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Steven in Elvish

Steven, your name is really cool! It’s an ancient Greek name meaning “Crown, Garland.”

Sindarin

The Sindarin word for “crown, garland” is Rî. On its own it’s gender-neutral, and to make it gendered, we add feminine and masculine name suffixes.

Masculine: Ríon.

Feminine: Ríeth or Ríel.

Now, as a name for your Role Play characters in Middle-earth, these don’t work. It’s just the word for “crown” and Elves don’t name themselves random objects without showing a connection to how they are connected to that object. Luckily, we have a very convenient word – “Rîn – crowned, garlanded.” We’ll add a few name suffixes to make names that mean “Crowned One.”

Masculine: Rínor.

Feminine: Ríneth, Rínel, or Rínil.

Quenya

In Quenya, translating this name is also very simple. The Quenya word for “crown, garland” is Rie. Adding suffixes onto this will be a little tricky, so I’ll include the nouns “nér – man” and “nís – woman.”

Masculine: Rio or Riener.

Feminine: Rienis.

Again, these names don’t work for your Elven characters. We’ll make the names from the adjective “Rína – crowned, garlanded.”

Masculine: Ríno.

Feminine: Ríne. In Quenya, there’s a specific word for a “garlanded maiden – Rielle” which you may recognize as part of Galadriel’s name.

Steven, I hope that you found this article fun and interesting!

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 309.

Wiktionary, “Στέφανος” Last edited: May 3rd, 2021

1 Comment

  1. steverapaport | | Reply

    Croatian Stipe and Hungarian Istvan are cool and you left them out. I think the Slavic borrowings and descendants are interesting.

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