Lord Of The Rings Name Generator

Every name you know is a translation

Tolkien did not write a novel. He wrote, as far as he was concerned, a translation.

The conceit runs through everything. The story comes to us from an old manuscript, the Red Book of Westmarch, written by hobbits, in their own tongue. That tongue is the Common Speech, which Tolkien calls Westron. And Tolkien himself is nothing more than the modern scholar who found the book and rendered it into English.

He explains the whole thing in an appendix, under the heading of translation, at the back of the book, where almost nobody reads it.

Which has an extraordinary consequence that most readers never register. If the book is a translation, then the names in it are translations too.

Every English-sounding name in the Shire is Tolkien's rendering of something else.

Frodo's name is not Frodo

In the language the hobbits actually spoke, he was called Maura.

The element maur- meant wise or experienced. So Tolkien needed an English name that carried the same sense and had the same antique feel, and he reached for Frodo, a genuine Germanic name that happens to mean roughly the same thing. The translation is not a substitution. It is a translation.

It goes further, and it is beautiful.

Baggins is his rendering of Labingi, from the Westron word labin, meaning bag. Bag End was Labin-nec. Bilbo was Bilba.

Sam is Banazîr, which meant half-wise, or simple. Tolkien turned that into Samwise, which is the same joke in English, and then let everybody shorten it to Sam without noticing they were calling him half-witted.

And Pippin was Razanur, a traveller or a stranger, which Tolkien translated as Peregrin, a word that means exactly that. His short name was Razal, which meant a small red apple. So he made it Pippin.

A pippin is a small red apple.

He built a joke in an invented language and then translated the joke.

The lie he told to explain the dwarves

Now, why would anybody go to this much trouble?

Part of the answer is that Tolkien had a problem, and it was one he had made for himself years earlier.

When he wrote The Hobbit he had taken the names of his dwarves straight out of a medieval Icelandic poem. Thorin, Dwalin, Bifur, Bofur, Dori, Nori, Ori, and the rest sit in a list in the Old Norse Völuspá. It was a philologist's private joke, and it was never meant to be defended.

But now there was a serious book attached, with its own languages, and a lot of Norse names standing in the middle of it with no explanation whatsoever.

The translation conceit solves it perfectly. The dwarves do not have Norse names. They have secret names in their own language, which they never tell anybody, and the names we know are outer names rendered into a human tongue. Christopher Tolkien said as much: the conceit cleared up the problem left over from The Hobbit of why the dwarves had Norse names.

It is an enormous piece of scaffolding, built after the fact, to justify a borrowing. And it produced one of the most complete invented worlds anybody has ever made. There is more about where those dwarf names actually came from on the dwarf name generator.

Man, Elf, Ainur

The names in this generator carry a tag, and the tags are not decoration. They are the actual architecture of the world, and each one implies a different naming system.

Man means the names behave like human names, because that is what they are. Aragorn has a father, a lineage and a number after his name, exactly like a king in a real chronicle.

Elf means the name is built out of a constructed language with real grammar, where the parts mean things. These are not phonetic guesses. They are compounds, and someone could parse them.

Ainur is the strange one. These are the powers who existed before the world, and their names are not translated at all. Manwë, Ulmo, Aulë, Oromë. Nobody has rendered them into English, because there is nobody older to render them for.

That is the tell. The further back you go, the less translated the name is. Tolkien built a world where the antiquity of a being is audible in how foreign its name sounds.

What to do with these

These are Tolkien's characters, not invented names, and they belong to him and to his estate. The generator is a way to wander through them.

So use it as a reference, a memory jog, a way to settle an argument, or a starting point for a fan story or a game running on somebody's kitchen table.

If you want a name of your own in this style, the lesson is not to copy the sounds. It is to decide, before you write anything, which language your reader is hearing, and whether they are hearing it directly or through somebody else's translation.

That single decision is what makes Middle-earth feel four thousand years deep.

How this list was compiled

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, drawn from across the legendarium and tagged by kindred. One is chosen at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere. This is an unofficial fan tool with no connection to the Tolkien Estate or its licensees.

Questions people ask about Tolkien's names

What was Frodo's real name?

Maura, in the hobbits' own speech. The element meant wise. Tolkien chose Frodo as its English translation because it is a real Germanic name with much the same meaning, and it sounded suitably old.

Is Baggins a translation too?

Yes. The Westron was Labingi, built on the word for a bag. Bag End was Labin-nec. Tolkien translated the pun rather than the sound.

Why is Pippin called Pippin?

Because his short name in the original meant a small red apple. Tolkien found an English word that also means a small red apple, and used it. The full name, Peregrin, translates a Westron word meaning traveller.

Why do the dwarves have Norse names?

Because Tolkien lifted them from a real Old Norse poem before the larger world existed. The translation conceit was built afterwards, and it explains that these are outer names rendered into a familiar tongue, while the dwarves' true names stayed private.

Why are names like Manwë and Ulmo not translated?

Because there was no earlier language to translate them from. The Ainur come before the world does. The deeper into the past a name sits, the less it has been rendered, and the stranger it sounds.

References

1. The Appendix on Languages. Tolkien Gateway. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Appendix_on_Languages
2. Völuspá. Tolkien Gateway. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Völuspá