Well, my goodness. It looks like I have to add "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" to the list of movies to watch ala Xanadu.
Which is funny, because I added the Indiana Jones scenes only after thinking of them as I was in the process of typing up the last post. And that last scene in particular, with Indy in the classroom, was a complete afterthought in terms of deciding to include it, and as you will see here shortly it turns out to be really interesting (I think, at least).
Anyway, so I went back to other things after wrapping up that post. In the back of my mind, though, I was thinking about what we saw Indy unwrap and show Marcus after the class was dismissed. It was yet another cross.
This didn't escape my attention the first time - I mean, I noticed it, obviously, but I didn't really pay attention to it. I was paying more attention to what Harrison Ford was saying. But I started to think about that cross.
The cross that Indy recovered and showed Marcus was called the Cross of Coronado. This is a completely fictional artifact, by the way. There is no real cross by such a name (a movie replica is pictured above).
The cross is what opens up the movie with a young Indiana Jones as a Boy Scout in Utah, of all places. I somehow forgot that this movie essentially establishes Indy as growing up in Utah among the Mormons, a connection itself we might not want to easily ignore. He recovers the cross, only to have to surrender it when he returns to his dad's home. Later, we see him as an adult recovering the cross from a boat, and that is what leads us to the scene in the classroom when he reveals the cross to Marcus.
The cross will not be seen again in the movie, but it does set a religious undertone to the movie itself, that will become more apparent as the plot develops, as I remember it.
Anyway, again, it's a completely fictional item, though it uses a real name: Coronado (as in the Spanish Conquistador).
It is this name and its association with the cross that started to work on me.
I noticed the first syllable is our old friend: Kor/ Cor. Either spelling works, and we clearly have Tirion referenced here... you know, the place where I have been suggesting that X marks the spot for in a few of my last posts. It therefore caught my attention and gave me the motivation to look up the rest of the name on Eldamo to see what we have.
"Onad", the next part after Kor, didn't yield anything, so I looked up the phonetic alternative of "Anad", which is exactly how people say that syllable in the Coronado name, with more of the "ah" sound for the "o". You can try it to see.
Anyway, with "Anad", we struck gold, so to speak. At a first cursery take we get very simply: "long, far".
OK, so this works somewhat well, right? I have been writing that Kor is where the X takes us, and that this place is very far away. The name here seems to bear this out. In other words, at this stage, Coronado in Elvish translates directly into something like "Kor far". Somewhat interesting, if not yet a home run.
But it gets a lot better!
Buried in the translation notes on Eldamo for the root of "Anad" is this gem:
There is a later mention of the root √ANAD in a 1959 note, but in that note Tolkien considered transferring the sense “long” to a new root √ƷAN as a variant of √YAN, so that he could use √ANAD < √ANA- as the basis for words meaning “gate” (PE17/40). This new use of √ANAD would be a replacement for the 1930s root ᴹ√AD “gate” (Ety/AD). In another set of 1959 etymological notes, Tolkien did indeed give primitive forms ✶ʒandā “long” vs. yanā/yandā “wide” as derivatives of √ƷAN and √YAN respectively (PE17/155).
In case you didn't read that and skipped ahead, what Paul Strack (the owner of the Eldamo site) is saying here, is that in the last known etymological notes relating to ANAD, Tolkien was considering giving a somewhat different/ clearer meaning to that word: Gate.
Are you kidding me?
With that change (and Mr. Strack concedes that Tolkien did indeed follow through with at least part of his planned meaning clarification/ transition in other notes from that same year, potentially inferring his intent on ANAD for Gate was legitimate), we get Coronado to mean, quite literally, Kor-Gate in Elvish.
The Gate of Kor.
Call me crazy, but I have now a few posts here where we have likened the X to both Kor itself as well as the door or passageway to it, and here we have the cross (with Jesus on it) being called something like the "X of the Gate of Kor".
X marks the spot, indeed.
So, like I said, you can imagine what movie is next up on my watch list. We'll see if there are any other interesting things. I mean, if I see Harrison Ford also roller skating around a black hole in this film, maybe with his shirt off, then I'll really know we are on to something...
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