The Gim G's Part 2: Gim Guru and where it all began

 It turns out that Gim Gilthil (Ingwe) offers the key to understand the meaning of Gim Guru.

Before I get into the name of Gim Guru itself, I want to give a quick history on how it came about.  

I had mentioned before that back in 2019 I started a blog called A Good Seed, which at that point was just me thinking through things that I had been reading.  No strange words for me yet at that time.

At the beginning of July 2019, I decided to take a break from writing on that blog.  I was tired, I didn't know where else to go with my thoughts, and I was looking forward to not thinking about it.  I had been pouring over everything Tolkien and Mormonism for quite awhile, and I remember going to the library to check out some books that had nothing to do with either of those things.  We were leaving for a family reunion in Colorado (Estes Park right outside Rocky Mountain National Park) the day after the Fourth of July (Independence Day in the US), and I was looking forward to reading other things and clearing my mind a bit.  I was kind of done, and I was pretty OK with it.

We spent the Fourth of July at my in-laws. They live on a lake (we have a few of them in Minnesota), and every year the lake association holds a boat parade, where people decorate their boats and do a lap around the lake.  I had helped decorate the boat earlier in the day, and got really tired after lunch.  I decided to take a quick nap before the parade started (I was going to be on the boat helping as we drove around).

I fell asleep, and don't remember any dreams while actually taking the nap.  However, my daughter came into the room to wake me up for the parade, and as I was coming out of sleep, I had a strange vision or experience.  I was awake and sort of asleep at the same time, and I could see my daughter standing at the door telling me it was time to wake up.  Simultaneously, though, I saw a man, an older Being who had a grey type of appearance or countenance.  Hard to describe.  He was speaking, and kept repeating the phrase "Gim Guru".  He said it over and over again like a chant.  I could feel myself waking up even more as this was happening, and his voice transitioned to my own mental voice repeating the same phrase, like I was trying to hold onto it.  It was like a drum beat in my head "Gim Guru.  Gim Guru".  Repeated, like it was really important to remember.

After I was fully awake and this split vision passed, the phrase was embedded in my mind.  I needed to go get on the boat, however, and so didn't have time to really do much more with the phrase until later that afternoon and evening.

I already had an example or template of people receiving Elvish words with Doug and his books, so I already had a guess that perhaps this was Elvish.

The phrase was spoken, and not seen, so I wrote down what I heard before the parade so I could check into it later.  "Gimguru" is how I initially wrote it out, and as it turns out, that spelling is pretty spot on.  I was familiar with Eldamo, having used it on my original blog in dealing with some of the words that appeared in those books, so I used that site to look up gimguru as an entire word, and didn't find anything that matched.  I then broke it down into two segments:  gim and guru.

This was more promising.  While there wasn't anything for gim in that form, there was something for either gimi or gima.  Gima means "to hear", while Gimi means "to pay attention, heed".  When I saw this, I assumed Gim was a form of either word because these definitions made sense to me given the context of the experience.  The statement repeated over and over again, combined with the strange way in which the vision of the man overlayed the real-life image of my daughter waking me up seemed to suggest that the man was trying to get my attention, or at least someone's attention.

I remember being really encouraged by seeing this.  I then moved on to guru.  This was a little less encouraging initially.  Guru does have a definition in Eldamo:  "Death".  Obviously, this was a little concerning as this translation combination would mean something like "To hear death".  This sounded pretty ominous!

Not ready (or willing) to accept that I was being told that death is something I needed to pay attention to, I looked for other options.  Because this was a phrase that had been heard, I wondered if whether it was goru, instead - with an "o".  This was a bit of a better path initially.  Goru itself is an obsolete term for Orome.  So, in this case, you would have someone saying "Hear Orome".  OK.  Didn't make much sense at that time, but at least it wasn't something about death.

I looked at other forms of goru, including just gor.  Gor still had some bad options (horror, for example), but also some reasonably OK ones, such as "all" or "to warn, urge".  So, you could have something like "To hear all" (All to hear), or "To hear a warning".  In later compilations of these strange words, I would usually adopt the spelling of gimgoru based on the assumption that it meant something like either one of those options.

Anyway, I couldn't really do anything else with just this phrase.  So, I still ended up taking some time away from the blog (it might have been just a few weeks), but rather than being able to step away from this 'stuff', this strange experience occupied my mind.  It just really stayed with me, even if I couldn't understand what it meant.

There would be a couple other words that came over the course of the next month or two - so really not that much, though they also felt quite meaningful.  I won't go into those here, however, though I will note that, interestingly, just this morning I dreamed the English translation of one of those other initial Elvish words:  Star Shine.  

It would be in September and October that the flood gates opened on words and dreams.  But, it all started on the Fourth of July with this Gimguru phrase.

When things got really bad for me later in 2020 and parts of 2021, I would find myself wishing that day had never happened.  I would think that if only I hadn't had that experience, I would have been able to escape the gravity of whatever it is that this thing was and had become.  Or I would wonder why it happened then, at that time, when I had been looking forward to stepping away from this whole thing.  I came to really regret that day and that phrase.

