Notes and Documents A Note on the Sindarin Translation of the Name Daisy

An eye in a blue faceSaw an eye in a green face."That eye is like to this eye"Said the first eye,"But in low placeNot in high place."

(H, v, 122).

The answer to this riddle from The Hobbit is "sun on the daisies." The "eye in a blue face" refers to the sun in the blue sky, while the "eye in a green face" is a flower in a field. But although Gollum's answer seems obvious, in retrospect the choice of "daisy" out of all the possible flowers in the world reveals surprising insights about Tolkien's thought processes and inspirations.

The riddle, as Yvette Kisor points out, depends on the etymology of the word "daisy" (Kisor, 569–70), which, as Douglas Anderson notes (H, v, 122, n. 16), is derived from Old English "dœġes ēaġe, 'day's eye'; so named from its covering the yellow disk in the evening and disclosing it in the morning" (Onions 242).¹ The word "daisy"² is thus a particularly fitting choice for the riddle's solution, considering that it connotes two parallel images: the image of a bright object against a monochromatic background, and the metaphorical interpretations of an eye in a face. One of the odd things about this riddle is that it refers to the eye in a green face as singular, but the answer is sun on the daisies—plural. Readers who try to figure out the answer before reading Gollum's solution (very difficult to do, as the answer is located only a few lines down the page) would seem to be more likely to guess "sun on a flower" than "sun on a particular species of flower."³ Even if they did manage to guess "daisy," it seems unlikely they would pluralize the answer, considering the fact that the riddle presents "an eye" as singular.⁴ There is more significance to this detail than there might appear to be.

Bilbo's riddle appears to be Tolkien's earliest published reference to a daisy; perhaps his last appears in Sauron Defeated, volume IX of The History of Middle-earth. In this volume, Christopher Tolkien prints drafts of an epilogue for The Lord of the Rings that his father wrote and rejected in 1950 or 1951.⁵ This short text, which tells of Sam's life in the Shire after Frodo's departure from Middle-earth, includes the "King's Letter," an invitation to Sam Gamgee and his family to meet Aragorn and Arwen by the shores of Lake Evendim. Tolkien wrote two copies of the letter: one in English and the other in Sindarin, and the names of Sam's children appear in both texts, so we can match these names in English with their translations in Sindarin. Most interesting, for our purposes, is the Sindarin name of Sam's fourth daughter: Arien. In English her name is given as Daisy (Sauron 117, 441). This translation may be surprising to readers who are familiar with The Silmarillion, in which Arien is the name of the Maia who guides the vessel of the sun through the sky and tends "the golden flowers in the gardens of Vána…" (S 99). Her name is closely associated with the sun. Indeed, the name Arien means "Maiden of the Sun" in Sindarin and is derived, Tolkien says, from the same root as the Quenya word áre, which means sunlight.⁶ According to the Etymologies found in The Lost Road and Other Writings, Quenya words are 'day' and arin 'morning,' as well as Noldorin ar-, are all derived from the root AR-, meaning 'day' (Lost Road 349).

The name Arien is not a direct translation of Daisy, however, as the Epilogue might lead us to believe: rather, the Sindarin name is related to daisy's metaphorical meaning. Daisy refers directly to a flower, etymologically to the "day's eye," and, at the level of secondary metaphor, to the sun. Arien refers to a particular character related to the sun in the Silmarillion mythos. It may...