Rhûnic Revealed
Note: This is the first in what I hope will be a long-running series of articles on topics, tentatively titled “Philology Fridays”, regarding Tolkien, his languages, historical languages, and philology. Most articles should be relatively brief, but some will be a bit longer, if the topic merits a long article (as I believe this one does). For my first article in this series I have decided to take a look at the Rhûnic language used in Season Two of The Rings of Power. Rhûnic is a language used in a Tolkien adaptation, but it is said to be based on a language developed by Tolkien himself, which unfortunately remains unpublished. Here I examine what we can glean about the language from what little information has been released publicly.
A (Not So) New Tolkien Language
Season Two of Prime Video’s The Lord of Rings: The Rings of Power introduced us to the lands of Rhûn—at least, to some portion of them. The portion we saw was quite barren and unable to sustain much life, so it is as yet uncertain how Rhûn could contribute much to Sauron’s armies. However, presumably Rhûn (which is merely the Sindarin word for the direction from which the sun rises) is much larger than what we have been able to witness so far.
Apart from the Stoors’ canyon and Tom Bombadil’s house, the most notable location in Rhûn is Caras Gaer, which is described as a shrine on the western border of Rhûn. This is the place where we encounter the Dark Wizard, his followers the mystics, and a handful of nomadic mercenaries he has hired, called the Gaudrim. The name Caras Gaer (“Fortress of Dread”) is Sindarin, as is the term Gaudrim (which may mean something like “The Machine Horde”). However, the Gaudrim themselves sometimes speak a language which in official sources is referred to as either Rhûnic or Rhûnnic (not to be confused with Runic, which is a name for several superficially similar writing systems—notably used for Germanic, Turkic, and Hungarian languages—as well as occasionally for a particular early Germanic dialect/language that was written in such characters). This Rhûnic language is spoken briefly in Episodes 2 and 8, and also sung in the soundtrack, particularly during the Rhûn theme.
Other Tolkien adaptations have used Sindarin, Quenya, Khuzdul, the Black Speech, and even Old English and Adûnaic. Rhûnic, however, was specially developed for The Rings of Power. Recently, series composer Bear McCreary made a post on his website concerning the music for Episode 2 of Season Two, and in his post he shed some light on this language:
For this series, we always strive to ensure that music sung by soloists or choirs communicates meaning in text that is relevant to the culture the music represents. So, what language would the music of Rhûn be sung in? Rhûn is a large, mostly unexplored area in Tolkien’s published works, left intentionally vague. Tolkien scholars working on our series dug through Tolkien’s unpublished notes and used them to build the foundation of a Rhûnic language, one that has never been heard before by fans. Helping to expand one of Tolkien’s lesser-known languages into a vibrant musical culture was a true honor.
What might this language be? Tolkien dabbled in many different languages, both historical and invented. Possibly Rhûnic is a language nobody knew about before some Tolkien scholars dug it up. However, I strongly suspect that Rhûnic is based on a little-known language Tolkien worked on nearly a century ago, in the 1930s, which he called Mágol, or Mágo. At one point Tolkien identified “Old Mágo” as the language of the children of Húrin. Later he considered making it an Orcish language, though he ultimately decided against it. However, he did use the Mágol word bolg, meaning “strong”, as the name of an Orc character in The Hobbit.
Ultimately, however, Tolkien seems to have stopped developing Mágol or attempting to fit it into his Legendarium. Whether he might ever have considered applying the language to the lands of Rhûn is a matter of conjecture. However, considering that he suddenly decided near the end of his life that the other two Wizards must have achieved some success in the East, it is conceivable that he was thinking of expanding their role, and hence would need a language to draw on for their adventures in the East.
Mágol is said to be reminiscent of Hungarian in both phonology and grammar. Hungarian is not an Indo-European language. It is one of the most well-known representatives of the Uralic language family, as is Finnish, a language Tolkien famously admired, and used as his primary inspiration for the phonology of Quenya.
