Ornoth

On Ravenhill

2024-07-06T15:00:01Z

Today, kids grow up with their entire lives digitized and at their fingertips, but those of us over sixty rarely get a high-fidelity look back into our childhoods.

Sure, there might be some faded Polaroids or 35mm slides from major holidays, but those aren’t particularly vivid or easily shared. A majority of our lives—who we were and everything we experienced—exists only in brief flickers of increasingly fragile human memory, ultimately unsharable except as tediously repetitive verbal anecdotes, like those our grandparents told us when we were kids.

So when one uncovers an item that triggers lots of childhood memories and emotions, it’s worth expending some effort to preserve it. In this case, a 40-year-old cassette tape bearing a very special song, which I recently digitized.

Therindel and Daeron cover

Therindel and Daeron On Ravenhill cassette

In 1978 I was only fourteen years old and about to start high school. I’d recently devoured J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and had gotten in touch with a handful of other young fans to found the New England Tolkien Society.

NETS had two publications: I produced a big annual called “MAZAR BALINŪ” (The Book of Balin) that featured art, poetry, fiction, and such (read more about that here); but our regular newsletter was a monthly called “Ravenhill”, named after a fortified spur of the Dwarves’ Lonely Mountain, which was the ultimate goal of Bilbo & Co.’s quest in The Hobbit.

Our Tolkien fan group’s meetings were infrequent, because we were spread out all over the northeast, but we made up for it with enthusiasm, taking on Hobbit or Elven or Dwarven personae, dressing up in costumes, having period feasts, hosting Tolkien trivia contests, and the all-important mushroom-rolling race (using only one’s nose, of course).

Those events were always uproarious fun. Contrary to my home life as a very strong introvert, under my Hobbit persona I surprisingly found myself loosening up and expressing a fun-loving, impulsive side at our gatherings. For me, they were incredibly important experiments in my adolescent social and emotional growth.

It was in that context where, at one of our very earliest meetings, we were joined by a local musician named Tom Osborne, who went by the name “Dæron”, after a minstrel mentioned in Tolkien’s works. He played guitar and sang a folk song he’d composed around a poem written by Marthe Benedict (aka Therindel), a Tolkien fan of international renown.

The song, “On Ravenhill: Gimli’s Song of Parting”, is a poignant one. You may or may not recall that Gimli was the Dwarf who joined the Fellowship of the Ring to help Frodo bring the One Ring to Mordor. Tom’s song takes place long after the conclusion of the War of the Ring, as Gimli says farewell to the Lonely Mountain and Middle-earth, before joining his Elvish friend Legolas in sailing to the Undying Lands: something no Dwarf had ever been permitted to do.

Between the stirring words, so wonderfully performed, and the direct connection to our newsletter “Ravenhill”, everyone who heard it at that early gathering was near tears, despite the fact that we were mostly teenaged boys. There was something about Tolkien’s works that had touched each of us—the sense of wonder, the magnificence of nature, the freshness of youth, the sentimentality and romanticism—and Tom’s music and Therindel’s words captured all of that perfectly. It’s no exaggeration to say it resonated in my heart and lodged itself permanently in my memory.

The version I have on cassette… Over the past 42 years I never played it very often, but—knowing that it was important to me—I hung onto it through my many moves and all the changing roles and circumstances of my life. I’m happy that after so many years, it’s still in adequate condition for digitizing and posting (here’s the MP3), even if the quality isn’t up to modern standards.

Now, like Gimli, in old age I find myself looking back upon an astonishingly diverse, full, and fulfilling life with immense appreciation. I’m not quite ready to depart for the Undying Lands, but I can look back at the many treasures I have found, and savor precious memories such as those evoked by this deeply meaningful song of parting.

Far down the Lonely Mountain’s southern arm
I stand on the grey rocky height
Whence oft of old was sounded the alarm
And winged messengers soared in urgent flight.
(BEGIN CHORUS)
Only on Ravenhill—can you believe it still?
Looking across the green lands;
Mining the metals we shaped with our hands each day
Under the mountain where mystery lay.
(END CHORUS)
Here sun and wind and rain shaped the stone;
Here blood of kinsmen slain have soaked the clay;
And here I stand bent by the years I’ve known
To hear the echoes of a fading yesterday.

CHORUS

I am a living part of all this land—
Each standing stone, each tree a treasured friend,
Each glint of the sun a gem within my hand—
And yet beneath the sun all things must have an end.

