The Hobbit Is Our Second Thickest Book

Are Tjihkkom, a linguist with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oslo, has published his Lule Sámi translation of The Hobbit in 2023. In this interview he told us how he came to the idea to work on this text, and about the challenges and methods of forming new words in a language which does not have many books published. This interview was made in 2024 by Szonja and Metaflora for the January 2025 issue of the Lassi Laurië, where it was published in Hungarian translation.

Az interjú magyar fordítása a Lassi Laurië XXII/1. 26–28. oldalán olvasható „A hobbit a második legvastagabb könyvünk” címen. (Kattints ide a digitális kiadásváltozat megnyitásához!)

How many people speak Lule Sámi?

It all depends on how you count: with Sámi languages you have very small languages, but they are very small only because they have been split from other bigger groups. I would say there are maybe 2-3 groups of Sámi languages that can be considered so different that people don’t understand each other. My dialect has its own written norm, its own orthography, and maybe around 600 people can use this written language with no problems, but it should be readable for a lot more people. So, it’s pretty small. Its speakers are in Norway and Sweden. But Norway is a country that likes minorities, so it’s pretty easy to get funding: to get money to make books, for example.

Do you use it as an everyday language?

Not now. I live in Oslo, so pretty much no one here speaks this. It’s very local to some villages in the north of Norway. It is my native language along with Finnish, and I learned at school to write and read it. My father is Sámi, and my mother is Finnish. But it’s not that much used outside of my home village, Drag (or Ájluokta in Sámi). There some people still use it as their main spoken language. But there are very few books in it. Most people know how to read it, but it’s a bit strange to read it because there is not much text, so you do not get used to reading. And even fewer write text. And there are very few, like two people who write books in it, so translation is one of the few strategies to have more texts, and better texts, I would say. It makes sense to speak of a Lule Sámi literature since 1983, that is written with the current orthography, and from that the New Testament is without doubt the largest collection of texts, and also source for literary style in a certain extent. And I think that next to that, The Hobbit is the thickest book, that we have currently.

You already have several translations published. How did this start?

It started as a small hobby or an experiment, where I translated the Alice in Wonderland into Sámi because it’s a very fun book. I experimented with translation, and to somehow get a feeling of what is a good writing strategy. Specifically, for The Hobbit, it began with that Torgny Hedström, who proofread Alice in Wonderland sent around an A4 page of The Hobbit that he translated many years ago: it must be like 10 years ago. That he just did for fun and he sent it to me like, “Hey, check this out, it’s pretty cool, you can do with it what you want”, and so I kept it, and I thought about it, and then I asked the HarperCollins who have the copyright for that – or who are in contact with the Tolkien Estate about the copyright. I asked them if it’s possible to make an agreement on the translation. And they said yes.

All of your translations were your own choices?

Yes! I’m the one who translates and the one who publishes the books, so I work for myself. It’s quite small scale. It’s just me and my proofreader, Åsta Pedersen Ruud.  I write the text, and we read it together, and I format the text into a file that can be printed into a book. Some books also have an illustrator.

And do you choose books you personally liked and want to share with other people or just popular literature in general?

Popular literature. I think it’s very important to focus on quality over quantity because I can translate maybe one or two books every year. It’s also a question of how easy it is to get the translation rights for a book. The Hobbit was quite easy, because they have already sold the rights to a lot of countries.

How many copies were printed? Is it true that it is already sold out?

Two hundred copies were printed. It’s not sold out yet, but there are not many left. It sold surprisingly well. Collectors bought between 40 and 50 copies. Months after the book came out, I got a mail from this person from Ireland and then another from The Netherlands and so on and so on. It was very surprising but also fun that the international Tolkien communities are so up to date.

What is your next translation plan?

The latest book that I’m working on now is from Spanish. It’s the Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. It’s a completely different style. My girlfriend is Spanish, so we translate it together. She translates it to me into a sort of mix of Norwegian and linguistic words, and then I write it in Sami. I am also planning a translation project from Finnish into Sámi. I think it will be a bit faster since it’s the same language family.

What are the main challenges in translating to Lule Sami?