Although it is a Western Siberian language in origin, the speakers of what became Hungarian lived near the steppes, and intermingled with nomadic peoples who spoke Iranian and Turkic languages, possibly including the Huns themselves. There is a tradition that the Hungarians descend from the Huns. Whatever the case may be, the Hungarians, or Magyars, followed a steppe nomad lifestyle for some centuries. After a civil war erupted around AD 830 in the Khazar khaganate, they moved westward. Attacks by the Turkic-speaking Pechenegs pushed them even further west, and they eventually settled in the Carpathian Basin (where present-day Hungary is located) about 895.
I am not a specialist in Hungarian, nor indeed in any Uralic language. Nevertheless, after comparing the phonology of Hungarian with the phonology of Rhûnic (as used in The Rings of Power), I am virtually certain that Rhûnic may be identified as an extension of Mágol, Tolkien’s Hungarian-based language. However, I suspected this to be so even before I heard a word of Rhûnic, so it may be a case of confirmation bias.
If not directly based on Mágol, Rhûnic may instead be an extrapolated mother, aunt, sister, or daughter language, created by applying regular sound changes. Of course, given that the material on Mágol is as yet unpublished, it is difficult to say how much of Rhûnic derives from Tolkien’s work, and how much had to be invented by linguists working for the show. I imagine the linguists needed to add much themselves for the purpose of dialog and song lyrics.
The Texts
Very little Rhûnic was actually used in Season Two of The Rings of Power. The largest text comes from the lyrics of the Rhûn theme from the soundtrack. Other texts are limited to one or two sentences.
1. “Rhûn” (Theme) – Bear McCreary
Rhûnic:
Fú nimžil, nimžil-feg,
aibesjar balan taugun.
Dunšig Lún,
ligrám lihiš bódi aišäd bil.
Dyúl hez ní, feč Šigór.
þabul nädo naþa-feg je.
dyúl gileg anže þurfeg jai.
Dyúl hez ní, feč Šigór.
gorul arkädfeg go,
þur če žilid-feg bil.
I Raib-aišäd.
English:
Under moonlight, moonlight thine,
Our sister carried far.
Dark Magic,
White wings beat in sacred shrine.
Command her, thou Istar.
Grant flesh to thy servant.
Bring her forth with your might.
Command her, thou Istar.
Rise from thy throne,
In thy power and splendor.
The border shrine.
2. “Sandstorm at the Well” (Soundtrack) – Bear McCreary
Rhûnic:
I lurg i bauvailun, j’aišäd i raibo.
English:
The threat unseen, the shrine at the border.
3. Episode 2: “Where the Stars are Strange” – Jason Cahill
In this episode the Gaudrim character named Kilta (Arkie Reece) had two untranslated lines in Rhûnic. One was when he apparently ordered his men to attack the Stranger and the two Harfoots at the well:
Pängul niganvil!
The other was an exclamation shortly thereafter when the Stranger conjured a sandstorm. Although the Rhûnic text was not given in the subtitles, I believe it can be deduced from the lyrics to the Rhûn theme:
Šigór!
4. Episode 8: “Shadow and Flame” – J.D. Payne & Patrick McKay
In this episode, after the death of the Gaudrim character named Brânk (Zates Atour), the Gaudrim Scout (Theo Spofforth) shouted in Rhûnic to the remaining Gaudrim:
Go! Go now!
Unfortunately, only the translation is given in the subtitles, rather than the Rhûnic.
Rhûnic Phonology
Vowels
Rhûnic uses the vowels a, e, i, o, u, and ä. The first five vowels seem to have values similar to those of languages such as Spanish, Italian, or Japanese. The vowel ä seems to be a low front vowel, similar to the a in English “happy”. Curiously, no rounded front vowels such as ö or ü—which exist in Hungarian—are attested, though this may be due simply to the small size of the corpus. The vowel ä does not exist in Hungarian orthography, but the sound does exist in some dialects as the pronunciation of the short e.
