Kal-El: Star Shine

 How have I never watched Superman:  The Movie?

I've watched Superman II and Superman III (I enjoyed II, but thought III was absolutely terrible), but I've never watched the first movie.

Last night I got a notion to give the first movie a go.  I've only made it part way through - maybe I will finish it tonight or this weekend sometime.  I stopped it where Superman finally knows who he is, used his green crystal to build a mini replica of Krypton, and used it to learn a bunch of stuff from recordings his father left him.  He 'left' Earth as part of this experience, seemingly, and toured space for 12 years to learn, and now is back disguised as Clark Kent and just beginning his job at the Daily Planet with Lois Lane.

Superman has come up briefly one time on this blog (that I could find or remember) in the post "Breaking Bald:  Omuruc".  In that post, I used William Tychonievich's reference to one of Superman's nemeses, Mr. Mxyzptlk, to play a word game with one of Asshat's names, Curumo.   Mr. Mxyzptlk's weakness or vulnerability involved his name being said backwards.  I applied that first to "Saruman" to see if we get anything but didn't get anything.  I then realized that Saruman isn't actually his name, so tried Curumo to get Omuruc, and we were off to the races.  

In that post, I mentioned that Mr. Mxyzptlk had tried this tried on Superman, but just as I had done Asbalom, he hadn't used Superman's real name, likely because he didn't know it.  He used Superman, which is a title or a nickname bestowed, like Saruman, and not actually a name.

I bring this up now because when I started watching Superman last night, Superman's real name of Kal-El came up.  I couldn't help but look up this name in Elvish as I was watching the show to see what we might be dealing with.  It is a fairly clean translation:

Kal:   Shine
El:     Star

This caught my attention.  I had dreamed this name or phrase, or at least those two words together, just in the reverse order, a few mornings ago.

As I briefly mentioned in my recent post on Gim Goru (one of our Gim Gs), the morning that I wrote that post, I had a dream where I saw the two words "Star Shine".

It was actually a dream similar to the one I had where the woman was standing in my room and shouted "Fun!", in that at first I didn't realize that I must have been dreaming.  I had woken up and was checking emails on my phone.  I briefly saw the phrase "Star Shine" as I was scrolling down, and stopped to think about it for a second because it seemed both strange to see that there in my inbox and because it was familiar.  When I looked back at my phone, the phrase was gone and I couldn't find it, even after doing some searches.  I realized I must have briefly nodded off and seen that phrase, or something.  I was still holding my phone, so I assumed I must have briefly fallen back asleep while looking at my emails.

After I was awake, in a slightly unusual move for me, I thought I should first reverse engineer the phase from English back into Elvish.  I say it was unusual, because it is always the other way around - I get an Elvish word or phrase, and I go over to Eldamo to see if I can make something in English out of it.  If I already know the English, and it is a clear phrase, it doesn't seem necessary to try and get its Elvish equivalent, unless I am trying to come up with some word game or double meanings, which I guess I do sometimes, but it is never where I go first with things.

In this case, though, it just felt important to go figure out what that might be in Elvish.

I actually started out with El as the word for star, primarily because it has been such a big factor with El-Anor (the Anor Stone or Star).  I typed in "shine" in Eldamo (you can do the same thing and see the results), and Cal and other variants like Kal (in Elvish the C and K are the same, basically) and even Gal.

El-Cal or El-Kal didn't make much sense to me then, but when I saw that Gal was an option for "Shine", I remembered that the 2nd "word" I got back in 2019 likely contained a variance of Gal, and that the word likely contained another word for star, as well.  That word was Gilga.

Gil is another word for Star, just like El.  And so abandoned El-Kal, and I ended up landing on Gil-Gal as the likeliest Elvish equivalent to the Star Shine phrase I had seen.

At the time I liked it for two reasons:  first, because it seemed to directly relate back to that second word of Gilga of Gil-Ga, and second, because I had just finished writing my post the day before on Gim Githil, and was going to be writing my 2nd post on Gim Goru.  In both those names, we have the double-G... GG.  In Gil-Gal or Gil-Ga, we have the same phenomenon, GG.  

However, hearing Kal-El last night reminded me of that original translation I landed on (El-Kal), and it seemed to make sense.

I was going to write a few more things on some other connections, and even go back to the 2019 dream of Gilga and how that came about, but I think I will close this off here.  I mainly just wanted to log that a couple days ago I had seen the phrase "Star Shine", had first landed on an Elvish translation that didn't seem to relate to anything that I knew of, only to then find it as the proper name for Superman as I began watching the movie last night.