_n. _Firmament. o menel aglar elenath ! lit. 'from Firmament glory of the stars !'.
Sindarin
menel
noun. the heavens, firmament, region of the stars
Menel
noun. Firmament
Menel
noun. sky, high heaven, firmament, the region of the stars
Menel
noun. the heavens
_n. _the heavens, the apparent dome of the sky. Probably a Quenya word introduced into Sindarin. It was a 'pictorial' word, as the lore of the Eldar and the Númenoreans know much astronomy.
menel-vîr síla díriel
*heaven-jewel shines having watched [for us]
The second phrase of Lúthien’s Song (LB/354). Three translations of this phrase are:
Patrick Wynne: “✱a heavenly jewel shines silver, having watched” (NTTLS/11)
David Salo: “✱having watched ... shines like a jewel in the sky” (GS/211)
Bertrand Bellet and Benjamin Babut: “✱jewel of the firmament, shines on the watch [for us]” (GTLC)
The first word menel is the Sindarin word for “the heavens, firmament”. The second word vîr is the lenited form of mîr “jewel”. The third word síla “shines” is the present tense of the verb síla- “to shine”. The last word díriel “having watched” is the lenited form of tíriel, the past active participle form of the verb tiria- “to watch, gaze”.
ae adar nín i vi menel
our Father who [art] in Heaven
The first line of Ae Adar Nín, Tolkien’s Sindarin translation of the Lord’s Prayer (VT44/21). The first word Ae is probably a variation of the vocative a “O”. The second word is adar “father”, modified by the possessive pronoun nín “my”, with the adjectival element following the noun as is usual in Sindarin. The fourth word is i “who” followed by vi the lenited form of mi “in” and menel “heaven”. There is no Sindarin word for “to be” in this phrase, as there is in English (“art”).
Both Bill Welden and David Salo point out (VT44/22, GS/231) that Tolkien’s use of the 1st-person-singular possessive pronoun nín “my” in this first phrase (where the original prayer had “our”) is somewhat peculiar, since elsewhere in the prayer he used mín for the 1st-person-plural possessive “our”. Bill Welden suggested that Tolkien may have use the 1st-singular here to connote greater intimacy (VT44/22).
As pointed out by Bill Welden (VT44/23-4), Tolkien did not use Q. menel for the Christian Heaven in the final Quenya version of the prayer, replacing it with the name Q. Eruman. Elsewhere, S. menel properly referred only to “the heavens” (holding the stars) and its application to the Christian Heaven would not be appropriate (MR/387). Perhaps Tolkien would have replace S. Menel with a Sindarinized form ✱Eruvan of the Quenya name, if he had made the same change in the Sindarin prayer.
Decomposition: Broken into its constituent elements, this phrase would be:
> ae Adar nín i vi Menel = “✱O Father mine who [art] in Heaven”
bo ceven sui vi menel
on Earth as [it is] in Heaven
The fifth line of Ae Adar Nín, Tolkien’s Sindarin translation of the Lord’s Prayer (VT44/21). The first word is the preposition bo “on” (possibly a mutated form for po), followed by ceven “earth”. The third word is the preposition sui “as”, followed by vi the lenited form of mi “in” and menel “heaven”. There is no Sindarin equivalent for English “it is” in this phrase.
See the entry for the first line of this prayer for a discussion of the (mis)use of menel for “Heaven” in this phrase.
Decomposition: Broken into its constituent elements, this phrase would be:
> bo Ceven sui vi Menel = “✱on Earth as in Heaven”
o menel aglar elenath
from heaven on high the glory of the starry host
o menel palan-diriel
from heaven gazing far
Menel
heaven
menel (i venel), pl. menil (i menil)
menel
heaven
(i venel), pl. menil (i menil)
A word for the “the heavens, firmament, region of the stars”, a loan word from Quenya (MR/387; RGEO/64). See the entry on Q. menel and √MENEL for further details.
Conceptual Development: This word began to appear as an element in Sindarin in late Lord of the Rings drafts (SD/45) and drafts of Lord of the Rings appendices (PM/130) from the early 1950s. In the Sindarin prayer Ae Adar Nín from the mid-to-late 1950s, Tolkien used Menel for “Heaven” as in ae Adar nín i vi Menel “our Father who [art] in Heaven” (VT44/21), but this seems not to be the proper Elvish usage, so could perhaps be considered a Mannish misconception (or Tolkienish vacillation on the meaning of the word). Elsewhere Tolkien only used S. menel for “the heavens”, such as in o menel aglar elenath “from heaven [the firmanent] on high the glory of the starry host” from the A Elbereth Gilthoniel poem (LotR/238, 1028; RGEO/63-64). Note that menel did not appear in the earliest drafts of Elbereth Gilthoniel from the 1940s (RS/394).