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Orcish Landscape (new) |
Scottish Gaelic
References, Din Eidyn,
Tolkien wrote a letter confirming to his own surprise that the origins of the word ‘Nazgul’ (the ‘Ringwraiths’, ‘The Black Riders’ ) must have been the Scottish Gaelic ‘nasg’. The Scottish Gaelic for ‘ring’ is ‘nasg’; and the word ‘wraith’ is from both the Gaelic and Old English meaning ‘to writhe’. Tolkien wrote that he had not consciously used the Gaelic words, but that the Gaelic origins of the word “nasg” may have ‘become lodged in some corner of my linguistic memory’.
One of Aragorn’s names was the Dúnedain Ranger . Dúnedain is very similar to the Gaelic name Dun Eideann which was the capital of the old kingdom of Gododdin situated in the eastern part of what is now the Scottish Border and included Berwick. Its name changed to Din Eidyn, then Dunedin then Edinburgh. In New Zealand, Scots émigrés named their town Dunedin, after Edinburgh.
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