I have had some guesses concernng the Tolkien's words:
Tolkien wrote that Westra lage wegas rehtas... was in "a very old form of Germanic; pre-runic" (HoMe V, p. 43) and "like very ancient form of Germanic" (HoMe IX, p. 243)
I have asked a specialist: Nelson Goering wrote to me:
These words can be found in two sources: in "The Lost Road" (HoMe V, p. 43) and "The Notion Club Papers" (HoMe IX, p. 243, 287, 304), in the form:»Westra lage wegas rehtas, nu isti sa wraithas«
In this last story Prof. Alwin Arundel Loudham, B.N.C. ("chiefly interested in Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic and Comparative Philology", p. 159) provides us also with the Old English version of this sentence:»westra lage wegas rehtas, wraikwas nu isti«
and with its translation: 'a straight way lay westward, now it is bent' (or like in The Lost Road: 'a straight road lay westward, now it is bent').»westerweg wæs rihtweg, wóh is núþa«,
Tolkien wrote that Westra lage wegas rehtas... was in "a very old form of Germanic; pre-runic" (HoMe V, p. 43) and "like very ancient form of Germanic" (HoMe IX, p. 243)
I have asked a specialist: Nelson Goering wrote to me:
It's basically Proto-Germanic (what Tolkien would have called Common Germanic or the like). It's really quite archaic. The final -e of lage and the -i of isti are Indo-European final vowels that have been lost in basically all Germanic dialects, even Early Runic (though the final -i's are in the process of being lost there). One odd thing is that he uses final -as where most people reconstruct *-az. So either Tolkien had opinions on this, or he was something so old that Verner's Law *-az had not yet become the universal form. So neither Old English, nor Ingvaeonic. In both of those varieties, for instance, the final -as's would have been entirely lost. In Ingvaeonic, I might go with something like *west lag weg reht, nu ist sa wraiþ, and in Mercian Old English this would be west læġ weġ reht, nu is se wrāþ (keeping the word order the same).
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It is how Karen W. Fonstad showed The Silmarillion's Earth in her atlas |
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The Straight Road |
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