Linguistic puns, riddles, and jokes in LotR, etc.

[littlemanpoet]

Rina:

That is really interesting about the Eldar/El-bar. And that explains the rather cryptic story in Genesis -- they were elves of course!

Well, it's not really quite that simple. One must deal with the question, "is there any real correlation between a Hebrew word-pair and a Germanic word? Is there any proof that the primordial Germanic word came from a Hebrew word? I suppose that depends on the linguistic prevalence of "El" as being equated with 'godhood'; I don't know the answer to that one.

Just as interesting to me is the similarity between "Deus" and "Zeus", but that's only tenuously related to the topic of this thread, I suppose.