© 2024 The Interpreter Foundation. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
All content by The Interpreter Foundation, unless otherwise specified, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
Interpreter Foundation is not owned, controlled by or affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All research and opinions provided on this site are the sole responsibility of their respective authors, and should not be interpreted as the opinions of the Board, nor as official statements of LDS doctrine, belief or practice.
Pingback: JRR Tolkien and the Book of Mormon – Why the LDS Church is True
Great article and fascinating analysis.
Here are a few tidbits, possibly relevant, on Book of Mormon naming patterns that I stumbled upon a few years ago while considering the name ‘AntiNephiLehi’:
1) All of the Book of Mormon names that contain _*anti*_ anywhere in the name, both proper and place names (as well as the name of one unit of measure), occur solely in the book of Alma, with just one exception (Antionum, which occurs first as a place name in Alma and then 400 years later as a proper name in Mormon).
2) All the proper names that begin with ‘Anti*’ belong either to civil or military rulers or leaders of some kind (assuming the ‘AntiNephiLehies’ to be ‘the people of [the king] AntiNephiLehi’).
The *anti* names appear in Nephite, Lamanite, Zoramite, and Ammonihahite contexts, but (again with the exception of the military leader Antionum at the very end of Mormon’s time) only appear during a 39-year period and only within a single (edited) volume, which itself comprises three records (cf. Alma 63:17).
It might be interesting to see if there are other naming conventions or patterns that likewise are limited to specific time spans, though that could be difficult, given how much the chronology of the rest of the Book of Mormon tends to follow an expand/compress/expand/compress pattern.
Could the methodology here be tested on some additional sets of names to help clarify the significance of the observed differences between the Book of Mormon and Tolkien? For example, what results would we get by looking at Bible names such as reported Jewish names around the time of David vs. other groups or Jewish names in the New Testament. Comparisons to names from several other authors might also be interesting.
I have now “glanced” at this essay. What I mean collaborative that I now must read is slowing and carefully. But my first impression is that once again a collaborative effort has yielded some very interesting results. In the ignorance of youth, when I first started to read the Book of Mormon seriously, it was Hugh Nibley, who was a loner, who opened the door for me. But later it was more and more the collaboration of teams of scholars who pointed the way. And this essay seems to have depended upon the contributions of a number of different scholars from several academic specialties. I hope to live long enough to see what flows from this remarkable “Exploratory Study.”
I was very pleased to see my dear friend Bruce Brown was part of this team. I have a high regard for Bruce, who also knew, as I did, the late Cleve Barlow, who was a truly remarkable scholar and person. Cleve was a convent to the Church of Jesus Christ. Even in his youth he was informed on Maori arcane lore. And he later published a book with Oxford University Press that is still useful in grasping the deeper structures of the Maori world. I was pleased to discover that both Bruce and I were blessed to have known Cleve.
Pingback: Comparing Book of Mormon Names with Those Found in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Works: An Exploratory Study - Brad Wilcox - The Mormonist