Month: March 2015

onehandedly:

curufinwefeanaro:

|| Yesterday lintamande answered a question of mine concerning Feanor learning Valarin (over here). Which prompted a conversation with misbehavingmaiar that ended up with me freaking out about what learning Valarin might mean in terms of creation of the Silmarilli. I already posted about that over here, quite extensively. But what I previously called a simple “power of words” now has become clearer.

Treat this as a headcanon, rather than an actual meta post.

Fëanor learnt a bit of Valarin, according to what is said he knew of it more than anyone else. But he did not share what he knew, according to Pengolodh because of his discontent with the Valar themselves. Lintamande’s post already explains the logical problem in how that timeline bit is framed, but I will now assume that he, in fact, did not share his studies about the language. And what else did he not share? The technique to make the Silmarils itself.

But what is Valarin? It’s the language of deities. The sounds were peculiar, too sharp for the Elves, but many of the words might as well have been not pronounceable, because the Valar’s phonic apparatus is not forced to remain perfectly human-like. The Elves tended to transcribe Valarin words into Quenya ones. 

Then misbehavingmaiar advanced the hypothesis that Valar might be not just a “language”, but a way to put music into words. An onomatopoeic tongue, as much as “whisper” or “bark” are onomatopoeic English words. “Bark” describes the sound of a dog, even if you can’t actually reproduce it with your mouth. Valarin, by consequence, could be the Music of the Ainur, the way they sing but brought into a language. Fëanor studided it and never shared what he knew. As doegred told me, exploring it he was looking for a language and found mathematics, because what is music if not a mathematical system?

As doegred put it: “He learnt how to trap light by creating a cage for electromagnetic waves that worked on the basis of interference using a specific math developed on the basis of Valarin”. And he did it through talking as well as crafting. Through the power of words. All elven “magic” is based on music and words. He literally learnt the language of the gods.

This would also partially explain why Valarin was considered so complex and almost impossible to learn. In fact if Valarin was a mathematical model that exhaustively and coherently described reality (or the music from whence it sprung) then it must have been made up of different kind of notations, even different kind of mathematics. Each of them used in the context best described by it.

Let me give you a quick example. When dealing with classical mechanics the mathematic you need, the one which is best equipped to help you create a coherent model of the phenomena you observe is Algebra, you will need to study forces and fields and so on, while trying to study Quantum mechanic with the same mathematic is quite hard to so scientists (and students) use another notation, the bra-ket notation, which allows them to understand and handle the model. Same thing goes for many other fields of science or even art (recently I read something very interesting about the use of Quaternions in the field of digital animation, apparently they are particularly good for it because they allow to handle the movements in both a 3-d space and time at the same time).

So it is conceivable that Fëanaro never published his notes about Valarin mainly because there was no way to write a comprehensive study about a language that varies depending on what subject you are addressing.