Four times the Tirion Assistant Civil Registrar sighed at a name, and one time she nodded in approval by Chestnut_pod

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Four times the Tirion Assistant Civil Registrar sighed at a name, and one time she nodded in approval

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Minë

Contrary to Luimiel’s nemesis, public opinion, it was not illegal to reuse names. How anyone ever thought a policy of strict non-repetition could work was beyond her. Sheer coincidence essentially guaranteed that there were multiple Sea Lovers or Green Jewels or Happy Women striding about Arda, blissfully unaware of their nominal compatriots across the continent, in the Halls, up a mountain retreat somewhere, or even, in these recently troubled times, beyond the Sea. How could it really be avoided? Furthermore, it was purest superstition that it brought ill luck – the fact that Ambarussa had come to a sticky end was no proof. Luimiel personally knew a set of two Alassantës, one of whom was a successful horse-breeder, and the other of whom seemed very happy running about the forests in the nude with Vána, for which reason she had not come to register her chosen name with the Inter-Valinorian Vital Records Agency. 

One very much could give one’s child a name that had been used before, and, frankly, Luimiel thought, looking across her desk at the unfortunate infant first in line to be registered today, she wished more people would.  

The baby’s parents were a type she knew well: the dreaded experts who loved their work, the sort who had kept to one trade since before the Sun and the Moon had risen, because they were so intellectually fulfilled. Luimiel was perfectly intellectually fulfilled at the Tirion Civil Registrar, thank you very much, but you didn’t see her having a baby and naming it “quality inkwell.” 

“‘Poldalanwa,’ you said,” she repeated after the mother, in the hopes that she might stir some self-awareness. The mother nodded enthusiastically, somewhat hampered by the stiffness of her brocaded collar, which appeared to have the better part of Míriel Serindë’s first treatise on dyeing woven directly into it in Tengwar. 

 “‘Big’ as in ‘large,’ and ‘loom’ as in –” she waved a hand, “the weaving apparatus?” 

“Precisely!” exclaimed the father, beaming. He was the one holding the baby, in a sort of mathematically improbable sling made out of tubes of knit material. It did appear very secure, but it also hurt her eyes to look at for too long.

Out of options, Luimiel dipped her quill in her quality inkwell and began to carefully scribe the initial Parma. She dreaded the series of assonant vowel carriers already. 

The baby grizzled a little, and the father bounced slightly in his chair, humming softly. The mother bent at the waist and nuzzled at the baby’s head, just barely covered with wisps of that distinctive reddish-brown Noldorin hair. The grizzling did not quiet, so the parents exchanged already-long-suffering glances, and the father rearranged the sling’s knit tentacles to allow access to his chest, where a clever sort of snap closure allowed the baby to latch on and nurse. 

Luimiel softened, a little. Filling in the fine line of the Vala, she asked, “So, are you hoping he will become a weaver as well?” 

The mother laughed. “You could tell what we do?” 

Before Luimiel could do more than violently bite her tongue, she went on, “The little one should do whatever he wants! We just want him to know he is loved, and that we believe that he will make great things wherever he goes.” 

Luimiel smiled, and gave the final letter a nice flourish before putting the pen down and sanding the ink. 

“From your lips to Erú’s ears,” she said. “You are all done here – please wait three to four weeks for the fair copy of the birth certificate to be ready, and remember that you may come back to register the other parent-name and the chosen-name at any time.” 

Both parents gave her brilliant smiles and stood, their clothes instantly shaking out their wrinkles. 

Luimiel saw them to the door of her office, and watched them proceed down the hall, heads bent towards – well, towards little Poldalanwa. She sighed, and went to file some marriage certificates. There were few enough children in the city these days to be too prickly about one so obviously well-loved. 

 

Atta

The public also tended not to know that it was possible to call a civil registrar to attend a newborn (or, at least, to call an assistant civil registrar, their time being assumed to be less valuable, even though they did all the work), just as one might call a clergyelf. Unfortunately, those who did know this tended to be a particular type of Elf. 

