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The eighth line of Átaremma, Tolkien’s Quenya translation of the Lord’s Prayer. The first word sív’ is an elided form of sívë¹ “as”. It is followed by the emphatic second person plural subject pronoun emmë¹ “us” and apsenet “forgive [them]”, the aorist form of the verb apsen- “forgive” with a plural direct object suffix -t. The fourth word tien “those” is a dative (indirect object) form of tie, apparently a variant of the third person plural pronoun te.

The second half of this phrase is the subordinate clause i úcarir emmen “who trespass against us”, composed of i² “who”, úcarir “trespass” (aorist plural of úcar- “to do wrong, to sin”) and emmen “against us” (dative of emmë¹). The last of these is unusual in that it has an emphatic pronoun used as an object rather than the subject.

Decomposition: Broken into its constituent elements, this phrase would be:

sív(e) emmë apsene-t tie-n i úcari-r emme-n = “*as we forgive-them those-for who trespass-(plural) us-against”

Taken together, the first half of the phrase has a subject (emmë), verb (apsene), a direct object suffix (-t) and an indirect object (tien). The sense of the phrase is probably something like “*as we forgive them [the trespasses] for those [the trespassers] who trespass against us”.

Conceptual Development: Earlier versions of the prayer (I-IV) used a different verb avatyar- for “forgive”, as well as different prepositions for “so”: ier (I-IIa) and yan (III-IV). They also lacked any Quenya equivalent of “those who” (tien i in versions V-VI). The literal meaning of this phrase in versions I-IV of the prayer seems to be “*as we forgive our trespassers”.

Tolkien considered a variety of ways to express “trespassers”. In version I-III, he used a (?verbal) element meaning “trespass” with the agental suffix -ndo: lucando (I), lucindo (IIa-IIb) and rocindë (III), all meaning “trespasser” and all in the plural. In version IV, he used rohtalië “trespass-people”, a compound of the noun rohta “trespass” and lië “people”.

These he combined with either the independent pronoun menya “our” (I-IIb, IV) or the possessive suffix -mma² “our” (I deletion, III). Finally, he used an ablative element meaning “from”, either the preposition va (I-IIb) or the ablative suffix -llo (I deletion, III-IV). There was a similar construction for the verb avatyar- in line 6.

In version V of the prayer, Tolkien corrected úcarer to úcarir. This second form is more consistent with the rules Tolkien followed elsewhere in forming the aorist tense of a (basic) verb: it ends in an -e if unsuffixed but has an -i- between it and any suffix (-r in this case). However, Tolkien still used the form úcarer in version IV of the prayer, for reasons unknown.

	I	IIa	IIb	III	IV	V	VI
ier			yan			sív’
emme
{avatyarirat >>}	avatyarir ta		avatyarilta			apsenet
						tien i
{lucandollommar >>}	va menya lucandor	va menya lucindor		rocindillomman	menya rohtaliello	úcarer emmen

For better consistency with Tolkien’s other writings, I have used the more typical aorist form úcarir for the entry of this phrase. As Helge Fauskanger points out (LP-AM), there is a similar issue with apsenet, which might be expected to be **apsenit, though in this case the variation may be due to the fact that object suffixes are appended directly to the verb instead of to a subject suffix.