My first hardcover print - (WOW!!!)

 

For the first time, I have tried to apply KDP's new hardcover offer. And I am most impressed! The omnibus edition of my four volumes "Middle-earth seen by the barbarians", "Words of Westernesse", "Dynasties of Middle-earth" and "The Moon in 'The Hobbit'" looks most professional, the colour images are crisp, the paper feels noble - "like from the bookshop", my daughter said, admiringly! True, the printing costs for 500+ full-colour pages are rather high, close to 70 € in total, but just to see this result was worth the investment!

(Of course, for low-budget readers I have also produced a b/w pocket book for half the price; but it's not quite an eye-bulger as the hardcover!)

I think I should do other books in hardcover as well, notably the image-laden volumes on minor worlds of the solar system.

One more word included in NoMe: Adûnayân

So we got exactly one new word of Adûnaic in Nature of Middle-earth: Adûnayân, that's what Adûnaic called itself, and I am forced to discard my previous hypothesis that its name was Adûnaiyê, analogous to Nimriyê 'Elvish' in the Notion Club Papers.

Its structure is difficult to interpret. My first association was the other name, Yozâyan 'Land of Gift', but that is based on an attested noun zâyan, pl. zâin 'land', which cannot be present here (note the different place of the long vowel, though with Tolkien it is not always significant). The NCP have also provided us with an agental suffix -ân that produced nouns like magân 'maker'. But that would suggest an interpretation of Adûnayân as 'Westerner' or in fact 'Westron', and I am not sure whether this reading holds.

But then, we have cases like abâr 'strength, endurance' > abrazân ' steadfast, faithful; Voronwe'. Can we draw an analogy? The basic element of Adûnayân is no doubt Adûna ' a Númenórean', shall we simply add a glide consonant y + -ân', following the structore of -ada in azûlada > -yada in avalôiyada to avoid a vowel cluster?

But then, we also have got from the NCP the possessive prefix an-, included, among other examples, in an-Adûn 'of the West'. Maybe Tolkien decided in the third phase of Adûnaic, that in Words of Westernesse I had labelled a-Adûnaic for reference purposes, to make it a lenghtened suffix: *adûnân. In that case, Adûnayân would simply mean '[Language] of the Númenórean(s)': Adûna + y + poss. suff.

Anyway, it's time for an update to Words of Westernesse. 

Is this not a great model for Tuor son of Huor?

Costume design (1876), by Karl Emil Döpler (1824-1905), for Siegmund, in “Die Walküre” (1856), by Richard Wagner (1813-1883).