CHORUS

I will surrender all I held as worth
And take the westward road across the sea.
A Dwarf of Durin’s race, a son of the earth,
Who dared to crave the lofty Elvish destiny.

CHORUS

So here I forfeit all my mortal right,
And here I render up my earthly will.
I shall leave it all to seek the light,
For I have bid the past farewell.

CHORUS x3

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The Book of Balin

2024-07-01T20:11:11Z

A couple months I ago I received an email from the eBay auction site, indicating that one of my few remaining product searches had been triggered. In this case, the search text was “MAZAR BALINŪ”. What the heck does that mean?

Welp, I recently posted that in high school I was a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. And that I was one of the founders of the New England Tolkien Society.

NETS had two publications: a monthly newsletter called Ravenhill that my friend Gary put out, and a (nominally) annual literary magazine called MAZAR BALINŪ that I produced. The name is in Tolkien’s Dwarven language and translates to “The Book of Balin”, which was an artifact that the LotR fellowship found in the mines of Moria.

It wasn’t easy to get the artwork, articles, and stories I needed, so only two issues were ever published: in 1980 and 1983. I photocopied issues and mailed them to our members, which were probably less than a hundred people. So it was pretty amazing to discover 40-year-old original copies on eBay, being sold by someone in the Netherlands!

But seeing them got me thinking. To my knowledge, there are no copies of MB online, and I’m not even sure any exist in public collections. So I scanned my archived originals and compiled them into the two PDFs that I can share with you now.

MAZAR BALINŪ I (pdf)

MAZAR BALINŪ II (pdf)

As an interesting postscript, MAZAR BALINŪ’s focus on original artwork, poetry, stories, and articles was the antecedent for my subsequent internet-based electronic magazine, FSFnet. FSFnet, which I founded in college in 1984, was renamed DargonZine in 1988, and has held the title of the longest-running electronic magazine on the internet for decades. While it still exists today in a torpid, nominal form, we’ll still celebrate the 40th anniversary of its founding later this year.

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…Or Not

2024-06-28T17:56:58Z

It’s time to come clean and clear up a falsehood that I’ve been telling for decades. Ornoth is not my birth name.

I changed my legal name back in 1994. But ever since then, when someone asked where the name “Ornoth” comes from, I told them it was an old family name with no particular meaning or history or derivation other than prior use. I didn’t think it would be flattering or to my advantage to admit that I’d changed my name or to reveal its origin, so I very purposefully kept it hidden.

Why am I revealing this now? Well, at my age I no longer feel compelled to protect a career, a reputation, or a fragile ego. And in this time where people are allowed to redefine all aspects of their identities, a simple name change doesn’t carry the stigma it once did. And having first started using Ornoth as a moniker fifty years ago, there’s no question that making it my legal name was a good long-term decision. Looking back on it, it was one of the best decisions of my life.

Coat of arms of Orny (Switzerland)

If you want to know the whole story, you’re gonna have to sit down and allow your author to relate this story in the third person, present tense…

Journey with me back five decades to 1976: to a 6th grade English class. An awkward 13 year old kid named David listens attentively as Mrs. Bernier reads J.R.R. Tolkien’s children’s fantasy novel “The Hobbit” to the class. Within a year, the boy enthusiastically plows through Tolkien’s more ambitious three-volume followup: “The Lord of the Rings”.

By chance, around this time he sees a newspaper article about a slightly older kid named Gary: an internationally-known Tolkien fanatic who lives an hour away. They meet up, start recruiting others, and create the New England Tolkien Society: a group of adolescent fans who regularly get together for events that feature discussions, trivia, music, camping, cooking, contests, and costumes.

Along with their costumes, everyone’s got a Middle-earth alter-ego persona. Gary dresses appropriately as a Hobbit called Hidifons. There’s Elven maids named Lothiriel and Therindel, a bard named Dæron, a pack of irascible Dwarves, and a few dozen others.

So David needs to come up with a Tolkien-inspired persona and his “Hobbit name”. Consulting Ruth Noel’s book “The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, he mashes together the Elvish words “orn” (meaning “tree”) and “loth” (“flower” or “blossom”) in an attempt to capture the image of the fragrant lilac trees that herald Maine’s brief spring. Thus, he announces himself to his fellow fans as “Ornoth”.