“Please, come quickly,” said the servant sent to answer the door of the (gaudy, Luimiel thought) Queen Anairë-syle mansion in what Luimiel privately called the Wealthy Snobs Quarter. She was hustled through richly carpeted hallways to the back of the house and ushered into a bedroom where, she realized, half-recoiling from the smell, someone had just given birth. 

A very small, very squashy, very bloody infant was being taken over to a basin by another servant, bawling out what seemed to be its very first breath. 

Deeply taken aback, Luimiel looked at the large divan in the center of the room, where the immediately post-natal mother reclined, strands of black hair sticking to her sweaty brown skin. 

“Are you the Civil Registrar I requested?” the woman asked in an accent that could cut glass, between pants. 

“I am Assistant Civil Registrar Lui-” began Luimiel, bowing, and was arrested by the woman snapping:

“Yes, yes, all right; it’s all the same. Listen; get out your ledger or whatever it is.” She pointed to the infant, who squalled even louder as the servant washed away the birth-muck. “They are Helwára, do you understand?” 

Luimiel forcibly leveled her eyebrows – this was what she got for being the most efficient registrar in the office; sent to deal with peremptory snobs halfway across the city! – and took out her ledger. 

“Would you prefer Tengwar or Sarati, madam?” she asked. 

“Tengwar, obviously; what sort of relic do you take me for?” replied the other woman irritably. “Just get it down!” 

Luimiel got it down. She quite liked scribing capital Hyarmens, at least, and figured she ought to take what small pleasures she could from this… situation.  

She showed the mother the name in the registry book, breathing shallowly through her mouth, and tried to inform her about the wait for the fair-copy birth certificate, but was waved away peremptorily, clearly secondary, she thought huffily, to a comb.

Yet another servant bustled her out through the side door, and pressed a coin into her hand, “from the mistress.” 

Luimiel drew herself up to her full (and considerable, if she did say so herself) height, and told the servant that civic employees did not accept gratuities. 

Then, breathing deeply of the fresh spring air, she went to the nearest pneumatic message station to ask if Hyamina from the Census Office wanted to join her for one of their semi-regular lunch-and-lament outings. 

The Civic Center operator did not even send on her request. Instead, the little scrap of paper that whizzed back to her through the tubes requested that she, being so conveniently located, proceed to another personal registration home appointment that had just come in, two streets over. 

Well, at least it was a beautiful spring day, when the sunlight shone off the marble pavements and a breeze set the trees along the street to nodding their blossomed branches. 

Luimiel found the address easily enough – this house was the only one on the city block, and somehow even more ostentatious than the one she had just visited. She didn’t have to knock, as two servants waited at the door to escort her, once again, down a hall to a bedroom in the back of the house. 

It was, at least, more orderly than the last one, Luimiel saw with relief. The baby, though clearly extremely new, was clean and swaddled, held in the arms of a woman who was fully clothed and, though sweaty, sitting up in bed. 

“Hello, madam,” said Luimiel. “I am Assistant Civil Registrar Luimiel, here to record a birth and mother-name.” 

“Thank you,” said the woman, with a gracious nod. “I very much appreciate your coming to the house, Assistant Civil Registrar. I wanted to get this all done as quickly as possible!” 

Luimiel opened her register and prepared her traveling quill. 

“It’s no trouble. Do you prefer Tengwar or Sarati, madam?” 

The woman laughed a little. “I suppose they make you ask that to please the fossils, or the hardliners! Tengwar, please.” 

Quill sharpened, Luimiel looked expectantly at her. 

“I have named my child Helwára,” she said, smiling radiantly. 

Luimiel startled a bit. “What a funny coincidence,” she said, tracing the two lovely downward diagonals of the capital Hyarmen. “I just this hour registered another baby with that very name, only a few streets away!”

Her pen jerked when the woman gasped sharply. 

