Words and Names in Tolkien's Work

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I understand now, Lalwendë. It's always worth kicking these things off with a caveat or disclaimer of some sort, though. My arguments below should be taken as light-hearted musing.

I like þing, and in the place-names you mentioned we can see the effect on it of interaction between speakers of Norse and Celtic languages in Scotland and the North of England. It's in the mouths of speakers of Gaelic that þ becomes d, so the place-names preserve an idea of the cosmopolitan society, particularly of the North-West of England and southern Scotland in the early-medieval period. In the place-names you mentioned, the wall comes from Old Norse vǫllr: 'field', so that Dingwall is 'the field of the assembly'.

In the cultures that spoke Old Norse, the Thing was more than a political assembly: it was also a legal, mercantile and social event, often the only time that certain families would see one another before it was next held. The Icelandic Alþing was a great annual event, at which the Lawspeaker would recite from memory the laws of Iceland (Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda, was once Lawspeaker to the Althing). Legal cases were argued and judged, business was done and marriages and other social arrangements made. Any changes to the law were also discussed by senior figures. It's probable that there was also a religious element to the Althing before the advent of Christianity, and there is an account in Njals Saga of the period of crisis when the new faith was discussed there.

A thing, then, is more than a regional assembly in today's language; and in Iceland the Althing, with its courts and legal experts, stood in place of a king. It is a well-known story that Edward I once held a parliament under the Parliament Oak at Clipston in Sherwood Forest in 1282, and this is a perfect illustration of the idea that all that was required for a parliament was the presence of the king and his chief nobles at a given place. Returning to Thingwall, then: what if we regard Thingol's name as a corruption of Þingvǫllr? Being King of Doriath, he is the focal point of an assembly and therefore the field or place of the Thing. If we were inclined to translate his name using medieval languages, we could call it an oblique way of describing his central place in the lives of the Sindar of Doriath.

Teleporno, as I said, has a Greek form, and could be taken to be formed from telē-: 'far off, at a distance', and pornē: 'a prostitute' (this is the first element in pornography: lit. 'writing about prostitutes'). Analysing this meaning demonstrates quite neatly why this must have been a coincidence, although Tolkien surely knew enough Greek to realise how the name could be interpreted. It is, of course, the Telerin form of Celeborn, the name of Galadriel's consort. I don't think I need fill in the somewhat coarse direction my thoughts took after those realisations.