Talk:The Etymologies (Tolkien)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Middle-earth Wikiproject This article is within the scope of WikiProject Middle-earth, which aims to build an encyclopedic guide to J. R. R. Tolkien, his legendarium, and related topics. Please visit the project talk page for suggestions and ideas on how you can improve this and other articles.
Note: Though it states in the Guide to writing better articles that generally fictional articles should be written in present tense, all Tolkien legendarium-related articles that cover in-universe material must be written in past tense. Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Middle-earth/Standards for more information about this and other article standards.
Assessment
Start
This article has been rated as start-Class on the quality scale.
High
This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale.

Article Grading:
The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

The most significant weakness of this article from the p.o.v. of an encyclopedia is how "closed" it is - the etymologies are their own little universe, within the Tolkien canon, and I don't know of any secondary literature about them. All an encyclopedia entry can do is discuss what they are and how they relate to the greater whole. The etymologies are, to make matters worse, not 'fixed' in any way - they underwent a constant state of flux for the entire time Tolkien nibbled at them. Because there was never a canonical Elvish language, there isn't any way to do normal literary criticism of how the layers emerged into a finished product. The article needs to explain why the etymologies were never finished. Scott1329m 12:35, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I wanted to do a major rewrite to this, but still don't know how. Maybe we should make an article referring to the 'external' history and then something about the 'internal sundocarmë' would be the best, isn't it? What I really suggest is to write it from the very beginning. --Neigel von Teighen 13:35, 11 December 2006 (UTC)