“Oh, please don’t worry,” she said, looking up briefly from her ledger, rubbing out a spot of ink from her startle. “It’s not illegal to have two children with the same name. That’s a common misconception, actually–” 

“That spider-whelp,” snarled the woman, with enough venom that the baby woke and began wailing. 

Taken aback, Luimiel raised her voice over the baby and said, “It’s really not a problem; it’s just a bit of chance–”

“Oh, do be quiet,” the woman snapped. “I can’t very well give the baby the same name as my hag of a sister, can I? Erase it! That jealous martinet! She can’t stand coming second at anything; she’s never forgiven Grandfather for giving me the larger house when I married. What, did she actually give birth while you were in her bedchamber? Sow! It’s Helwarin, then.” 

Luimiel couldn’t quite piece together which parts of the tirade she was meant to take down. 

“I’m sorry, you’d rather Helwarin, now?”

“Yes! Nienna’s sodden brassiere, you’d think everyone in this city was out to get me.” 

The baby kept crying as Luimiel scratched out the previous line and – not without some font-based asperity – wrote out “Helwarin” on the next.

“Does this meet with your approval?” she asked Helwarin’s scowling mother – and, apparently, Helwára’s scowling aunt. 

“Fine,” she bit out. 

“Very well; the fair copy of the birth certificate will be delivered to this address in between three and four weeks, and you may register the child’s other parental name and chosen name at any time.” 

“You had best believe we will be registering this child’s name early,” the woman said through her teeth. “And if my sister comes to the registrar to complain, tell her that a pale blue morning is very different from a pale blue dawn, and that she’s a sneaky little greedy thief who makes her own problems!” 

Luimiel walked as quickly as was polite back to the door, and leaned briefly against it, clutching her ledger to her chest. One of the servants gave her a speaking look, and held out a large coin to her. 

Luimiel hesitated. Then, she sighed deeply and took it. She was going straight to the office this time, no messing about with the pneumatics, and treating Hyamina to the lunchiest, most lamentable lunch-and-lament they had ever shared. 

She heaved another sigh, heading down the street. This was what a power vacuum and sudden deflation did to people! 

 

Neldë

It took about a century, but the Fëanorian nostalgics crept out of the woodwork and began having babies again before Luimiel was fully used to the sudden reduction in her workload. 

It was worst among the young, she thought grimly, staring across her desk at the new parents sitting across from her, neither of whom could be much over one hundred and ten, and both of whom were dressed in eye-smarting shades of red. If they really remembered Fëanor, she thought sourly, they wouldn’t dare mix blue and orange undertones like that.

“We want to name him Singenáro,” the first mother said, tossing her head. She held the baby, dressed in a clashing maroon gown, firmly on her lap, while the second mother stood behind her, arms crossed, clearly expecting some sort of resistance.

“That would be ‘salt,’ and not ‘salty?’” asked Luimiel in a mild tone. 

The seated woman jutted her chin out. “When salts are burned, they produce a rainbow of colors depending on their composition. We think it’s a lovely namesake.” 

“It surely is a warming image,” said Luimiel, and, bracing herself, moved on to the next question. “Would you prefer Sarati or Tengwar?” 

“Tengwar!” they replied in emphatic unison. 

She bit the inside of her cheeks hard as she scribed the poor, innocent baby’s admittedly visually elegant name in her most textbook Tengwar. What did it matter if they could properly remember the Darkening or not? If they were as pro-Noldor as they seemed, they’d never leave Tirion, and their son would probably never have the opportunity to get punched out by a Telerin schoolchild with an equally sectarian name, Alquarénë or some such. 

She glanced up from sanding the ledger, and accidentally met the standing mother’s glower. 

Why act as though I’m some auntie about to scold them? she thought crossly, and, against her better judgment, unbit her cheek. 

“You know, it isn’t actually illegal to use the same name for two different Elves,” she said, aiming for a tone of airy unconcern. 

“What do you mean?” asked the mother holding the baby. Above her, her wife continued to glare. Luimiel hadn’t been glared at by so many young people since she was one hundred and ten! 

