Anne, your name is really cool! It’s an ancient Biblical name that has been imported all over Europe. It means “He[God] has favoured/graced me [with a child].”
Elvish languages can’t have sentences in their names, so this name will be translated as “Favor/Grace/Gift.”
Quenya
Tolkien made a couple Quenya words that he used for “grace” in this context: “Lisse – Sweetness/Grace” and “Anna – Gift/Grace.” You can use these words as gender neutral names.
This name is used pretty exclusively as a feminine name, so here are the words with a feminine name suffix added: Lissie and Annë.
As a name in an Arda-context, this name has a problem. Elves don’t name themselves or others with abstract nouns like this. Elvish names are meant to be descriptive of their subjects, and an abstract noun is too, well, abstract. I think that we can get around this by changing or vocabulary to adjectives instead of nouns, and going for “Blessed One.” It’s not as close in meaning as the nouns are, but I think it preserves the meaning well enough.
Quenya has three words for “Blessed” that match the meaning that we want the best, “Manaite – Blessed/Having Grace,” “Herenya – Wealthy/Fortunate/Blessed,” and “Almárea – Fortunate/Lucky/Blessed.”
With a feminine name suffix: Manaitie, Herenye, and Almárie.
Sindarin
Sindarin doesn’t have direct words for “grace”, so we’ll use the Sindarin cognates of the Quenya words, “Glî – Sweetness/Honey” and “Ann – Gift.”
With feminine name suffixes: Glíeth, Glíel, Anneth, Annel, and Ennil.
Like with the Quenya version, this name doesn’t work very well for your Elven characters in Middle-earth. “Gift Woman” maybe could be a generous person, and maybe “Honey Woman” is someone with a sweet-tooth, but these are pretty far from the original intended meaning. So, let’s go with “Eliannen – Blessed.”
With some feminine name suffixes added: Elianneneth, Eliannenel, and Eliennenil.
Anne, I hope you found this article interesting and useful!
If you’d like your name translated in this series, comment below and I’ll consider it for a future article!
Sources:
Hanks, Patrick & Hodges, Flavia. A Dictionary of First Names Oxford University Press. 1990. pg 21.
Wiktionary, “Hannah” Last edited: May 16th, 2021