Far Over the Misty Mornings Cold

I first took an interest in Finnic languages a few years ago when I was looking into the languages that Tolkien used as inspirations for his different Elvish tongues. Tolkien knew Finnish, and along with Greek he used it as a model for Quenya because he found them aesthetically pleasing. In studying and listening to Finnish and Estonian, I can see why he thought so. There is a musical quality to both languages that lends itself to their traditional rune-poetry and folk singing, and I can see how Tolkien became “intoxicated” by it. As lots of Tolkien fans know, he also borrowed from the Kalevala for some of his stories, including the adaptation of the story of Kullervo that became the tragedy of Turin Turambar as recounted in The Children of Hurin. There was also a release of Tolkien’s rendering of the original Kullervo story in the last few years that is worth reading.

One of the things that I noticed as I have been learning Finnish and Estonian is that they have very different-sounding words for morning: aamu and hommik respectively. This is all the more curious because the Finnish greeting in the morning is hyvää huomenta. Huomen and homme are cognates, and hommik comes from homme, but where does aamu come from? It is actually the leftover part of an older word that refers to the morning mist, huomenhaamu, and over time it turned into aamu.