Also attested in the Rhûnic corpus are the accented vowels á, í, ó, and ú. Whether there are accented versions of e and ä cannot be determined from the corpus. I suspect that the acute accent used here indicates a long vowel. The character name Brânk uses a circumflex. Whether the two diacritics have different meanings is not clear. However, I suspect that they are simply different ways to mark the long vowel, and Brânk could just as well be written Bránk. On the other hand, the name also appears in the subtitles as Bränk, with a dieresis, which is certainly possible in Rhûnic phonology. In that case it would seem to be a (fronted) short vowel. Which sound was originally intended is not clear.
In addition to the plain (short?) and accented (long?) vowels, Rhûnic also contains the diphthongs ai and au. These are pronounced similarly to the vowel sounds of Modern English “mice” and “mouse”. Possibly there are other diphthongs that are unattested in this corpus.
Consonants
Rhûnic contains the labial (bilabial and labiodental) consonants p, b, m, f, and v; the dental (or alveolar? and interdental) consonants t, d, n, and þ; the velar consonants k, g, and possibly h; the liquids l and r, the sibilant consonants s, z, š, ž, č, and (I think) j.
Most consonants may probably be pronounced as in English. The letter þ is pronounced as English “th” in “thorn”. If h is a velar fricative (like the ch in German Bach), it may represent the same sound as the kh in Khamûl and/or Khand. The former is the name of a Ringwraith also identified as “the Shadow of the East”, and the latter is the name of a realm to the east of Mordor. Otherwise, the h may be a glottal fricative, as in English hat. The r seems to be an alveolar flap, or perhaps a brief trill, not an approximant as it is in standard dialects of English.
The letters š, ž, and č are pronounced like sh, zh, and ch would conventionally be pronounced in English. (Although the sequence zh does not commonly occur in English, the sound occurs in some words such as “azure”, “vision”, the pronunciation of “garage” in some dialects, and in the hypercorrect pronunciation of “Beijing”.)
From my own listening, I am still uncertain if the Rhûnic j is an approximant (also known as a semivowel or glide), like the j in the Scandinavian name Bjorn, or an affricate, like the consonant sound in the English word “judge”. It seems to me that it varies between the two, but I suspect I am just hearing wrong. I believe the sequence sj, as in aibesjar, is merely the coincidence of s + j (however it may be pronounced), and not meant to represent a single consonant sound.
Rhûnic does also contain the letter y. This seems to have a pronunciation similar to English, in which case it would seem not to make sense for the Rhûnic j to represent the same sound. However, Hungarian also has a y, but j is normally used to represent the same sound as English y. In Hungarian the y only occurs in the context of palatal consonants such as gy, ty, ly, and ny. In Rhûnic the y only occurs in the context of dy, at least in the corpus we have. I suspect then that dy is a voiced palatal stop pretty much identical to Hungarian gy.
I believe other consonant combinations should be pronounced as written. Even the n in the combination ng seems not to be velarized to ŋ.
A Rhûnic Lexicon
The following table contains a lexicon of all known Rhûnic words from the existing corpus. The order is alphabetical, with þ coming after t. The corpus is not comprehensive enough to require me to decide whether to group a and ä, and d and dy, together, or to list ä after a, and dy after d (assuming there would be any Rhûnic words containing the sequence dz).
If several meanings are listed, the first meaning is the one I think most likely. In the case of words such as nimžil-feg and þurfeg, where feg is clearly a suffix, I list the word and the suffix separately. In some cases, where I discern a likely root word, I also list the possible root word separately, preceded by an asterisk.
