So, I was working today trying to correctly sequence all the typescripts of the chapters towards the end of LotR Book IV and was struck by something that I'd never thought about before.
Tolkien goes to great lengths to build suspense for the disaster at Cirith Ungol. Several times in the chapters leading up to it he avoids giving its name or otherwise suggests that its name is of deep significance.
Finally Faramir tells Frodo the name -- and it means nothing to him. Similarly Faramir confesses ignorance of its actual meaning.
But we've long been told that Frodo speaks Elvish. Or were the elves of Woody End and elsewhere simply being polite, hailing Frodo as possessing a fluency he simply didn't command? We know that Bilbo has great skill in Elvish. By contrast, is Frodo's grasp of Elvish limited to one or two polite phrases? Is this one sphere in which Bilbo outshines his nephew?
Certainly there's no suggestion that 'Ungol' (spider) is difficult or obscure.
So, slightly puzzling. Going to have to give this one more thought.
--John R.
current reading: 42 YEARS IN THE WHITE HOUSE by Ike Hoover
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Yes - the evidence is quite contradictory. I am going through the audio books and when Frodo is in Rivendel one gets the impression that Frodo does not understand much of what was going on and similarly when he is in Lorien. At other times there are phrases that indicate that Frodo does have a working knowledge of elvish.
Maybe something could be made of the Sindarin-Quenya distinction. Frodo seems represented as knowing chiefly Sindarin, the common language of the Elves in Middle-earth, though I'm not sure whether that's really stated anywhere: he understood the "Snow-white" song, with its Sindarin Elbereth, Gilthoniel, and Bilbo's Dun-adan admonition at Rivendell presupposes he knew Sindarin ... though he could not read the Moria gate inscription, whether because of the language or the tengwar mode; of Quenya he knows the "Elen sila..." greeting, but did not understand Galadriel's lament. The Etymologies (HOME 5), in part cotemporaneous with the first writing of LR, gives the root UNG as having derivatives in Q and Ilkorin, but "in N[oldorin] not used except in name Ungoliant, which is really taken from Q[enya]". When the linguistic situation was reconceptualised prior to the publication of LR, Sindarin was mostly based on Noldorin. But admittedly, there's no hint of this when Kirith Ungol is glossed "spider glen" in early drafts of LR (HOME 7). Perhaps _ungol_ had by then been imagined as Sindarin, but not the usual word for spider, any more than _(she)lob_ is in English (then again, one might expect that to show up in the gloss for Kirith Ungol).
Dear J.H.
It sometimes seems that Frodo's knowledge of Elvish varies depending on the needs of the story at any given point, but I've never gone into it. Might make a nice little article for someone philologically inclined, to trace and lay out the evidence for 'Frodo's Elvish Knowledge'
--John R.
Dear Widia
The Sindarin / Quenya divide, with Frodo more fluent in the former than the latter, sounds like a good solution, though I'm not a good enough linguist to work up the proof or otherwise of it.
Perhaps the philologist in Tolkien is quietly suggesting that knowing the right Elven language can forewarn you in times of trouble.
Too bad they don't get the chance to ask the Lorekeeper in Minas Tirith, who seems to know at least a little Quenya. Or perhaps he's one of the ones Faramir describes as going pale and falling silent whenever the name (Cirith Ungol) comes up, which is hardly helpful.
--John R.
This was the subject of some discussion on TORN about 15 years ago, as I recall. One suggestion put forward then was that Frodo, not to mention all the Sindarin speakers in Gondor, assume the name is poetic: the pass is the kind of high narrow place that would be fit only for spiders to climb.
Now ask yourself how seriously Gondor's citizens took the meaning of the word "umbar".
I am tempted to propose that we are dealing with one of these questions where we should not seek a consistent, ‘story-internal’ explanation, but rather turn to the narrative effect.
In my view the whole section leading up to the encounter with Shelob benefits from the hints of a menace that is unknown – had Frodo and Faramir discussed that this was the “Spider Pass”, the story would, in my opinion, have suffered.
Therefore Tolkien, I suggest, was perfectly willing to sacrifice a bit of that “inner consistency of reality” in order to make for a better story ... and it is not the only place in The Lord of the Rings that he did this.
Cirith Ungol is sindarn, not quenya.
Since Cirith Ungol is Sindarin, any greater fluency in that language does not solve the problem. No doubt Frodo's grasp of Elvish does depend on the needs of the story, as you suspect. But it is stated that Frodo knew "only a little" Sindarin. I know only a little German and Spanish, in which I can say "Good day" but not "spider".
Look again at the passage regarding the "Snow-white" hymn: "It was singing in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little, and the others knew nothing. Yet the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in their thought into words which they only partly understood. This was the song as Frodo heard it…" His grasp of the song's meaning evidently goes beyond his actual learned knowledge of Sindarin. (Yoko Hemmi connects this with Tolkien's theory of "native language" as something innately familiar even if never learned, which he developed in his lecture "English and Welsh". See her paper, "Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and His Concept of Native Language: Sindarin and British-Welsh", in Tolkien Studies 7.
The idea that Tolkien might have meant ungol as an archaic word like English lob seems plausible.
None of this explains why the lore-wise, Sindarin-speaking Faramir doesn't mention that Cirith Ungol means "Spider Cleft". Is he really the Witch-king in disguise? ;-)
Why would Frodo think that Spider Pass means "pass with giant hobbit-eating spiders"? Perhaps he thought it was a reference to the topography.
His uncle had already had to deal with giant dwarf-eating spiders. I think Cirith Ungol would indeed have sounded alarm bells for Frodo if he had known what it meant!
Coming to this late and I don't have a lot more to add, but I wanted to agree with John Garth here. "Spider" is not a particularly common word in English. It may seem common to fluent speakers, but it's not among the 5,000 most common words, according to frequency tables of the 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (as just one source).* It's a word that doesn't come up until it comes up ... your leg usually! I know the word for spider in a handful of languages, but I'm sure I didn't know it right away — except for Italian, where I remember it was specifically part of the Pimsleur audio course (it was used with the idiom "to be afraid" "avere paura di"). And I have some knowledge of lots of other languages in which I *don't* know the word for spider.
It seems totally plausible to me that Frodo just didn't know this word, that it simply hadn't come up in his lessons or in the Elvish poems he heard. And why should Faramir translate it for him? It's just a place-name to him, and he didn't have any concrete knowledge of Shelob to share. Even if Frodo did know the word, then poetic, metaphorical, or topographical explanations seem perfectly valid explanations too.
* For the insatiably curious, "spider" is the 5,619th most common word in English. At least, for now.
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