apsene, verb forgive, not previously attested. Apart from making the "external" observation that this verb may echo English absolve, absolution, it is difficult to say anything certain about its intended etymology. The first element may somehow be related to #apa- after (as in Apanónar the After-born, an Elvish name of Mortal Men as the Second-born of Ilúvatar: WJ:387). The semantic relationships must however remain vague, all the more so when the element #sen is wholly obscure[13]. #Apsen- forgive would most likely behave as a "basic" verb or consonant stem, so that the "uninflected stem" (here used in an infinitival sense) is apsene for older *apseni. According to the system Tolkien used elsewhere, this would become apseni- when any ending is added. However, in the text before us we also have the suffixed variant apsenet, not as we might expect *apsenit. It seems that when writing this text, Tolkien’s evolution of his languages was in a "phase" where the variation -e vs. -i- did not take place, though he had used this system before and later returned to it; see care for a fuller discussion of this peculiarity. – The ending -t seen in apsenet is apparently the same pronominal suffix -t them as in laituvalmet we shall praise them in the Cormallen Praise. The whole phrase emme apsenet thus means we forgive them – sc. other people’s sins/trespasses, not the offenders themselves, for they are apparently denoted by the dative pronoun tien instead: As we argued above, the direct object (accusative object) of #apsen- forgive is the matter that is forgiven, while the indirect object (dative object) is the person(s) forgiven. The object ending -t them may be a shortened and suffixed form of the independent accusative pronoun te them, concerning which see tien. It may also be related to the pronominal ending -nte they (UT:317 cf. 305), which could be a nasal-infixed version of -t.
ar, conjunction and, well known from Namárië and other sources. The Silmarillion Appendix, entry ar-, defines this element as beside, outside and adds that this is the origin of "Quenya ar and, Sindarin a". A similar explanation is given in the Etymologies (LR:349 s.v. ar2-), and this may well be Christopher Tolkien’s source in this case. However, this entry in Etym. says nothing about the Sindarin (or Noldorin) conjunction; only Quenya ar is mentioned. Normally, we would expect a simple stem ar to become ar both in Quenya and Sindarin, not a in the latter. Indeed the Sindarin of the King’s Letter has ar instead of a as the conjunction and (SD:128-129); however, a is found in LotR (the Cormallen Praise includes the words Daur a Berhael Frodo and Sam). The King’s Letter, showing ar instead of a, was never published during Tolkien’s lifetime, so he would not be "bound" by it. Besides the a of the Cormallen Praise, a later source also has ah; MR:304 gives Finrod ah Andreth for Finrod and Andreth. This reproduces a post-LotR source, so this ah Tolkien must have intended to be "compatible" with a in the already published LotR: It would seem that a manifests as ah when the next word begins in a vowel, or at least in a-. These examples from Sindarin seem to suggest that Tolkien now imagined the primitive stem yielding the conjunction to be *as rather than ar, for while the latter should have yielded ar both in Quenya and Sindarin, the former can indeed produce Quenya (*az >) ar and Sindarin a with a side-form ah that is used before vowels. Compare the stem os- round, about producing Noldorin/Sindarin o about, concerning, with "h before vowel, as o Hedhil concerning Elves [Edhil]" (LR:379). The h that turns up before vowels is a remnant of the s that the original stem ended in. Same for Sindarin ah and from *as: when the next word began in a consonant, h was almost inaudible and disappeared (*ah Berhael > a Berhael), but before a vowel it survived. The text before us provides new possible evidence supporting the notion that in the post-LotR period, the conjunction and is to be derived from a stem *as rather than ar: The preposition as with, here attested for the first time, could plausibly be related to the word for and. See as for further discussion. Ar as the Sindarin word for and in the King’s Letter may reflect the earlier concept of the stem being ar – evidently rejected shortly after the Letter was written, but before LotR was published.
aranielya, noun with pronominal ending: thykingdom. Regarding the ending -lyathy, see esselya. #Araniekingdom is a hitherto unknown word, but obviously related to aran king. The latter is undoubtedly to be referred to the stem ara- noble (PM:363, cf. the entry ar(a)- in the Silmarillion Appendix); aran could reflect an "extended" form *aran. Alternatively, aran could simply represent a primitive form derived from ara- by adding a masculine ending, like *arano. (A quite different etymology for the words for king was set out in the Etymologies, where aran is the Noldorin form only, corresponding to Quenya haran: See LR:360. However, aran later became the word for king in Quenya and Noldorin/Sindarin alike.) The word #aranie kingdom includes what is normally an abstract ending. The ending -ie (-ië) can be gerundial or infinitival (see UT:317, commenting on en-yalië), or it can correspond to English abstract endings like -ness, e.g. verie boldness (LR:352 s.v. ber-). If I had been presented with the word #aranie with no context or gloss, my best guess would probably have been that it means *kingship. When it is used for kingdom it may properly refer to the abstract reign of a king rather than to his realm as a physical place. However, precisely what is meant by Biblical references to "the Kingdom of God" is a matter for theologians rather than linguists. In the original Greek texts (Matthew 6:10, Luke 11:2), the word translated "kingdom" appears as basileia; this is also properly an abstract, and Tolkien may simply have carried its etymology over into Quenya (Greek basileus : basileia king : kingdom = Quenya aran : #aranie). In their Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, Arndt and Gingrich define basileia as "1. kingship, royal power, royal rule, kingdom… 2. kingdom, i.e., the territory ruled over by a king… 3. esp. the royal reign or kingdom of God, a chiefly eschatological concept." When coining the word #aranie for Quenya, Tolkien may have intended it to cover about the same shades of meaning. As for the meaning "the territory ruled over by a king", it is interesting to notice that the normally abstract ending -ie also appears in #nórie country (compounded and inflected in Namárië: sindanóriello out of a grey country). The stem is obviously ndor- as in the more usual word nóre land (LR:376, cf. WJ:413).
13
According to VT43:18, Tolkien derived apsene from sen "let loose, free, let go" supplied with a somewhat obscure prefix aba-, becoming ap- when the syncope brought b into contact with p.