adjective "sapphic". So it seems like one could also posit something derived from the name of a minor canon character (Tinfang Gelion, maybe?) or OC and/or the name of some minor geographic region as a jumping-off point. Ideas would be welcomed.
"Homosexual", "bisexual", "asexual" etc. are of course medical-esque terms of Latin-slash-ancient-Greek extraction (plus "bi" and "ace" derived from those.) I suppose one could attempt to create some similar Quenya term using yérë for sexual desire - although this goes beyond my meagre knowledge of Quenya. And again, this implies similar attitudes to the Western world re: the scientific study of sexuality, and I'm not sure about using Quenya as a Latin-analogue myself given the relatively fraught history and the fact that there'd still be Elves around who remembered e.g. Thingol's ban.
Going outside English for a moment, German offers "schwul" for gay, which apparently comes from "schwül" - oppressively hot and humid. Nobody appears quite certain how that shift in meaning happened, but suggestions are that it refers to the possibly-metaphorical warmth of sex and companionship (I guess similarly to the sexual connotations of "frigid" in English), or referring to the temperature in a brothel. Which again gives us the connection to sex work. (Again, I'm getting this from Wikipedia.) So I guess one could use Q. saiwa, úrin or S. urui - although it seems like this might create confusion with the English sexual connotation for "hot"!
Getting away from creating some analogue to a word we have, one could maybe use something along the lines of "fated" (S. amarthan, maybe) as a riff on the "strange fates" line from Laws and Customs of the Eldar. Although this does rather end up changing the meaning of Amrod/Amras' mother-name...
Of course, all this begs the wider question of what Elven conception of sexuality and alternate/minority sexualities would have been, what the connotation of same-gender relationships would've been and whether they'd have been legal or illegal, what Elven queer subcultures would have looked like, etc. - and how this would have differed among Noldor vs Sindar vs Silvan vs Vanyar vs etc. in different Ages, to boot. I admit at this point that I have very little knowledge of how these things have looked in other cultures and varying points in history apart from "not like here and now", and this would probably be helpful when considering possibilities. >> Possibly one can use the description in Laws and Customs of the Eldar as a jumping-off point for what the normative sexuality would have looked like (so heterosexual marriage, with children, relatively early in life, sexual desires waning after a while) and then contemplate how deviations from that would have been viewed. But really, I have no idea so any input is welcome!
I'm working on a femslash fic in mid-Second Age Imladris and was pondering possible ways to describe sexual orientation (or some analogous concept) in Sindarin or Quenya. I'd welcome people's thoughts on the matter.
I started off looking for an analogue to "queer" - something along the lines of "strange, odd" seems like a natural piece of vocabulary for the majority to apply to minority sexuality of whatever stripe - but the closest I could find in any Sindarin or Quenya dictionary was "foreigner" (S. athal, Q. ettelëa), which is a bit far off.
"Gay" is more fruitful - e.g. Sindarin gelir even has "gay person" as the suggested translation in the dictionary I checked (although I'm pretty sure that isn't the meaning they intend! ;)) However, the etymological shift for "gay" to go from "happy" to mean "someone who experiences (only) same-gender attraction" strikes me as more involved than "queer". Looking it up, it looks as if "gay" first started meaning something like "carefree and uninhibited", then took on a connotation of sexual behaviour which encompassed same-gender sexual relations (along with prostitution), then shifted until that was its sole meaning, and finally took on the meaning we know today. (Disclaimer: this is from Wikipedia, so anyone who knows more about this feel free to correct me.) So I figure positing "gelir" or something like it as Sindarin vocabulary for queer people would imply it underwent a similar shift, which means that cultural attitudes towards same-sex relationships among Elves would have been similar to those in the US (or UK?) at the time - in particular, the connection with being sexually uninhibited and, potentially, sex work.
"Lesbian" apparently comes from Sappho of Lesbos, along with the less-used adjective "sapphic". So it seems like one could also posit something derived from the name of a minor canon character (Tinfang Gelion, maybe?) or OC and/or the name of some minor geographic region as a jumping-off point. Ideas would be welcomed.
"Homosexual", "bisexual", "asexual" etc. are of course medical-esque terms of Latin-slash-ancient-Greek extraction (plus "bi" and "ace" derived from those.) I suppose one could attempt to create some similar Quenya term using yérë for sexual desire - although this goes beyond my meagre knowledge of Quenya. And again, this implies similar attitudes to the Western world re: the scientific study of sexuality, and I'm not sure about using Quenya as a Latin-analogue myself given the relatively fraught history and the fact that there'd still be Elves around who remembered e.g. Thingol's ban.
Going outside English for a moment, German offers "schwul" for gay, which apparently comes from "schwül" - oppressively hot and humid. Nobody appears quite certain how that shift in meaning happened, but suggestions are that it refers to the possibly-metaphorical warmth of sex and companionship (I guess similarly to the sexual connotations of "frigid" in English), or referring to the temperature in a brothel. Which again gives us the connection to sex work. (Again, I'm getting this from Wikipedia.) So I guess one could use Q. saiwa, úrin or S. urui - although it seems like this might create confusion with the English sexual connotation for "hot"!
Getting away from creating some analogue to a word we have, one could maybe use something along the lines of "fated" (S. amarthan, maybe) as a riff on the "strange fates" line from Laws and Customs of the Eldar. Although this does rather end up changing the meaning of Amrod/Amras' mother-name...
Of course, all this begs the wider question of what Elven conception of sexuality and alternate/minority sexualities would have been, what the connotation of same-gender relationships would've been and whether they'd have been legal or illegal, what Elven queer subcultures would have looked like, etc. - and how this would have differed among Noldor vs Sindar vs Silvan vs Vanyar vs etc. in different Ages, to boot. I admit at this point that I have very little knowledge of how these things have looked in other cultures and varying points in history apart from "not like here and now", and this would probably be helpful when considering possibilities. >> Possibly one can use the description in Laws and Customs of the Eldar as a jumping-off point for what the normative sexuality would have looked like (so heterosexual marriage, with children, relatively early in life, sexual desires waning after a while) and then contemplate how deviations from that would have been viewed. But really, I have no idea so any input is welcome!
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