When you have a language that has mostly been only spoken in some villages in the North, of course, you don’t have any sort of strong literary tradition. We have the way to write words, but we don’t really have many rules on how to write texts, like punctuation, or idioms, or expressions, like very literary expressions. So, it’s always a sort of process to decide, does this work? Is this readable? I have had many discussions with my proofreader about this. And of course, it’s also the choice of words. Especially with strange concepts, things that don’t have an old word. It’s always the question like, do we invent? Do we invent a new word, or do we borrow a word from English or Norwegian or Finnish?

And what do you do most of the time? Just borrow a word from a different language or use an old word or invent something new?

I like to invent something new, if it makes sense. Sámi is similar to Hungarian in that it’s very easy to make new words by just putting stuff at the end. For example, in The Hobbit, in the chapter when they escaped from the Elves in the barrels, it’s talking about how the river flows underground. So, there are the words for underground watercourse and waterdoor… in English, it’s Portcullis and Watergate: “There the rocky roof came down close to the surface of the stream and from it a portcullis could be dropped right to the bed of the river to prevent anyone coming in or out that way.” So, how do I say this? I cannot say river for it, because there is already a river, the stream. So, the solution was there to make a word from the word ‘to flow’, that is gålggåt [kolokot], and add this ending to it, so that becomes gålgådahka [kolkotakka], which means ‘a place where something flows’. So that’s one strategy to make words, because for the reader it’s then clearer what the word means.

An example for the other main strategy: since The Hobbit is set in a very English landscape, Tolkien describes oak trees. But in the North, there are no oaks, so Sámi has no native word for ‘oak’. So, there was the name “Thorin Oakenshield”, and it’s a bit stupid to just call the oak a tree. There I used a borrowed word from Norwegian, where ‘oak’ is eik, and this “ei” sound became in Sámi “äj”, so eik became äjkka.

As you already mentioned one name-translation problem: how do you work with names in general? What is Bilbo Baggins in your translation, for example?

For the names there are also two ways: the names either have meaning or they don’t. Like “Baggins” is obviously from English ‘bag’, so you just take whatever Sámi word you have for ‘bag’, and you make that into a sort of name style. If you follow the Tolkien mythology, these names are translations from Middle-earth languages, so the English names obviously have some meaning, and it would be a bit strange not to keep that meaning. But “Bilbo” doesn’t have any meaning, so it’s impossible to translate it. The closest thing is to write it in a Sámi way, but you cannot really translate a name that doesn’t have any meaning. So, for the name “Baggins”, the word for ‘bag’ is vuossa, and there are many last names that end with “r” for some reason, so “Baggins” became Vuossar. (This one, “Baggins” was not invented by me, it was already there on the one page Torgny Hedström translated. So, I borrowed it from him.) And the same goes for place names. If they have a meaning in English, I translated it approximately how it works in Sámi, so for example Bag End became Vuossarbahta from Vuossar, the Baggins name, and bahta which means ‘End’.

And a little funny coincidence… if I’m not completely mistaken, Hungarian uses this name tradition where the last name comes first and the personal name after it. Now, I did the same thing in The Hobbit. So, for Bilbo Torgny used Bilbo Vuossar, which I changed to Vuossara Bilbo (where the final -a on Vuossar marks the genitive, so it means ‘Bilbo of Baggins’, or more directly, ‘Baggins’ Bilbo’). Thorin Oakenshield became Äjkkagalba Torin.

Why? Is this name order usual there as well?

It is, when you speak with other people, but it isn’t normal to write it. On one side, the more traditional way of expressing names, but also the more casual, it’s more oral… The written norm follows the Norwegian or Western European tradition of having the first name and last name. But I wanted to do it this way because the text flows better, I think.

You already mentioned some of your choices. Was there any other expression which you had a special difficulty to translate, or any solution you are particularly proud of?

