The first line of Átaremma, Tolkien’s Quenya translation of the Lord’s Prayer. The first word Átaremma “our Father” is atar “father” with the 2nd-person-plural-exclusive suffix -mma consistent with the 1st edition of The Lord of the Rings (after the 2nd edition of The Lord of the Rings, this suffix would be -lma).
The remainder of the phrase i ëa han Eä “who art in Heaven” is a circumlocution, literally meaning “✱who is beyond Creation [the Material Universe]”. This allowed Tolkien to avoid an explicit name for Heaven, though he did use Eruman for “Heaven” in the fifth line of the prayer.
Decomposition: Broken into its constituent elements, this phrase would be:
> Átar-emma i ëa han Eä = “✱Father-our who is beyond Creation [the Material Universe]”
Conceptual Development: The form Ataremma for “our Father” appears in all versions of the prayer, sometimes preceded by the interjection a or Ai “O”. Wynne, Smith and Hostetter suggested that the long Á of Átaremma in versions V to VI of the prayer may be a coalescense with this interjection (VT43/13).
In versions I-IV, Tolkien use menel for the word “Heaven” in various configurations, most involving an assimilated locative, such as meneldea “in Heaven”. In other writings, Tolkien said that menel referred to the dome of the sky or “the firmament”, and therefore was not proper for “Heaven” (MR/387, PE17/152). Perhaps because of this, in version V he switched to the circumlocution i ëa pell’ Eä, with an assimilated form of the preposition pella “before”. In version VI he changed the preposition to han, as above.
In the earliest version (I), Tolkien used the word na for “is”, added at the end of the phrase, but it was omitted later.
| |  I  |IIa|IIb|III|IV|V|VI| | |A|Ai| | |Ataremma|Átaremma| | |i| |i| |{menellea >>}|menelzea|meneldea|ëa pell’ ëa|ëa han ëa| |na| |
Tolkien’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Quenya, composed sometime in the 1950s (VT43/7), first published in the “Words of Joy (Part One)” article in Vinyar Tengwar #43. There are six versions of the prayer, labeled by Tolkien I-VI (VT43/8-12). Version II has two variations, which the editors labeled IIa and IIb. These revisions were apparently in two phases: I-IV and V-VI (VT43/5-6).
The version presented here is based on version VI (VT43/12) with a few minor changes:
In line 8, the more usual aorist form úcarir (appearing as a revision in version V of the prayer) is used instead of the form úcarer (version VI).
In line 9, the form úsahtienna (version V) is used instead of the form úsahtíenna (version VI), since the long í is likely a slip (VT43/23).
Tolkien did not provide an explicit translation, so the English text is from the common English translation of this prayer among Catholics. English words with no Quenya counterpart are in brackets.
Further discussion of the textual history can be found in the analysis of the individual phrases. My analysis largely follows that of the “Átaremma” section (VT43/8-26) of the “Words of Joy” article, though I also consulted Helge Fauskanger’s analysis of the prayer in his “Lord’s Prayer and Ave Maria” article.