I recently read somewhere that Tolkien based Quenya, which I guess can be best described as high church Elvish, to some extent on Finnish. Sindarin was the everyday language used between elves.

The way I understand it is that Quenya was the ceremonial and official Elvish, while Sindarin was for everyday use. You pray in Quenya, then speak Sindarin while having coffee and cake in the Fellowship Hall. Kind of like speaking Latin at court or in the cathedral, but your mother berating you in Italian on the way home because she caught you staring out the window during the homily.

Then I saw a meme that talked about how when Gandalf announced that the thing coming for them was a Balrog of Morgoth, Legolas was the only one in the group that understood just how bad this was. He had heard the stories and legends, and knew that they couldn’t fight this thing, and they probably couldn’t run from it.

At that moment, I visualized Legolas, either in his head or out loud, starting a quiet prayer in Quenya like his mother might have taught him. It was one of those moments in life where there are no atheists in foxholes and the mind goes back to what it can remember.

But he ends it with a word he might have learned from his father, or perhaps looked up in the Quenya dictionary – Perkele, because when you step in it really bad, you bring out those words too.