Phrase “Merry Christmas!” by Aldaleon

Updated the tengwar to match Tolkien's letter.

You might want to provide the original gloss as an alternate translation: “may thee find a blessed Amanar”.

Elaran and I discussed it on Discord and agreed that Amanar is probably am “up” + Anar “Sun”

Yes, it must be referring to the winter solstice, after which the "Sun" starts going back "up" (having reached its lowest point in the sky).

I have added amanar. Thanks!

cool

"may you find a holy winter solstice" xD

Just a quick research trip gave me a feeling of what Tolkien meant in the letter.

The phrase "only referred to Yule and the beginning of the Sun's return" is just defining the period covered by the holiday, and when the greeting is appropriate. In our current system, this is from the Winter Solstice to Yule (Christmas Day). In 2020, The Year of the Pandemic, would be from Dec. 21st to Dec. 25th.

It is very logical, maybe even obvious once you guys did the hard part of the research, thatamanar was created from Am 'up' and Anar 'sun' and could be used as roughly ‘Christmas greetings ’or more directly, 'Winter Solstice greetings'.

However, I believe that Amanar, as referenced in the letter, is a proper noun, as denoted by the initial capital, and refers to Aman, 'blessed Realm', the continent chosen as the Elven Home and fortress. The inhabitants are known as the Amanyar ("Those of Aman').

In this case, the greeting, translated by Tolkien as "may thee find a blessed Amanar" would be an Elven expression of hope for the one being greeted by saying may you find your own blessed home (Amanar)

Thoughts?

ChrisP

Note that lye is almost certainly an object here, as suggested by the English gloss “thee” (object form of “thou”). If it were the subject of hir- “find,” we’d expect either suffixation onto the verb (hiruvalyë) or an independent form (elyë hiruva, as in Namárië). A more prosaic order would be “May a blessed Amanar find thee.”

I’m not convinced by your hypothesis. What does the capital have to do with its being a place name? We have multiple attestations of holiday/festival names also denoted by capitals in Latin transcription. Furthermore, if Aman is referring to the Blessed Realm, what is -ar?

When we first saw the word, some scholars did think that it could be "Aman-árë" and such. We later settled on "Am-anar" because the other idea introduces some problems. However we did still consider the "Aman coincidence" to be possibly deliberate on the part of Tolkien, like a pun.