“Oh, I simply thought you might be interested. People do get so nervous about that old superstition about name-doubles being bad luck, but there’s really no proof at all. If you want to reuse a name – any name, I’m sure I don’t know what you’ve considered! -- I say you should feel no restraint!”

“We like ‘Singenáro,’” said the glare-y one, clearly trying to sound intimidating. 

“I do too,” said Luimiel. “I just try to make sure that everyone is happy with the name they choose, and I do so hate it when people are held back by unfounded dogmas.” 

They both seemed to soften at that, and the standing woman even uncrossed her arms. Her wife nodded, and they both listened without glaring while Luimiel explained the wait time for the birth certificate – all the while ushering them slowly towards her office door.  

“And remember,” she concluded at the threshold, “You can come back at any time to register the other parental name and the child’s chosen name. And remind the child that he can choose a repeat too, if he likes, and be entirely fortunate – after all, there were two Curufinwë’s in this very city, and they did so well for themselves!” 

The baby-holding woman’s mouth opened in indignation, but Luimiel shut the door in their faces before she could see if they would turn as red as their clothing. 

Leaning back against the door, she took several deep, steadying breaths. Returning to her desk, she sat and stared out the window, which had used to catch the Mingling so her office swam in light, and now caught about twenty minutes of direct sunlight a day – so long as it was spring or summer.  

She sighed deeply. Salt-fire indeed. She resented needing a fire for light in the autumn and winter, now, but she supposed she did like the special blue-salt logs the office bought, for effect. It was a pretty shade of teal. 

 

Canta

Credulous as people were about actual homophones, they were, by and large, quite willing to use synonyms as names. 

Luimiel smiled at the chubby baby bouncing on her father’s knee, waving her little fists as though conducting an orchestra and scientifically blowing bubbles. 

“What a happy little one,” she said, and the father laughed. 

“It’s a blessing,” he said. “She was born at something of a bad time, not that we could have predicted it – those big floods last month have had my spouse and I up to our necks in work, and mud too! If she were colicky, or anything but this cheerful little sprite, we’d be at our wits’ end.” 

“Oh, I hope you were all right,” Luimiel said. The floods had been the result of an unexpected failure in a dam far upriver, one of the many works left unmaintained in the general crisis of engineering precipitated by the mass departure of most of Tirion’s engineers across an ocean, still not fully resolved after all these years. Many of those on the plain below Tirion-hill had suffered major damage, including in the village where Luimiel’s parents lived. 

“Yes, thankfully,” replied the man. “We live with my grandparents, and they remember before the river was dammed, when it flooded every year – that house is up on stilts so tall I could chat with Oromë eye-to-eye from my front porch!” 

“What a relief,” said Luimiel, waving her quill about so the baby could grab after it. “My parents live in a house like that too – but only because they were flooded out the year I was born and learned their lesson! The family joke is that they named me ‘flood daughter’ so they’d always remember to check the piles around my begetting day.” 

“Why, that’s just the name I want!” the man exclaimed. “Since she came in the flood. Well, sort of – my spouse and I liked the sound of ‘Ulundiel.’”

“…Ah,” said Luimiel. She kept her smile on her face, but laid down the quill. “Ulundiel like ‘ulundë,’ I assume?”

“Yes, yes,” laughed the man, gathering up his daughter in his arms and rubbing their noses together. “Ulundë, definitely! ‘Flood,’ not ‘hideous monster!’ It wouldn’t suit this one at all.”   

“That’s certainly true. But… Are you… quite sure you wouldn’t just like to use my name?” asked Luimiel. 

The man shook his head. “My spouse is just set on ‘Ulundiel.’ And, well, they’re rather superstitious, you know, and I don’t think they’d much approve of doubling up with your name, even if you did offer.” 

“It really isn’t true, what they say about name doubles,” protested Luimiel, but the man just laughed again. 

