Orcs become oaka, and elves turn into mū, as Tolkien’s masterpiece is published in the endangered Polynesian language

Many nights over the last year, Keao NeSmith would return to his home on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and think about hobgoblins. Not because he was afraid of the evil fantasy creature, but because he was translating J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” into Hawaiian.

“I didn’t even know what a hobgoblin is,” NeSmith said of the process of becoming more familiar with Tolkien’s world. “We have a generic term that means ‘monster,’ but it’s too general.”

Eventually he scrapped the search for some match with “goblin” and went with a Hawaiianized form of “orc,” or “’oaka” — in which the apostrophe represents a glottal stop — an actual Hawaiian word that refers to the gaping jaws of a dog that’s about to bite. Thus a hobgoblin became nui ’oaka, or “big orc.”

He also had to think how to translate Tolkien’s “Eldar” (“elves” in English), which has no analogue in the Hawaiian tradition. “I didn’t know the difference between Santa’s elves and Keebler’s elves and came to find that Tolkien’s elves are very different,” he said. The closest matches in Hawaiian mythology were forest-dwelling creatures called the mū, but they are unsophisticated creatures who make screechy noises in the mountains. NeSmith decided to adapt the mū, which are like the Eldar in the sense that they’re shy and sing in a haunting way, and added “wao,” or “wilderness.” Now elves are mūwao. More.

See: Al Jazeera America

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