By nature extremely analytical, introverted, and solitary, a curious thing happens as our protagonist proceeds through his high school years. At Tolkien gatherings, he starts making friends, clowning around, acting silly, and flirting with the girls, who playfully shorten his nickname to “Orny”. Being outgoing is so completely out of character for him that he thinks of himself as having two separate and distinct personalities: one named David, who is a quiet, jaded, introverted loner; and the other named Orny, who is impulsive, energetic, and gregarious. “Ornoth” is also the name and persona that he carries with him when he begins attending medieval recreationist events put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism.

The awkwardness of maintaining two separate names and personalities comes to a head when he leaves for college, where he repeatedly winds up living with roommates who share the given name David. Partly out of simple convenience and partly to lean into his outgoing persona rather than the introverted one, he uses “Orny” throughout his college years. After using it for more than a decade, he has become more comfortable identifying as Ornoth – or Orny – than as David.

However, he has to revert to using his given name during the decade following college graduation, which brings marriage and a budding professional career. After several years of early success, both these endeavors flounder, as he is forced out by new management at work, and undergoes a divorce that is partially attributable to the cold dispassion of his predominant “David” persona.

The year was 1992; I was about to turn thirty, my life had fallen apart, and I longed to return to the carefree ease of my days in college and Tolkien fandom.

But this misfortune was also the watershed moment that spurred tremendous changes in my life. I reached out and reconnected with some of my old friends from college. I re-assumed leadership of the electronic writing project I’d left six years earlier. I grew my hair long for the first time and started hanging out in the Boston nightclub and music scenes. I got involved in the local BDSM and polyamory communities. I got an exciting and profitable new job at a cutting-edge consulting firm near M.I.T. where my skills were highly valued. I briefly lived with my old high school girlfriend before finally moving from the distant suburbs into the heart of the city. And I took up cycling again after a decades-long hiatus.

In all these different environments, I went by “Ornoth” or “Orny”, resurrecting the name that I identified with, that represented the kind of person I wanted to be, and which was used by all my friends, both old and new. At the same time, I finally started working to integrate the two halves of my bifurcated self-image: the methodical intellectual and the playful impulsive.

And it was time to finally leave “David” behind, a name that I found uncomfortable, that had unpleasant associations, and was only used by family members.

But my family provided an intimidating obstacle: telling my very conservative parents – who had given me my birth name, after all – that I wanted to legally change it. Fortunately, by then I’d gained the self-confidence to express myself firmly, so they couldn’t do much more than choose to ignore it.

So after nearly twenty years of using it informally, in late June of 1994 I went to probate court and had my name formally changed, taking Ornoth as my first name, and demoting “David” to one of now two middle names. As such things usually go, it was both an immense fundamental change and an anticlimactic formality.

That was thirty years ago this week, and there hasn’t been a single second when I’ve regretted it. Ornoth is who I am, who I have been for nearly all of my life, and how everyone knows me. “David” sounds as alien to my ears as Billy-Joe-Bob.

The only times I was the least bit equivocal about it was when I was introduced to someone new. When the inevitable “What kind of name is that?” question came up, I always fell back on a convenient lie: that it was just an old family name with no specific derivation. But today that equivocation officially ceases, as I take unapologetic and public ownership of this deeply meaningful life choice.

As you might imagine, having a unique name comes with advantages and disadvantages. For some people, it’s easier to remember a name that’s distinctive, but many folks require time and repetition to commit it to memory. So it has often gotten shortened to Orny, Orn, or even just O. People often mishear the ‘th’ and call me “Ornoff”; another common error is “Ornath”; and sometimes people misread a printed ‘rn’ as an ‘m’ and see “Omoth”. Such is the price we pay for being unique.

On the other hand, picking a username is a breeze; I’ve never had to resign myself to being “DAVID783” or the like. Googling has revealed that there are small towns called Orny in both France and Switzerland (see the latter’s coat of arms in the image above), and at least one person in Germany has Ornoth as a surname. And there are several fantasy- and gaming-related websites using Ornoth as the name of a fictional character, which always feels a bit ironic.

Having thought of myself as Ornoth for half a century, it’s not just a part of me; it is me. But so is the entire story of how it became my name: its origin, etymology, and literal meaning; its central role in my social and emotional growth; how I reclaimed it as part of a major mid-life revitalization; and how it prompted me to finally stand up to parental authority.

And while I’m very happy that today literally everyone knows me as Ornoth, I’ve always self-consciously kept all that backstory hidden. But the story behind my name is one that deserves to be claimed and celebrated, and I’m happy to share it with you today on this personally meaningful anniversary.

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