rename notice

[calimac]

My friend mneme just renamed his LJ. His preferred handle had been taken by an earlier user who wrote a single post and then disappeared, but now that account has been purged.

I'm in exactly the same situation. My original intent and always preferred desire was to be kalimac, but that too had been taken by someone who wrote a single post and then disappeared. When signing up, on the fly I went for an altered spelling "calimac", but I never liked it, not least because people thought it had something to do with California.

So I checked and, sure enough, now at last my long-gone squatter has also been purged, so I've changed myself. The wrong spelling redirects to the right one, but I don't know for how long, so if you have any external links or bookmarks directly to my LJ, you might want to change them.

I picked it as my obscure tribute to the Tolkien character I most identify with, Merry Brandybuck. (And that's the one in the book, not the one in the stupid moooovie, OK?) He's a stuffy little pedant with a passion for esoteric historical and geographic knowledge who doesn't know when to shut up about it, and spends his time at Rivendell studying maps instead of enjoying the scenery or hobnobbing with the Elves. That's me.

When I first needed a non-realname handle for online bulletin boards, I used Meriadoc, Merry's formal name. The problems with that were that it was often already being used by somebody else, and that whenever I used it, other commenters would fall over themselves telling me that they got the reference.

This became tiresome. I needed something more obscure.

Deep in his appendices, Tolkien tells us that Meriadoc (which is actually a medieval Welsh name) was a "translated" name in his text, the same way that his characters didn't "really" speak English, and that the "actual" name was Kalimac.

I'd actually used Kalimac as a cognomen before - it was the name, for instance, of my fannish press, the serial number for all my printed zines - so when I joined LJ I determined to use it again, only to find myself blocked. No longer.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on being able to claim your own at last.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

Congrats on finally getting to use your alias of choice on LJ! Also, my hat is off to you for going deep into the Tolkien appendices - I've wanted to do that, in sort of a "wouldn't that be interesting?" sort of way, but never had the patience to actually sit down and do it.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The appendices are seriously interesting and parts of them are utterly wonderful.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I'll get to them eventually - I bounced off Fellowship about half a dozen times before making it through, and I've bounced off The Silmarillion twice so far.

By the way, it's good to see you around - I'd been wondering how you'd been in the days since Mutations.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I post fairly regularly over at my own lj; I don't cover all the minutiae of life but I mention major things like moving. Moving to a new apartment was probably our biggest recent piece of news.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the new apartment! (Assuming, of course, that this was a wanted move and not a "something horrible happened to my previous place so I had to move" move.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Being something of a Brit historian myself was one of the reasons I originally found Tolkien's appendices interesting. Lists of medieval kings! Cool!

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

My original intention was to call my blog The Witching Hour - which was taken on Blogger. Rather than chickening out, I went with Iron Tongue of Midnight, a favorite image from Midsummer Night's Dream.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

P. S. I've updated links and references on my blog.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Hurray!

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

One of my fellow participants in the Steve Jackson Games newsgroups wrote there that Pippin was clearly the thickest member of the Fellowship, and drew some rather pointed contrasts with Merry. I hadn't really pinned that down previously, but of course he's right. Though there's more to Merry than "stuffy little pedant"; he gets half the credit for doing away with the lord of the nazgul, after all. On the other hand, his not figuring out Dernhelm's secret identity fits perfectly. . . .

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Having difficulty recognizing people outside of expected contexts is another talent of mine.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I have that one too. It's a pain, isn't it?

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Congrats on reclaiming your comparatively real name. User IDs are like Cosplay, and some people get quite invested in them.

I don't know how many links I make to your name, probably quite a few. I'm not going to change all my "lj=" tags. If people can't figure it out in context, too bad.

Are all your old comments now with your new name?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

All of my past comments on LJ, and any uses made of my handle here with an "LJ user" tag, have automatically changed. Links with an "A HREF" tag have not changed, but at least for now they still forward to the correct post.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

My friendslist was automatically updated to have your new username checked.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

It is so nice to finally have the right user name, as I well know. When I picked out Athenais all those years ago I never thought it would be popular. Boy, is it ever.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the explanation of the name. I always vaguely wondered but never asked. Congrats on getting the right one finally.

[mneme]

Congrats!

My blocker was prior to november 2001, although I'm not sure -exactly- when; a few months before I signed on, I think.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My blocker's date was late 2003. I joined in April of 2004. Finding the block was irritating, because I'd been reading several people's LJs for a while already, and should have signed up, if only to read them all together, earlier.

[a-blue-moon-cat.livejournal.com]

Congratters! :)

[marc zender (from livejournal.com)]

David, I applaud your esoteric moniker. The “now unmeaning Buckland name Kalimac” only appears once, in Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings. It's not even in the book's index, inclusive of the new one by Hammond and Scull. Now that's pretty darn arcane!

But apart from its obscurity, I've long thought that Kalimac also represents an interesting orthographic crux. The presence of the letters k and c in the same name is actually pretty striking to a Tolkienian linguist, given that Tolkien does not contrast k and c (at least in intention) in the languages of The Lord of the Rings. According to Appendix E, the sound [k] is represented in the Elvish languages by the letter c, even before e and i (hence, famously, Celeborn), whereas “names drawn from other than Elvish langauges” use the letter k “with the same value as c”. Calimac would be fine for an Elvish form, and Kalimak for a non-Elvish one, but a form like Kalimac shouldn't exist. And yet it does.

I suspect the reason is historical, in that the manuscripts and typescripts of Appendix F show that Meriadoc's original Westron/Buckland name apparently developed from Khilimanzar (in the earliest extant manuscript of Appendix F, HM12: 59) to Chilimanzar and Cilimanzar (in the second manuscript, HM12: 50) to Kilimanac and Kalamanac (in the first typescript, HM12: 81) and then to Kalimanac and Kalimanoc (in the second typescript, HM12: 83). The final form, Kalimac, apparently emerged only in the final draft.

It's pretty clear from the associated texts that, despite the developments in the initial letter(s) — from Kh to Ch to C to K — Tolkien nonetheless always imagined a hard initial [k]-sound in this name. (If you'll forgive the joke, Merry's name never sounded silly, nor was it ever homophonous with a Mexican dish.) And, similarly, since there was no potential for orthographic confusion at the end of a word, once Tolkien settled on final -c (in the first typescript) he never wavered.

Given all of this, I suspect that the published form “Kalimac” is just a fossil of Tolkien's last-minute work in readying the appendices for publication in The Return of the King. In other words, when he at last collapsed Kalimanoc to Kalimac he did so without noticing the problematic K- and -c in the same word in light of what he'd written (or was about to write) in Appendix E. Had Tolkien's meticulous eye been drawn to the form in question, then like Kalmakil and Kalimmakil — kings of Gondor whose names appear in Appendix A of The Lord of Rings regularized to Calmacil and Calimmacil — I'm certain he would have regularized Kalimac to Kalimak.

I suppose that "Kalimac" is a candidate for the kinds of emendations made on Tolkien's behalf by Hammond and Scull for the 50th anniversary edition of the text. But Tolkien's intentions aside, I hope Kalimac is never changed. The poor fellow was already saddled with Estella Bolger in 1987; I'd hate to see his name changed in 2017. I'm sure you would, too, since then you'd have to change your LJ moniker once more, this time to Kalimak.

All best,

Marc