Ambarkanta: The Shape of the World. List of cosmographical words with explanations, and a description of the world of Tolkien’s mythology (*‘The Silmarillion’) as it stood at the time of writing, published with commentary, notes, three diagrams, and two maps in *The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986), pp. 235–61.
SYNOPSIS
The Earth is said to be globed within the Ilurambar, the transparent Walls of the World, impassable except by the Door of Night. On all sides of the Earth is Vaiya, the Enfolding Ocean – the seas and air – of which the Air is of two kinds, Vista which ‘sustains birds and clouds’ and Ilmen ‘breathed by the Gods, and purified by the passage of the luminaries; for in Ilmen [the Vala] Varda ordained the courses of the stars, and later of the Moon and Sun’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 236). Vaiya, Vista, and Ilmen are further defined in relation to Valinor and Middle-earth, and to the movements of the Sun and Moon. The creation of Valinor and the shaping of Middle-earth by the Valar are recounted; ‘but the symmetry of the ancient Earth was changed and broken in the first Battle of the Gods … and the Earth was again broken in the second battle … and it has changed ever in the wearing and passing of many ages’ (pp. 239–40).
HISTORY
When editing the Ambarkanta for The Shaping of Middle-earth *Christopher Tolkien believed that it belonged with his father’s writings of the early 1930s. Later, however, he realized that it dated instead from the mid-1930s, following the ‘later Annals’ but preceding *The Fall of Númenor; see *The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 9, 108.
At the beginning of the six manuscript pages of the text is an alternate title, Of the Fashion of the World; the title Ambarkanta (Qenya ambar ‘Earth’ + kanta ‘shape’) and a subtitle, The Shape of the World, are given on a separate but related title-leaf. Two of the three diagrams accompanying the text are labelled ‘The World from Númen (West) to Rómen (East)’ and ‘The World from Formen (North) to Harmen (South)’. The third, ‘The World after the Cataclysm and the ruin of the Númenóreans’, is related to three sentences added by Tolkien to the original text of the Ambarkanta, which ended with the final words quoted above: these refer to the re-shaping of the world that occurred at the end of the Second Age, when the Númenóreans sailed West against the ban of the Valar: ‘But the greatest change took place, when the First Design was destroyed, and the Earth was rounded, and severed from Valinor’ (p. 240). Christopher Tolkien feels that this addition could date from ‘much later; but … is far more likely to be contemporary, since the story of Númenor arose about this time’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 261). The third diagram, twice marked with ‘the Straight Path’ (by which the Elves may seek Valinor, while mortals may follow only the curvature of the earth), seems to belong to the same period; a precursor, ‘a very rough and hasty sketch, which shows a central globe … with two circles around it’ in which ‘a straight line’ extends ‘to the outer circle in both directions’, is described in The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 11.
The two related maps are inscribed ‘The World about V[alian] Y[ear] 500 after the fall of the Lamps … and the first fortification of the North by Melko’ and ‘After the War of the Gods (Arvalin was cast up by the Great Sea at the foot of the Mts.’ (sic, lacking a closing parenthesis).
‘The Ambidexters Sentence’. Text, edited with notes and analysis by Patrick H. Wynne, published as section IV of ‘Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals and Related Writings, Part Three’ in Vinyar Tengwar 49 (June 2007), pp. 3–37.
The work consists of two untitled pages, one in manuscript, dated later than 12 January 1968, and one typewritten, ‘bearing several successive versions of a sentence in Quenya [*Languages, Invented] (with English translation) concerning Elvish ambidexterity and the significance of the left hand’ (p. 3). The text is closely related to a section of *Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals. Here the text proper is followed by an appendix, ‘Late Writings on √nā ‘to be”.
Amroth and Nimrodel
see Part of the Legend of Amroth and Nimrodel Recounted in Brief
‘Analysis of Fragments of Other Languages Found in The Lord of the Rings’
see The Lord of the Rings; Words, Phrases, and Passages in The Lord of the Rings
Ancrene Riwle. A medieval guide or set of rules for anchoresses (female religious recluses), Ancrene Riwle is the longest and best known of a group of religious prose works written or translated in the thirteenth century in the West Midlands of England, in all of which Tolkien took an interest. Its eight sections prescribe a daily routine of prayers, but also offer practical guidelines for the conduct of life. Written originally in English, it proved so popular that it was translated into French and Latin and adapted for other audiences.
The language of this work, Tolkien wrote in his preface to the Modern English translation by his former B.Litt. student *M.B. Salu,
now appears archaic … and it is also “dialectal” to us whose language is based mainly on the speech of the other side of England, whereas the soil in which it grew was that of the West Midlands and the Marches of Wales. But it was in its day and to its users a natural, easy, and cultivated speech, familiar with the courtesy of letters, able to combine colloquial liveliness with a reverence for the already long tradition of English writing. [The Ancrene Riwle (1955), p. v]
Tolkien called this variant of Middle English ‘Language (AB)’, as it was shared between two manuscripts traditionally referred to with sigla as ‘A’ and ‘B’: respectively, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 402 (MS CCCC 402), apparently the earliest surviving manuscript of Ancrene Riwle, and MS Bodley 34 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which contains the works of the *Katherine Group. The language is usually referred to by others as the ‘AB language’.
MS CCCC 402 bears the title Ancrene Wisse – it is the only manuscript of this work to include a title – and because of this medieval authority, some scholars have argued that Ancrene Wisse should be used to refer to the work in general. *E.J. Dobson, for example, comments in ‘The Affiliations of the Manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse’, *English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962): ‘I use the title Ancrene Wisse to refer to the work as a whole, and do not follow the convention of restricting it to the text of [MS CCCC 402], in which I can see little if any point’ (p. 129). Ancrene Riwle is a corrected version of the title (Ancren Riwle) given the first complete edition of the work by its editor, James Morton, in 1853, and was used on all editions of the work, except Tolkien’s, published by the Early English Text Society (EETS; see *Societies and clubs). We chose Ancrene Riwle (except specifically for Tolkien’s edition of 1962) in the present book because of its predominant use by EETS, and because it was used for M.B. Salu’s translation (see below), though Ancrene Wisse was (properly) used for Tolkien’s edition.
Tolkien was concerned with Ancrene Riwle as early as 1920, while teaching at the University of *Leeds, most particularly with MS CCCC 402, the only surviving manuscript of a revised version of the text. His interest was linguistic, as demonstrated in the several references to Ancrene Riwle in his article *Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography in the Review of English Studies for April 1925, and as he remarked in *Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad, published in Essays and Studies in 1929. In November 1930 he wrote to *Kenneth Sisam of Oxford University Press (*Publishers), in regard to a proposed edition of Ancrene Riwle, that he could produce a plain text, with a limited glossary, in a short time,