But that was then, and I don't feel that way anymore.  It is pretty amazing to have an opportunity to completely revisit what that phrase means, and put a different lens on what it all means.  A bit of a second chance, or maybe more like a seed that was planted quite a while ago that finally started to grow into something more understandable.

First off, I obviously don't view gimguru as just a phrase now, but rather as a name-title:  Gim Guru, similar to Gim Githil, as stated earlier.

Also as mentioned, Gim Githil became the template that unlocked Gim Guru's meaning for me.  When I saw and understood what Gim meant (after reverse engineering Ingwe's name), and some of the evolution of the Gnomish language, everything just kind of clicked.   It was actually pretty neat.

In yesterday's post on Gim Githil or Ingwe (who I think might be Peter, as stated in that post), Gim means something like "chief, king, leader, ruler, etc."   What we saw is that in this early Gnomish language, we can get some insight into meaning by dropping the "G" and looking at what is left on the later languages on Eldamo, which seem more comprehensively captured.   We saw with Githil that we can drop the G, and this leaves us Ithil, meaning the Moon, and that this was the same word and meaning as the later versions or language of Ingwe's full name, Isil Inwe.  In other words, Isil Ingwe = Gim Githil.  

Thus, using this as a template for Gim Guru, we can take the G out Guru and get Uru for that second part of the name or title, which is entirely consistent with what was done with Githil and Ithil.   Uru means "fire".  So, at its first iteration, we have something like "fire chief or ruler".  But Fire, in this sense, is also used to relate to the Sun.  Uru is a form of Ur, which in the earliest drafts of the Lost Tales, was the actual name of the Sun.  Also as an aside, the letter 'u' is also added to the end of some words to make that word a noun, including a proper name.

Therefore, we have fire and the sun represented here with this Being (just as we had the moon with Gim Githil), and this takes us very directly to Eonwe.  He is described as the 'chief' or leader of the Maia, or the Holy Order (of the Sun/ Son).  But perhaps not as well known is that an early name for Eonwe was Urion.  As Tolkien Gateway describes:

His [Eonwe] other early name, Urion, means "He of the Sun", from ur ("the Sun"), uru ("fire") or urin ("blazing"), + the masculine suffix -ion.

So, Eonwe is very directly associated with the Sun.

I also believe that Faramir and Abinadi are two other incarnations of Eonwe, as I have explored in other posts.  Fire was a big part of both lives, with Abinadi being both burned to death by fire, but also prophesying that Noah and his priests (and their posterity) would have their own experience with fire, both in burning others and in turn being consumed in fire (a prophecy not yet fully fulfilled, in my opinion).  Faramir nearly faced the same fate of death by fire many years earlier at the hands of his father, Denethor, who lost his mind.  As I have also explored, my belief is that he lost his mind fully and completely after looking into the Anor Stone as part of his desire to see his son's fate, and he was shown a vision of fire.   Faramir's future death as Abinadi may have been a part of that, but Denethor was also specific in his ramblings about what he saw in that vision:  he saw everything burnin, and the end:

... But all shall be burned.  The West has failed.  It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended.  Ash!  Ash and smoke blown away on the wind!

Denethor saw the truth (the Palantiri cannot be made to lie), but he did not understand it.  He saw an event that has not yet happened even in our time, many years later.  He saw the burning of this world and all the tares along with it, and that his son Faramir would be involved in that final burning, though in his role as the Holy Ghost.

I have linked Eonwe-Faramir with the Holy Ghost, which on the surface seems strange (I think so, at least)), but fire and the sun is also something that links and connects these iterations of this Being.  The Holy Ghost baptizes with Fire.  Both the righteous and the wicked will be baptized with Fire, but they will obviously be very different experiences.  It is the wicked, the tares, that will experience directly what Denethor saw in the Anor Stone, while the righteous will experience a different kind of fire and burning, I think.

In any case, I am rambling and repeating what I have written or alluded elsewhere.  To summarize what I am trying to say is that Gim Guru is another name or title for Eonwe-Faramir, that it means "Sun King" just as Gim Githil means "Moon King".  The Sun and the Moon is represented in the earliest names of these two Beings, and that this at least partially explains their involvement and work in the story to come, even if we don't fully know in what shape that involvement will be.

Of all the characters and storylines that have been explored on this blog, the stories of Faramir and Eowyn are ones that remains central.  My mind keeps coming back to their story, and to the Stones and stories that seem to be associated with them.  That just seems to be how it works in my mind right now, and in some ways it makes sense since I have placed so much weight on the Stones and stories that they seem to have been involved with, and will at some future point be involved with again.

But it was interesting to see that in some ways the character of Eonwe-Faramir has been here from the very beginning - the very first word, even.  That name, Gim Guru, I now take as belonging to him, and it was thus this name and Being that the man in that strange dream/ vision was drilling into my head back on that fateful afternoon on Independence Day, 2019.   

That is why I mentioned in my last post that it was meaningful for me to come to this conclusion and interpretation regarding this name.  Besides making sense (in its own strange way), it helps explain why the character of Eonwe-Faramir has played such a major role in my thinking and writing:  his name was literally what kicked off my whole strange journey.