I think there is one fun fact what people like to hear… I already mentioned that there are two ways of creating new words. You can either borrow them, or you can invent them. But there is a third way which is very fun. It is to use old words that are not in use anymore. It’s basically called learned loan. So, for the word “Elf” there was no word in Sámi. It would have been conceptually very confusing to use words from Sámi storytelling traditions in this case. Because Elves are not creatures that are found in stories here. Trolls or Goblins… they exist in Sámi stories, so we have words for those, our own words, but not for Elves. And it’s very difficult to make a new word for something completely new. I could of course have borrowed the word “Elf” from Norwegian or English or Finnish, and fit it in with the correct sounds. But I thought, and this was a bit of a fun experiment… so even though the current written language in Sámi, the current official orthography is very new, there are word lists and dictionaries that go all the way back to the 1700s. Which contain a lot of words that are not used anymore. And I went looking for an Elf-word there. Maybe there are words for some creatures that don’t exist in stories anymore, but have existed? But then I looked at how Elves are described by Tolkien: they are this very old people, the first people ever created, and they are quite tall and pretty, and they have long hair, they have no beards, and they like beauty. So, I thought: this is stereotypically feminine. These are very feminine characters, if you look at it from that point of view. And I saw in this old dictionary a word that is no longer in use, but what supposedly used to mean woman: hene. So, it was sort of free to grab, and I decided to use that for the word for Elves. The dictionary is from 1780, and I just made a sort of reconstruction on what would this word look like if it existed today? So that’s why Elves in this book are called hiedne.

That’s a funny choice for a book which does not contain women at all! But it has a lot of poems: what about those? Did you translate them all by yourself? Could you follow the original verse forms or what choices did you have to make?

I translated them, yes. It is very difficult to translate in to the same verse as Tolkien used, because in Sámi, you always have the stress on the first syllable of every word. So, just for example, the original “Far over the Misty Mountains” poem has stress on every other syllable. To do that in Sámi you would have to use only small words to place the stress at the right place. So, the solution was to use a different metre: instead of iambic metre, the Sámi follows the trochaic metre.

It is also very difficult to rhyme in Sami, because you would basically need the same word except for one letter difference or one sound difference, because of where the stress is placed, so the endings are a bit the same, but it is much more important to have the stress placement or to have alliteration. So, the poems are sort of freely translated in the sense that they have a quite different structure from English, but the content is the same.

Tolkien used a lot of different forms of poems in the book, he was experimenting with different styles. Could you make these differences happen in your translation or do you use more or less the same verse forms?

There are some differences, yes. Every poem of the Dwarves has this structure that in every line first you have a word with three syllables, and then you have a word with two, and then again with two, and then with three. So, every line is a mirror. And when the Elves sing in Rivendell, then it’s different again: in their poems the feet always have two syllables.

About these different peoples in the book: we have heard that for Beorn you have actually used another Sami language…

In English the characters have different styles. The Hobbits speak in one way and the Dwarves have a slightly different way of speaking and so on… In this I took inspiration from one Norwegian translation: while translating from English, I also used Finnish and Norwegian translations as tools, or sources of inspiration, and help. In the Finnish translation everyone speaks pretty much the same. But one Norwegian translation uses styles from different times. Like the Elves speak a sort of Norwegian that was written 100 or 150 years ago, but still understandable for people today. Not completely archaic, but still. While the Hobbits speak a more modern form of Norwegian. I took inspiration from that and in the Sámi Hobbit when Bilbo uses one sound, the Dwarves use another. For example, when Bilbo or someone else like Gandalf uses the word for ‘army’, it is fuovva with an “f” in the beginning. And when the Dwarves use it, because they speak a slightly more northern variety, they say huovva with an “h” at the beginning. So not a big difference, but some that you can see, to sort of keep different styles for the different characters. And the same goes for Beorn, where I asked Olve Utne (who recently passed away) who knew how to write Pita Sami, to write Beorn’s sayings. Officially Pita Sami is a different language, I would say it’s just a special dialect, I can understand it perfectly fine. It is very near to Lule Sámi, spoken by much less people, but they have their own official orthography, which I can read but I can’t write it. It’s still almost the same, but you can notice the differences.

But why Beorn? Was that the most marked difference in English? Or why was it Beorn who had to have that big difference?

It has to do with the background of the people… The Elves, they are the first things that Ilúvatar created, so they speak the most archaic, or the oldest form in the book. The Hobbits speak a more daily language. Dwarves, as I said, they speak a northern dialect. But Beorn is interesting, because it’s just this person or creature who lives alone in a forest and he’s very much alone. He doesn’t come into contact with a lot of people otherwise. So, it would be a bit strange if he was to speak like everyone else. That’s the reason that I wanted him to have a very marked different style from everyone else. He’s isolated, so he needed an isolated language.

Az interjút Szonja és Metaflora készítette 2024. november 20-án. (A portrét és a képeken látható könyvpéldányt az interjúalanytól kaptuk – a tárgyfotókat Metaflora készítette.)

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