"There is my home! ... Sharbhund we called it, before the
Elves changed all the names."
Words of
Mîmfrom
Unfinished Tales Part One II
Narn i Hîn Húrin
The tall, lonely hill that rose out of the plains south of the Forest of Brethil was known in Elvish as Amon Rûdh, the Bald Hill. To the Petty-dwarves who settled there, and dwelt in the secret halls of Bar-en-Nibin-noeg, it had another, older name. In their own tongue they called the hill Sharbhund.
Notes
1 |
The consonant represented by bh is unique to this word, and its intended pronunciation is nowhere explained. It may be that the simple and natural pronunciation sha'rbhund is the correct one. Following the model of Tolkien's use of dh, however, bh may represent a 'bilabial fricative', a sound rather similar to 'v' or 'f' (depending on whether it is 'voiced' or not). Assuming this speculation is correct, we have no way of knowing whether Tolkien intended the sound to be voiced, so the name Sharbhund could be pronounced (approximately) as either 'Sha'rvund' or 'Sha'rfund'.
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2 |
We have almost no resources to help translate the name Sharbhund, but it may be noted that the Elvish names for features that had earlier Dwarvish names did tend to mirror the meanings of those names (as, notably, for the Mountains of Moria), so we might assume that the name had some connection to the Elvish Amon Rûdh, 'Bald Hill'. We also have a note (in volume VII of The History of Middle-earth) in which Tolkien tentatively translated the Khuzdul element BND as ' "head" or something similar'. Neither of these points is remotely conclusive, but taken together they suggest an interpretation of Sharbhund as something like 'bald head'.
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- Updated 19 April 2023
- Updates planned: 1
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