UW grad student provides translations for Lord of the Rings movies
9:57 PM 1/18/03

when the elves call David Salo, they generally use the phone or e-mail.

OK, they're not really elves, just the writers for actors who play elves in the movies.

But with the third installment of Lord of the Rings entering its final production stages, Salo is quite sure the phone will begin ringing again with questions on Elvish grammar and pronunciation.

Salo, 33, is a UW-Madison doctoral candidate in linguistics, but more importantly, at least to movie fans, he's probably the world's leading expert on Sindarin and Queen, the Elvish languages author J.R.R. Tolkien invented as part of the extensive mythology underlying the trilogy.

For nearly four years, Salo has served as the official translator to the Lord of the Rings movie writers. He hasn't caused as many children's nightmares as the fiery Balrog or set as many female hearts afire as Aragorn, but his linguistic marks are all over the films.

When the fearsome Balrog arises from the depths of the mines of Moria, the scary music in the background is a song Salo translated into Dwarvish (another of Tolkien's languages) warning that the beast approaches.

"It's actually sung by a chorus of 150 Maori," Salo said. And the hot human-elf love scene between Aragorn (actor Viggo Mortensen) and Arwen (actress Liv Tyler)?

Salo came up with the Elvish dialogue:

Arwen: "Renich i l i erui govannem?" (Do you remember the time when we first met?)

Aragorn: "Nauthannen i ned l reniannen." (I thought I had strayed into a dream.)

"I asked them, 'So, you want some lovey-dovey stuff between Arwen and Aragorn?' " said Salo, who, like other Tolkien purists, points out that the love story between the two actually is recounted in one of Tolkien's appendices to the trilogy.

In other places, Salo's writing is visible. He wrote the inscription that glows on Frodo's sword whenever the evil orcs are near. He researched not only the grammar of the inscription, but also the probable mythological history of the sword, which first appears in the book, The Hobbit.

"Maegnus is my name, I am the spiders' bane," is the English translation of the runes that appear on the movie sword.

Salo also translated into Dwarvish, or Khuzdul, the runic inscriptions that appear on the walls of Moria, the dwarf stronghold inside the mountains. For Salo, working on the movie presented a multi-level challenge: the language needed to be firmly based on Tolkien's creations, to satisfy the purists and director Peter Jackson, who went to great lengths to keep the movies faithful to the original work. But the language also needed to communicate with non-readers.

"My goal was for people who had no knowledge of Tolkien to have an appreciation of the sounds of the languages," Salo said.

Thus, said Salo, Quenya, the formal Elvish, used in proclamations such as Galadriel's farewell and in official histories, should sound noble and sonorous, while common spoken Elvish, or Sindarin, should sound "romantic, Celtic."

Salo also had to invent quite a bit of language for the orcs, who are on the screen during the extensive battle scenes in "The Two Towers." But while his goal was to make the orcs sound "nasty and brutish," he also made sure their language adhered to linguistic rules.

"I actually had to create quite a bit of Orkish grammar," he said.

Salo's interest in languages started early. He grew up in New Jersey and New York, the son of two anthropologists. He still has the copy of Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories" that he poured over as a boy; in the margins are penciled notes where he deciphered the meaning of runes found in the illustrations.

He read Tolkien as a boy, and began his fascination with the languages and myths underlying the stories. After graduating with degrees in Latin and Greek from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., Salo moved to Madison with his wife, Dorothea, also a linguist.

During the seven years between undergraduate and graduate school, Salo worked in his spare time to develop an understanding of Tolkien's languages. In those days, he had a contract to write background materials for a role-playing game based on Lord of the Rings. As a result of his study of Tolkien languages, he's written a 300-plus page grammar of the Sindarin language - which traces origins and variations of words - that he hopes to publish someday.

He's made study trips to Marquette University in Milwaukee, which houses the Tolkien archives, and has become expert enough that he can point out where Tolkien made mistakes writing in his own invented languages.

"Just because you invented the language doesn't mean you're the best at writing it out," he said.

None of this will help Salo much in his quest for his doctoral degree - for that, he's making a study of Tocharian, a language spoken in medieval China. He said his professors probably aren't as impressed by his Lord of the Rings work as they would be by papers published in academic journals.

Meanwhile, as a new semester begins, he's awaiting those phone calls as the production company works on the soundtrack for the "Return of the King."

"It's not unlike any other translating job," Salo said, "except I have the luxury of not having a bunch of native speakers out there to criticize me."

Susan Lampert Smith writes about the people and places that make Wisconsin unique. Send her story ideas at ssmith@madison.com or to Wisconsin State Journal, P.O. Box 8058, Madison, WI 53708.