A word for “bare, naked” appearing in notes from the late 1950s and early 1960s to explain the name Dol Baran. This name was originally intended to be “✱Brown Hill” with the second element N. baran “brown”; see N. Dolbaran from The Etymologies of the 1930s, which had baran as its second element (Ety/BARÁN). This meaning survived until Tolkien was working on the index to The Lord of the Rings (RC/433), but there he recognized this was problematic because the adjective baran should be mutated to varan. To resolve this quandary, Tolkien coined paran from the root √PAR “peel”, and this new adjective was variously glossed “smooth, shaven” (RC/433), “bare” (PE17/86) or “bare, naked” (PE17/171).
Conceptual Development: The Gnomish Lexicon of the 1910s had some similar “bare” words: G. falt “bare” (GL/33) and fôl “empty, bare — leafless, esp. of trees” (GL/35), both based on the early root ᴱ√FALA “bare, nude” (QL/37).
soft mut. of paran >> Dol Baran, paran