(”daughter of twilight”, a poetic kenning) (i** dinúviel, o thinúviel), pl. ?tinúvil (i** thinúvil), coll. pl. tinúviellath** **(MR:373, WJ:62)
Sindarin
tinúviel
feminine name. Nightingale, (lit.) Daughter of Twilight
tinúviel
nightingale
le linnon im tinúviel
*to thee I sing, I, Tinúviel
The fifth phrase of Lúthien’s Song (LB/354). Three translations of this phrase are:
Patrick Wynne: “✱to thee I sing, I, the Nightingale” (NTTLS/11)
David Salo: “✱I sing to you, I, Nightingale” (GS/211)
Bertrand Bellet and Benjamin Babut: “✱to thee I sing, Tinúviel myself” (GTLC)
The first word is the 2nd-person-polite pronoun le “thee”, with its use as the indirect object “to thee” implied by its position before the verb, as suggested by Wynne and Salo (NTTLS/10, GS/213). The second word linnon “I sing” is the present 1st-person-singular form of the verb linna- “to sing”. The third word is the first person or reflexive pronoun im “I, myself”. The last word Tinúviel is the other name of the speaker, Lúthien, usually translated “Nightingale”.
The name that Beren gave to Lúthien, translated “Nightingale”, more literally “Daughter of Twilight” (S/165), a derivation of the primitive form ✶Tindōmiselde (PE19/73). It is essentially a combination of tinnu “twilight” and the suffix -iel, except that the archaic final -v lost in tinnu was preserved in the compound.
Conceptual Development: This name first appeared as G. Tynwfiel in the earliest Lost Tales, probably a Welsh-like spelling of the name, but this was revised to Tinúviel (LT2/41), the form Tolkien more or less retained thereafter. The translation “Nightingale” for ᴱN. Tinúviel emerged in the Lays of Beleriand from the 1920s (LB/153). In The Etymologies from the 1930s, N. Tinúviel had the same derivation as given above (Ety/SEL-D, TIN).