| Rhûnic word | Possible meaning(s) |
|---|---|
| aibesjar | our sister (? or carried, or far; if “our sister”, then possibly jar means “our”) |
| aišäd | shrine (sacred shrine?) |
| anže | forth (? or bring) |
| arkäd | throne |
| balan | far (? or carried, or our sister) |
| bil | in |
| bauvailun | unseen (? or threat) |
| bódi | sacred (? or beat) |
| če | and |
| dunšig | magic (? or dark magic) |
| dyúl | her (? or you, or some word indicating a command) |
| feč | thou |
| feg | thy/thine/your (genitive case of feč) |
| fú | under |
| gileg | bring (? or forth) |
| go | from |
| gorul | rise |
| hez | command (?) |
| i | the |
| j’ | ? (a prefix, possibly from je “to” or i “the”) |
| jai | with |
| je | to |
| ligrám | wings (? or white, or white wings, or beat) |
| lihiš | white (? or wings, or white wings, or beat) |
| lún | dark |
| lurg | threat (? or unseen) |
| naþa | servant |
| nädo | flesh (? or grant) |
| ní | command (?) |
| niganvil | ? (likely a noun or noun phrase, possibly including a prepositional suffix) |
| *nim | root word relating to moon (? or light) |
| nimžil | moonlight |
| pängul | ? (probably a verb in imperative form) |
| raib | border (either normal form or shortened form for use in a compound) |
| raibo | border (either normal form, or a marked noun declension, or perhaps containing a prepositional suffix -o, meaning “at”) |
| *šig | root word relating to magic |
| šigór | Istar, wizard |
| taugun | carried (? or far, or our sister) |
| þabul | grant (? or flesh) |
| þur | power, might |
| *žil | root word relating to light (? or moon) |
| žilid | splendor |
Given that nimžil means “moonlight” and žilid means “splendor”, I think it is likely that *žil is a root word meaning “light”, or something similar. In which case, nim would mean “moon”. Also, given that dunšig means “magic” (or “dark magic”?), and šigór means “Istar”, or “wizard”, I think it is likely that *šig is a root word with a meaning related to magic.
Rhûnic Grammar
Given the small size of the corpus, few conclusions may be drawn about the grammar of Rhûnic that are not highly speculative. Regarding the syntax, the most notable feature is that genitive pronouns and prepositions seem to follow the nouns. For example, þur is translated as “power” and þurfeg as “your might”. Therefore in the word aibesjar (“our sister”), it is possible that *-jar is a genitive pronoun suffix meaning “our”, and *aibes means “sister”. Also, bil appears to mean “in”, and it occurs at the end of the sentence in ligrám lihiš bódi aišäd bil, and in þur če žilid-feg bil. That is to say, it seems that in Rhûnic the prepositions are actually postpositions.
In Hungarian, Finnish, and several other Uralic languages, stress is usually on the first syllable. In Rhûnic, on the other hand, stress is often on a subsequent syllable. For example, in niganvil, stress is on the second syllable. Possibly the word contains an unstressed prefix *ni-, but more likely Rhûnic simply has a different stress pattern than Hungarian. Many other words apparently have stress on a syllable other than the first, although possibly the fact that most of the available text is sung interferes with the “natural” stress pattern.
Speaking of niganvil and affixes, given that Rhûnic contains postpositions, it seems possible that *-vil could be a mutated form of the word bil, which apparently means “in”. However, it is just one data point, and the meaning of niganvil is not even certain, except that it appears to be a noun or noun phrase.
Another affix is the j’- in j’aišäd. The word aišäd means “shrine”, or possibly “sacred shrine”. My best guess is that j’- is either a preposition or a definite article. Possibly it is a shortened form of je (“to”), here used with the meaning “at”. However, as mentioned above, prepositions are usually postpositions, so this would be an exception. Another possibility is that j’aišäd is a contraction of i aišäd (“the shrine”), with the vowel i becoming a semivowel (like English “y”), and then possibly eventually becoming an affricate (like English “j”). A third possibility is that j’- is a noun case marker, although arguably declined nouns and prepositional phrases are two different ways at looking at the same thing.
Other possible nominal or prepositional suffixes include *-äd, *-id, and *-o. The first occurs in the words aišäd (“shrine”) and arkäd (“throne”). Possibly it is a marker indicating a structure or location, or possibly it is just a coincidence. The second suffix occurs in žilid (“splendor”). Given that nimžil means “moonlight”, it seems likely that *žil has a meaning related to light, or possibly the moon, and therefore *-id must be a suffix of some kind, albeit one that doesn’t significantly change the meaning. Other possibilities are that *-äd and *-id are variants of the same suffix, or that they consist of two suffixes, the second of which in both cases is *-d.
