Nyarna and Brittany Spears

In a brief dream last night I stood in an area where in front of me were words, almost floating in the air.  I knew they were words, but they were shapeless, like blobs.  I focused on one of these word blobs and began to 'shape' it, meaning as I focused on it the word began to form in such as way that it was now both revealed and readable.

The word that first formed was "Nyarna".  Encouraged by this, I turned my attention to the other formless words around me.  However, I found that they were slippery, in the sense that as I felt the word taking shape, I would lose it and couldn't quite get them to take a form I could make out.  It was during this process of attempting, and failing, to bring form to these words that I woke up.

Later, I fell asleep again, and while I can't remember the exact dream, I woke up, or was in the process of waking up, with the name Brittany Spears on my mind.  I don't remember if I had visually seen the name, but that specific spelling was an important part of it.  Brittany.  This was an obvious reference to the singer Britney Spears, but I understood it to mean something different, or rather not refer specifically to that person.  I actually didn't even know or remember how to spell Britney Spears' name, and only in my later searches would discover that the name on my mind had been spelled differently (Brittany vs. Britney).

So, let me go through some thoughts relative to both dreams.

Nyarna

Truthfully, the Brittany Spears reference and mystery occupied my mind most after waking up in the morning, and is what I looked into first.  Nyarna would just be on my mind a little later, but I will cover it off first.

Nyarna is an Elvish word which means "long epic tale, story, legend".  In looking this up, I remembered that this word, or something like it, had appeared back in my 2019/2020 set of words, though I couldn't remember where.

It turns out that it is the word "enyarno" that I was thinking of, and had translated in the same way as meaning a tale or story.  The word would have been sounded out back then, and I assumed that "enyarno" was my way of writing out "nyarno" (literally saying the n as en).  The -o ending, recall, can sometimes point to a noun, object, etc.  So that made sense to me at the time several years ago, and still makes sense now.

The interesting thing, however, is the Nyarna reference in my words literally comes right after where I have left off with my 2019 words walkthrough on this blog.  I had fast-forwarded a few weeks to the smoking of the Anor Stone (which is what I think happened), found in my post last week titled "Smoking a crystal:  Darkening the Sun in its going forth".  Since then, I have written a bit on Pharazon, other topics, etc. but have not really returned back to those 2019 words yet.

The mention of the Anor Stone being smoked or darkened occurred on Nov. 17, 2019.  Four days later on Nov. 21 there is one of the more interesting set of words from that time, and two days after that came the phrase which included the Nyarno mention.  Those two days, Nov. 21 and 23, I think are on the same topic and thus likely a continuation of the same thought.

So, how does my dream factor into this?  I think it is saying to go back to where I left off and take the next step and explore what they might mean.  That next set of words, if I focus on them, might reveal more clearly what they mean, just like in my dream, whereas if I skip ahead and look at words following (which I have done a bit of trying to make sense of a few things) I might be less successful in deriving meaning from those words, or being able to 'shape' them into something understandable.

That is what I have landed on, at least, and I think it makes sense.  It is worth a shot, so that is what I am going to do.  Next post I will give the Nov. 21 and 23 words an overview, so stay tuned.

For the remainder of this post, however, I want to discuss the Brittany Spears reference, which was interesting to explore.

Brittany Spears

I started by looking up the means of Brittany, of course.  Standard playbook.

Initially, this wasn't super helpful, or so I thought.   Brittany simple means "from the land of the Britons" or "from Britain".  OK.

But then I noticed in my search that Brittany, although it has everything to do with Britain, actually sits in France. 

I found this really interesting, for reasons that should be obvious to whoever has kept up with posts on this blog.  The theme of things being supposedly in Britain but actually in France factors in fairly heavily into some of the story I have explored here, specifically with the Shire and Tom Bombadil's House being located in France, whereas everyone assumes England.

Even recently, we had Bruce Charlton, an Englishman, using French phrases in discussing Tom.

The fact that Brittany is an actual place in France then had me going down a quick thought exercise of wondering whether it is possible that Brittan is where Tom's House could actually be, if one were to try and track it down?

I spent a little bit of time on this, but it was kind of a dead end.  There are maps that overlay Middle-earth with Europe, with most/ all of them having the Shire up in England.  I've gone through not-very-detailed looks before about how the map would shift if you moved that down to France, and I still don't really have a good perspective.  In this case, because Brittany is on the very northwest corner of France, having Tom's House there would either mean the scale of Middle-earth is much smaller than both Tolkien and readers assume, or that there is a significant portion or Middle-earth lands that then go underwater.  You essentially move the map directly south, to place the Shire in Brittany, and significant portions of western Eriador fall off into the Atlantic, and Gondor and Mordor are at the bottom of the Mediterranean.  I mean, people have brought up things like Doggerland, where much more of Europe was above water after the last ice age, but I don't really know much about that or have really looked into alternative Europeans geography.

