Into the Wardrobe

The most fundamentally useful parts are the chronologies, and somehow I think that's the way it's meant to be. Tolkien never bothered constructing a seperate language system for the Hobbits: even in the story they speak a dialect of the Common Tongue. I seriously doubt that even the Profssor (JRRT) ever actually considered these characters under their "correct" names.

When Tolkien creates names like Banazir and Ranugad, he's finishing out his fiction in a way that simulates a specific philosophy of translation.

I'll explain that sentence in parts. First, the whole thing is fiction from cover to cover, but it's a particular kind of fiction. Simulating some ancient authors, he's telling a story within a story. Tolkien pretends (and he tells us so on the title page, which are also fiction, though he does so in various Elven scripts) that he is the translator of The Red Book of Westmarch. I don't remember if he ever says how he managed to learn the language of the Red Book, though he calls it "Westron" which is itself supposed to be a made-up English word including the meaning "western" since the original word contained something like adun-, which meant "western". The Red Book is supposed to contain Bilbo's and Frodo's Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King and The Silmarillion, the latter of which was translated from Elvish by Bilbo. Thus we have a fictional translation (by Tolkien) of a historical account by Frodo.

Second, Tolkien chooses to have translated the names rather than having related them directly. He says in Appendix E, "I have also translated all Westron names according to their senses." I personally would not have done this were I the translator of such a book, but I understand Tolkien doing so in his simulated world. He wants us to relate to the name Samwise (Semi-wise) Gamgee the way we would relate to the name Banazir were we native speakers of Westron. Tolkien was a big believer in the power of the sound or "feeling" of names in telling a story. You know a "Balrog" is bad, just from the sound of it. At the same time, however, he was a big realist. The "realistic consistency" of Middle Earth is one of the things that makes it such a good story realm. I'm sure he made up "Samwise" first, but realized that the probability that someone being named "sam-wise" in a foreign language would be thousands to one against, so to maintain realism, he created an explanation for it.

I think what Alecto is trying to say is that the name "Banazir" would sound perfectly familiar to a Westron speaker, in the same way that "Samwise" sounds familiar to us.

To illustrate this, the name "João Maria de Carvalho Figueiredo " would to English speakers sound perfectly alien and bizarre, whereas to a portuguese speaker it sounds no more wierd than, say, "John Thomas Hargreaves" sounds to an Englishman. What Tolkien was doing (or rather, pretending to do) was translating what these names (Banazir, Kalimac) actually sounded like to westron-speaking Hobbits' ears.

Note the Shire is actually called "Sûza" and the Brandywine the "Baranduin", but the point is, to Hobbits, "Sûza" = "Shire" and "Shire" to them would sounds just as alien as "Sûza" sounds to us. Tolkien wanted us to see the Lord of the Rings through a 'Hobbit's eye view', but because he was such a perfectioninst he had to explain how.

Yes, you do make a good point, Mavramorn. We must make allowances. I love that Tolkien "translates" LOTR from Westron. My point is that the feeling is not the same. Of course to someone who spoke Westron the feeling would be the same.
Remind me to take a "Tolkien's dead languages" class sometime.