The suffix *-o is found in raibo, which either means “border” or “at the border”. If the latter, *-o is a preposition meaning “at”, and therefore j’- probably means “the” instead of “at”. Or *-o may be a case marker or some other nominal ending. Or raibo may be the normal form, and raib (in raib-aišäd, “border shrine”) is a shortened form used in compounds.
Two verbal suffixes seem likely. Given that taugun probably means “carried”, and bauvailun probably means “unseen”, it seems likely that *-un is a participial suffix. Also, several apparent verbs end in *-ul: þabul, gorul, pängul. Thus, *-ul seems to be a suffix indicating a verb, likely an imperative verb.
It is also worth noting that the second person pronoun apparently has at least two forms: feč, which is translated as “thou”, and feg, which is translated as “thy”, “thine”, or “your”. This would seem to be a distinction between the nominative (or really, the vocative) case and the genitive case. I am unaware of any stronger evidence for case distinctions in Rhûnic.
Like many Eurasian languages, Hungarian is classified as an agglutinative language. In an agglutinative language, grammar is typically expressed by means of affixes attached to root words (particularly verbs and nouns), with each affix expressing a single grammatical function. In Hungarian these are usually suffixes. Also, in Hungarian, prepositions typically follow the noun; hence, they are postpositions. Word order is relatively flexible, but is used to express different shades of meaning. It is used to show emphasis, just as in English unusually heavy stress on a word is used to show emphasis. Although relatively little is known about Rhûnic grammar, it does seem to be consistent with this description of Hungarian grammar.
Possible Borrowings
According to Patrick H. Wynne, Mágo (the earlier form of the language) resembles Adûnaic, whereas the later Mágol resembles Hungarian both in phonology and grammatical structure. Both forms also showed Elvish influence. I have hitherto attempted to consider Rhûnic in isolation. However, as Tolkien’s languages often influenced each other, it may be useful to compare Rhûnic with known Tolkienian languages, with the caveat that any similarity may be coincidental. For this section I would like to thank Narû from the Fellowship of Fans Discord server. These correlations are his work:
| Rhûnic word | Possible source |
|---|---|
| nimžil | from Adûnaic nimir (“to shine”), plus žil from Quenya isil (“moon”; “silver/white sheen”), or possibly Sindarin gil (“star”; “spark”) |
| Šigór | from Adûnaic zigûr (“wizard”) |
| arkäd | from Quenya arcanwa (“throne”) |
| aišäd | from Quenya ainas (“hallow”, “fane”, “holy place”, “sanctuary”) |
| Raib | from Noldorin rhain (“border”) |
| balan | from Quenya palan (“far”) |
| þur | from Quenya túrë (“might”, “strength”, “power”, “mastery”, “victory”) |
| Lún | from Quenya lóna (“dark”) |
| hez | from Middle Primitive Elvish khes (“command”) |
Of these, Šigór seems to be the most obvious. Even before Bear McCreary’s blog post, sharp-eared Rings of Power fans noticed that Kilta’s exclamation in Episode 2 sounded a lot like the Adûnaic word zigûr, which just happens to mean “wizard”. The rest seem somewhat plausible, although I would still gloss nim as “moon” and žil as “light” without stronger evidence that they are borrowings.
Is That All?
This may not be the most thorough examination possible of the Rhûnic language. However, given the relative paucity of examples of Rhûnic, I am doubtful that there is much more that can be gleaned from it. Then again, a specialist in Finno-Ugric language may be able to notice some things I haven’t.
A faithful transcription of the Gaudrim Scout’s dialog in Episode 8 would be marginally helpful. Perhaps Season Three will have more Rhûnic examples from which to deduce the grammar of the language. More useful would be behind-the-scenes notes from the linguist(s) employed in developing Rhûnic.
Also useful would be a scholarly article on Mágol (or whatever Tolkienian language was used as the basis for Rhûnic). Although many of Tolkien’s writings related to his Legendarium and his invented languages have been published, there still remain a few writings that are known of among Tolkien scholars, yet remain unpublished. Among them are his notes on such obscure languages as Taliska and Mágol. I hope these are forthcoming.
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