“I must say, I like ‘Ulundiel’s’ lámatyávë too! No, no, Ulundiel it is, please.” 

Luimiel bit her cheek and did as she was bid, and the man let her hold little Ulundiel once she was done, before he had to return to his mud-buried fields. 

It would have a nice ring to it, she told herself once they were gone. It was only that she did hope this was not a prophetic sort of name, and if it were, she did hope it only predicted another flood and not… well. Luimiel had a sibling, and that sibling was the sort of Elf who did things like express “immoderate” interest in the tyrant lizards, and went out hunting for “undiscovered Maiar” in the far west, and circulated a hand-printed broadsheet reporting “escaped spirits” from Mandos living in people’s outhouses. 

She sighed deeply. Her sibling’s mother-name was the very normal, respectable, and not at all prophetic Húmellaira, though, after their mother’s favorite flower. There really was no telling. Still. She did not envy that little girl having to explain her name on the first day of school.  

 

+ Minë 

Part of the reason Luimiel loved her job were the continuing education requirements – being kept up-to-date with the latest linguistic shifts, new innovations in dialect, legal requirements, tricky ethical questions about self-determination and prophecy, and all the other related fields that touched on naming. She had never before been required to learn a whole new language to scribal standard, however! 

She felt very proud of herself as she stood in the front room of a snug, comfortable sort of cottage in the newest neighborhood of Tirion, the Returners’ Quarter, and asked, with perfect and, she felt, justified confidence, “Would you prefer Sarati, Tengwar, or Cirth, honored?” 

“Oh, how lovely,” said the parent who had let her in from the afternoon heat, who had a lovely accent in Quenya and a fall of silver hair already mirrored on the head of the baby their spouse held in their arms. “I didn’t know it was an option to have Cirth!” 

“The Inter-Valinorian Vital Records Agency does try to serve everyone in Valinor, honored,” replied Luimiel, with what she felt was justified pride. 

The other parent smiled at her, teeth flashing. Luimiel noted that their incisors had been set with little gems, as had been all the rage amongst the bright young Noldor in her great-great-grandparents’ time. She wondered if this was perhaps something of a Lótessë-Ringarë romance, as well as a cross-cultural one. 

“I don’t suppose we could have both Cirth and Tengwar?” they asked. 

“Certainly; there is plenty of room for the name and its translation.” 

The Noldorin parent waved their hand. “That’s no trouble. We would like to name her ‘Nenel.’”  

Luimiel hummed. “Very evocative. It makes me think of the river at night.” And nice and simple, she thought, nothing outrageous! 

Writing it out in Quenya was the work of a moment. She looked up at the parents. “What is your preferred translation?” 

The Sindarin parent took their turn to grin. “It’s Nenel!” 

Luimiel thought for a moment that she was having some difficulty with the language barrier despite her earlier pride – and then her brain caught up with her. 

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “But that’s so clever! It really does mean the same thing.” 

Both parents beamed at her. 

“We went through the whole Sindarin-Quenya dictionary in the city library,” the Sindarin parent said, with evident gratification. 

“It’s wonderful,” said Luimiel, bouncing on her toes, and then recalled her Assistant Civil Registrar’s dignity and settled back to the ground.  

She showed the parents the new entry – “Nenel” in Tengwar and Cirth – and recited her usual litany. 

“The fair copy of the birth certificate will be ready in between three and four weeks. You can come back at any time to register the other parental name and the child’s chosen name. 

“And,” she added, for she could not resist, “You can ask to see me! I want to hear about all the other ideas you had. I’m sure you’re not the only ones who want something like this, and people around here don’t like reusing names.” 

The parents glanced at each other and chuckled, Nenel held snugly between them. 

They saw Luimiel back out into the afternoon without quite promising anything – but Luimiel was already mentally preparing long lists of suffixes and cognates, nodding happily to herself. 

Elennen would also work in both languages, she thought, "star water" instead of "water star," but this once, she thought she wouldn’t mind a bit of creative variety!