This wasn't a problem I was prepared to tackle today, basically, so I pretty much dropped the line of questioning as to whether Brittany, France has any physical location relevance for us here.

I returned to thinking on the name, and I remembered that William Tychonievich actually wrote a post about Britney Spears, and one of her songs "Lucky".  In that post, he changed the lyrics of one line slightly to read "She's so rocky, shisa star", and I remembered it because I had left a comment there talking about rocky stars.  In the line, you have someone saying that she is both rocky and a star (per William's change).  Rocky stars (or Stone Stars) come into play in my story here in the form of the Palantir, with the Ithil Stone being one of those.  

In that post, William spent time on Moon symbolism, and I also mentioned that this seemed to fit in well with the concept of the Ithil Stone.

This thought pulled me completely away from the location analysis, and to the Ithil Stone and to its owner, Eowyn.

It was then I realized the last name Spears tied into very recent commentary regarding Eowyn.  In my post "What is even more amazing than a talking dog?  A spelling bee!", I used my son's homework assignment to go on some paths that led toward Eowyn and the story on her Ithil Stone, the story being one way in which she is a Spelling Bee (Spell being a Story).

William would go on to also analyze my son's homework assignment in his post "There's more than one way to spell a bee" and he came up with a few other creative references to the Bee symbolism.  I left a comment on that post saying that a Bee could potentially be said to skewer (based on the German word "speil") someone if their stinger was large enough, and then proceeded to make the analogy between the Sword that Eowyn (as Izilba) carried and to the Word or Story that she possesses on her Stone:

A bee could definitely prick someone, and if its stinger was big enough, skewer them. In Words of the Faithful, Deseret-Izilba was known for her sword, which she skewered a few folks with, and which she drew out of beeswax like Arthur pulling Excalibur out of Stone.

"Izilba walked to the cube, ran her hands over the bee's wax. . . her hands grasped the sword's hilt, and she pulled it from the wax with ease, and the sword sang as it came forth, laughing that it's restful incarceration had come to an end, and the evil of this new day would by its steel be stung, shivered, and sliced"

We've compared the Word and Stories to a Sword, so could be a link there with Spell/Speil.

To spear someone would be the same thing as skewering them, or piercing them.  

So Brittany Spears, the name from this morning, seems to point back to Eowyn, even if the complete rationale for the different spelling of the first name isn't completely clear to me (or perhaps it was just to be a clever play on the France-England theme and that is all).  Even my first dream with the word Nyarna, which means Story or Tale, now seemed to tie directly into this line of thinking.  As you will see, and as I hope to explore or understand better, those November words I mentioned earlier and which I will cover next seem to be about Eowyn and the story she had been compiling.

So, Brittany Spears may in the end have something to do about locations in France - I don't know or have any good ideas on that - but it seemed to definitely point back, very specifically, to Eowyn and her Story.

One other interesting thing that occurred that might just support this line of thinking.

I mentioned Bruce Charlton and his French words that unknowingly tied to my English-French theme.  I went over to his blog later in the morning after I had been thinking of some of this, and making or expanding on some of these connections with the Brittany Spears-Eowyn-Ithil Stone connection, and saw that his latest post had the title "It only takes One side to make a war".

Ha!

I laughed because this is a paraphrase of one of Eowyn's lines from LOTR.  I think it is sufficiently well known or referenced that I imagine Bruce either purposefully used it in his title knowing its source, or it was unconsciously there from his knowledge and readings of LOTR.  I scanned the post, but didn't see any specific callout to Eowyn.  It seemed to be about WWIII or impending calamity or something and I wasn't very interested.  I was just concerned with the title.

In LOTR, while in the Houses of Healing, Eowyn asks the Warden of any news regarding the war.  The Healer tells her what he knows, and then says as a Healer he just patches the holes made by swords and that there is enough trouble to go around without any wars to make more trouble.  Eowyn replies:

"It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, Master Warden," answered Eowyn. "And those who have not swords can still die upon them..."

Anyway, that was an interesting little sync to have tied the Nyarna and Brittany Spears references back to Eowyn and her Story, and here we have Bruce on fire again with an Eowyn paraphrase for his title.

UPDATE:

In my hurry to get the post out, I forgot to mention the interesting fact that Brittany, or at least a town within it, is strongly connected with Rohan in LOTR.  Rohan is actually a place in Brittany, and Tolkien mentioned being aware of it when he wrote the book.  So, another interesting tie to Eowyn since she was Rohirrim.  You can reference the comment I left below for the letter excerpt where Tolkien mentions Brittany's connection to Rohan, and Rohan's linguistic connection to both the Celtic/ Brittany/ Germanic heritage as well as Elvish.