etelehta- vb. "deliver" (= "save") (VT43:23)
Quenya
etelehta-
verb. *to deliver, (lit.) free from
etelehta-
verb. deliver
mal ámë etelehta ulcullo: násië
but deliver us from evil: Amen
The tenth line of Átaremma, Tolkien’s Quenya translation of the Lord’s Prayer. The conjunction mal “but” is followed by a combination of imperative particle á and the pronoun me “us”. This is followed by the aorist form of the verb etelehta “deliver” and ulcullo “from evil”, the ablative form of the noun ulco (perhaps a noun form of ulca). The final word násië, corresponding to English “Amen”, seems to be a Quenya word meaning “✱be it thus”.
Decomposition: Broken into its constituent elements, this phrase would be:
> mal á-më ete-lehta ulcu-llo: násië = “✱but (imperative)-us out-free evil-from: amen”
Conceptual Development: The tenth line underwent more changes than any other line in the prayer. In version III of the prayer, this phrase was first written as a near match to the phrase in version IIb, but was radically altered to a form that persisted to version IV. The analysis below designates these two variations of version III as IIIa and IIIb.
In earlier versions of the prayer, the word for “but” was mostly ono (IIa-IV), though in version I it was {anat >>} one, and it was elided to on’ in version IIIa.
The earlier imperative element was either na (I-IIa) or a (IIIb-IV), and it appeared either before the verb (I-IIa, IIIb-IV) or in the middle of the verb (IIb-IIIa) as et·a·rúna.
The object pronoun me consistently appeared immediately after the verb in the versions I-IV of the prayer rather than before the verb as in version V-VI.
The early versions (I-IV) used a different verb et(e)rúna for “deliver”, still in the aorist tense but in (IIIb-IV) with an embedded imperative et·a·rúna, as noted above.
Tolkien earlier considered several words for “evil”: olca (I deleted), ulca (I), ulco (IIa) and úro (IIa-IV), the last of these possibly a noun form of úra “nasty”. These appeared either with the allative suffix -llo (I) or the preposition va “(away) from” (IIa-IV). In versions IIIb-IV only, the prepositional phrase va úro appeared before the verb rather than after.
Quenya words corresponding to “Amen” appeared only in a few versions: san na (IIa), násan (IIb) and násië (VI), each meaning something like “✱be it thus” or “✱be it so”.
| | I |IIa|IIb|IIIa|IIIb|IV|V|VI| |{anat >>}|one|ono|on’|ono|mal| |na etrúna me|et·a·rúna me|va úro|ám’ etelehta|áme etelehta| |{olcallo >>}|ulcallo|va ulco|{var-úra >>} va úro|aly’ eterúna me|ulcullo| | |san na|násan| |násie|
et
out
et prep. (and adv.?) "out", when followed by ablative "out of" (VT45:13) or literally "out from", as in EO: et Eärello "out of the Great Sea"; cf. also et sillumello "from this hour" in VT44:35. Et i pe/péti, untranslated phrase, perhaps "out of the mouth" (VT47:35). Prefixet- "forth, out" (ET), also in longer form ete- (as in etelehta, eteminya); verb ettuler "are coming forth" (ettul- = et + tul-). (SD:290; read probably *ettulir or continuative *ettúlar in Tolkien's later Quenya). The forms etemmë and etengwë (VT43:36) seem to incorporate pronominal suffixes for "us", hence ?"out of us", inclusive and exclusive respectively. The pronoun -mmë denoted plural inclusive "we" when this was written, though Tolkien would later make it dual exclusive instead (see -mmë). Second person forms are also given: etelyë, etellë ?"out of you", sg. and pl. respectively (Tolkien would later change the ending for pl. "you" from -llë to -ldë).
eterúna-
verb. deliver
eterúna- vb. (also etrúna-, though the cluster tr seems unusual for Quenya) "deliver" (= "save"). Tolkien may have abandoned this verb in favour of etelehta-, q.v. (VT43:23; VT44:9), but the root also appears in #runando "redeemer", so maybe eterúna- can stay with the meaning "redeem".
eterúna-
verb. *to deliver, (lit.) free from
The various drafts of Átaremma prayers from the 1950s used two different words for “deliver”: et(e)rúna- in versions I-IV and etelehta- in versions V-IV. Both start with et “out”. For et(e)rúna- the second element was rūna “free” as indicated in notes associated with version IIb (VT43/23). For etelehta- the second element was [ᴹQ.] lehta-, which in The Etymologies was glossed “loose, slacken” (Ety/LEK), but later was translated as adjective lehta “free, released” (VT39/17) as pointed Wynne, Smith and Hostetter (VT43/23). Both verbs seem to be inspired by the etymology of English “deliver” < “de liberare” = “[Latin.] free from”.
The verb eterúna “deliver” also appeared in Ortírielyanna prayer from this same period.
Neo-Quenya: For purposes of Neo-Quenya I would let both etelehta- and eterúna- coexist for “deliver” = “free from”, but not “deliver” as in “deliver a package”.