Mae govannen, mellon!

So, earlier this morning I was working on some writing/world-building and was doing some research on snowy mountain villages. I had remembered some shots of the Swiss Alpine village from the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and thought I’d find out where the movie was filmed. Such googling brought me to learn that the evil-guy base in that film lies on the top of the Schilthorn, which overlooks the Lauterbrunnen valley and its collection of villages.

I had recognized this name and the image of the valley from earlier searches about the origins of Tolkien’s works. It has long been posited that Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland was the inspiration for Rivendell in Middle-Earth. He had traveled there in 1911, and wrote years later in a letter to his son Michael:

“I am… delighted that you have made the acquaintance of Switzerland, and of the very part that I once knew best and which had the deepest effect on me. The hobbit’s journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods, is based on my adventures in 1911… Our wanderings mainly on foot in a party of 12 are not now clear in sequence, but leave many vivid pictures as clear as yesterday.”

To further drive this home, here is Tolkein’s rendition of Rivendell next to an image of Lauterbrunnen:

But just in case we needed more proof, I have some linguistics to back up this claim!

Lauterbrunnen is made up of two German words. “Laut”, which means “loud” and “brunnen”, which means “fountain”, “well”, or “spring”. So Lauterbrunnen means “loud-fountain”, “loud-well”, or “loud-spring”. I couldn’t help but notice that “brunnen” sounded an awful lot like “Bruinen”, the river that hugs right up close to Rivendell in Middle-Earth. It is in fact the fords of the River Bruinen where the Black Riders are washed away by those horse-shaped rushes of water.

Going deeper, I couldn’t help but wonder what “Bruinen” meant in Tolkien’s works. Surely, it would have some sort of translation from one of his languages. After some research and reviewing the text, whattya know, “Bruinen” it means “Loudwater”. Extremely similar to the translation for “Lauterbrunnen.” What a linguistic homage!

Doing a Control+F of “Loudwater” on the text of The Fellowship of the Ring shows that it is mentioned five times in the text. Here is the clearest indication they are the same river:

“What is that other river we can see far away there?’ asked Merry.

”That is Loudwater, the Bruinen of Rivendell,” answered Strider. “The Road runs along the edge of the hills for many miles from the Bridge to the Ford of Bruinen. But I have not yet thought how we shall cross that water.”

“Nen” can be found in other water-based Middle-Earth locations, like the lakes Nen Hithoel and Sea of Núrnen? As to whether this “nen” meaning “water” came first, and it was a happy coincidence that “Brunnen” had “nen” in there already, or if that came first and Tolkien decided to use “nen” for multiple water locations, who can say? Maybe a Tolkien linguist could help me out here!

Either way, couldn’t ignore this little linguistic homage and thought I would share. Happy reading!