danwaith

collective name. Danwaith

A Sindarin name of the Q. Nandor, sometimes also called Denwaith in association (or confusion) with their leader’s name Nan. Denweg (WJ/385). This name is a combination of dan “back again” and the lenited form of gwaith “people”, hence: “✱people [who go] back again”.

Conceptual Development: In Silmarillion drafts from the 1930s, this people was first called only the “Green-elves” (SM/133). Later Tolkien indicate that their name in their own languages was Danyar >> Danas, coined from the name of their leader Dan (LR/175). In the writing of the period, their name was often anglicized as “Danians” (LR/194). In The Etymologies, Tolkien said the name was derived from the root ᴹ√(N)DAN “back, backwards” (Ety/DAN), much like their later Sindarin and Quenya names.

In Silmarillion revisions from the 1950s, Tolkien used the name Danathrim alongside the anglicanized form “Danians” (MR/169). In his Quendi and Eldar essay from 1959-60 he used the name Danwaith, but by this period the name “Danian” had disappeared and Tolkien most frequently referred to them by their Quenya name: the Nandor.

danwaith

noun. the Nandor (a tribe of Elves)

denwaith

noun. the Nandor (a tribe of Elves), the people of Denwe

danwaith

nandor

(a tribe of Elves) Danwaith ("Dan-folk"), lenited Nanwaith (WJ:385). Also called, by confusion with the name of their leader Denwe, Denwaith (”People of Denwe”) (WJ:385)

danwaith

nandor

("Dan-folk"), lenited Nanwaith (WJ:385). Also called, by confusion with the name of their leader Denwe, Denwaith (”People of Denwe”) (WJ:385)

lindi

collective name. Nandor

Lindi

noun. Nandor

This is what the Nandor called themselves, a cognate of Quenya Lindar (Teleri) (WJ:385). The sg. is probably *lind, perhaps attested in the name Lindórinan. This form is stated to descend from the older clan-name Lindai (WJ:385), or at the oldest stage Lindâi (WJ:378). Lindâ was originally the name of a member of the Third Clan of the Elves, among the Eldar also called the Teleri; the Nandor came from this branch of the Eldarin peoples. In WJ:382, Lindâ is stated to be derived from a stem LIN, the primary reference of which is to "melodious or pleasing sound"; Lindâ, derived by medial fortification and adjectival -â, would seem to be in its origin an adjective, but later applied to the third clan of the Elves and eventually used as a noun. The reference was to their love of song (notice that Tolkien translated the name Lindórinan as "Vale of the Land of the Singers"; UT:253).

The Nandorin word Lindi alone in our small Green-elven corpus shows a direct descendant of the Primitive Quendian ending -î, while the sole other attested Nandorin plural is formed by umlaut: urc "Orc" pl. yrc. Perhaps the ending -i persisted in the case of words that had the stem-vowel i, since this vowel could not be changed by umlaut (being already identical to the vowel causing the umlaut so that no assimilation was possible); therefore, singular and plural would become identical if the plural ending -i had been dropped as in yrc. (It may not be necessary to invoke the simple "real-world" explanation that Tolkien's ideas about Nandorin had changed during the thirty years that separate the source that has yrc from the source that provides the word Lindi.)

Nandor

Nandor

Nandor is a Quenya name, meaning "Those who go back", apparently containing the element nan-.