I could give an intro to Tolkien and his influence on the fantasy genre - but instead, I’ll
quote beloved humorist and author, Terry Pratchett. Said Pratchett in 2010: “[Tolkien] has become
a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so
often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape
on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either
has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, [...] or is in fact standing on
Mt. Fuji.” - Terry Pratchett
So Tolkien is widely regarded as the most influential author on the fantasy genre…
period. But one of the less-discussed aspects of his work is the way Tolkien used constructed
language in his writing.
Nowadays authors are constantly making up words and languages for the worlds they build,
but Tolkien was unique in that he constructed languages first, and then created worlds so
his fictional languages would have somewhere to live.
In 1958, he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher: “[The Lord of the Rings] was an attempt
to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem
real”
And In a lecture he gave to some fellow philologists In 1931, Tolkien described his fondness for
constructing fictional languages as a “secret vice” - almost like a shameful hobby. But
Tolkien’s “secret vice” wasn’t just a strange quirk, it ended up as one of the
most influential aspects of everything he wrote.
Let’s talk a little bit about constructed languages, or as they’re called in the Community,
a thing that exists, “ConLangs”
According to linguist Arika Okrent: “There are trends, or eras, in language invention
that reflect the preoccupations of the surrounding culture, and so, in a way, the history of
invented languages is a story about the way we think about language”
According to Okrent, the history of constructed languages is, for most of its history, extremely
utilitarian. Between the 17th-18th centuries, the idea of a constructed Universal language
was thought of as a way of cataloging and understanding the world, and is linked with
the development of science and mathematical notation, as opposed to natural language which
was seen as flawed where it was not logical.
But by the 19th Century, attention shifted to the social use of language; in 1887, polish
linguist L. L. Zamenhof invented Esperanto, to this day the most widely spoken constructed
language in the world. It was described as an “easy and flexible language that would
serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding”
But Tolkien was not the first to invent language in fiction – Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book
Utopia, Francis Godwin’s 1638 book Man in the Moone, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's
Travels, became important landmarks in the early use of language invention. Swift created
names, place names and phrases in several languages spoken of places like Lilliput and
brobdingnag
But none of these examples reach the level of complexity of Tolkien’s languages. According
to Okrent: “...these creations usually aren’t languages so much as they are ideas, a bit
of vocabulary, a few phrases. … They serve the story, never the other way around… For
Tolkien, language creation was an art all its own.”
Tolkien intertwined myth and language to create, in his words, an “illusion of historicity.”
From his earliest language writing in 1907 all the way to his death in the 1970’s,
Tolkien never stopped developing what he called his ‘nexus of languages’”
Tolkien didn’t just see language creation as a hobby, but an art, akin to writing fiction,
and saw the two is as intertwined.In his own words: “For perfect construction of an art-language
it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant […] the
converse indeed is true -- your language construction will breed a mythology.”
He notes that in contrast to more utilitarian constructed languages like Esperanto, his
interest was in associating language invention with pleasure.
But Tolkien tended to downplay his languages to friends and family, calling it his “secret
vice” and using such dismissive and self-deprecating ways to describe them as “my nonsense fairy
language,” “unpublished inventions known only to my family,” and “the shame-faced
revelation of specimens of my own more considered effort.”
By the time Tolkien started working on The Hobbit in The Early 1930s he had already invented
the “Nexus of languages” which gave his nomenclature, again in his words, a “coherence
and consistency” that he found lacking in “other name inventors.”
The first instance we see of this nexus is simply the mention of “Moria” -- Moria
is a Noldorin, later Sindarin or your basic Elvish name meaning “Black Chasm”
We’d later also know it by its Dwarvish name, Khazad-dûm
But while there is evidence of Tolkien's language invention serving his nomenclature in The
Hobbit, it was not until the publication of the first entry in the Lord of the Rings trilogy,
The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954, that readers were given the first longer samples of his
Elvish languages.
On page 80 of Fellowship, Frodo flexes his language skills by speaking Elen síla lúmenn’
omentielvo, “A star Shines on the hour of our meeting”, you go, Frodo, work those
college language credits.
This is the first example of an Elvish language, in this case the high Elven language of quenya,
appearing as dialog in the text.
Later in the same volume, some elves speak it and we also get some poems - Galadriel’s
lament aka “Namárië” which means “farewell”
Language is a recurring theme throughout the books -- even the tree-like ents not only
get a few “inaccurate” (Treebeard’s words, not mine) sampling of their own extremely
slow and thoughtful language, but also discuss the way it differs from the languages of elves,
dwarves and men. It’s not only extremely slow, it’s also highly detailed.
Even the Elves, master linguists, could not learn Old Entish.
And in Return of the King we get appendices that talk a LOT about the languages and the
“translation” (Tolkien acting as a historian, not a fiction writer, tee hee)
Here he equivocates “Westron” - the common language of men, with Modern English, and
Rohirric, the language of Rohan, with Old English, and so on..
But Tolkien’s mythology is most meticulously developed in The Silmarillion , which is Tolkien
in full self-indulgence mode. It was published posthumously, so we don’t know what he would
have wanted the reader in on exactly, but it’s the most detailed outlining of his
mythology that’s been published.
So let’s talk specifics about this nexus of languages.
Sindarin - Spoken by the Grey Elves - basically the “common tongue” of elves in middle
earth in the third age, when LotR takes place, so Legolas, Elrond and Arwen - they speak
Sindarin. It has characteristics similar to Welsh and other Celtic languages (such as
Irish, Manx, Scottish, and Cornish)
Quenya is the language of the Eldar after they return to Middle Earth - so it’s the primary language
of high elves like Galadriel and Celeborn, but the elves of Lothlórien still speak Sindarin
on the day to day. So it’s considered a high, formal language - Aragorn speaks it
sometimes .
Quenya’s biggest real-world language influence was Finnish, which was JRR’s fave, and its
use in Finnish epics like “The Kalevala”
Quenya focused on the use of open, long vowels, and his sound combination rules emphasized
a softening of consonant stops; all elements of Finnish phonetics
That said, many of the words in Quenya tend to end in open vowels (e.g.. Norolinde, pirukendea,
nieninqea), whereas in Sindarin words tend to end in consonants (hindar, Nebrachar, magradhaid)
giving Sindarin a different sound aesthetic than Quenya. Quenya and Sindarin both descend
from a common ancestor, Quendian, because Tolkien wanted his elvish languages to feel
lived in, and to evolve like real languages do.
So where English, German, Spanish, Irish, Persian and Hindi all descend from the same
proto-langauge and are in the same language family, so it goes with Elvish languages.
This is in contrast to--
Black speech is almost kind of a parody of international auxiliary languages like Esperanto.
Sauron “created” it to be its own evil language inaccessible to outsiders - not an
organic language within a language family that evolved over time.
The most famous use of this, of course, the inscription on the One Ring, even though it’s
written in an Elvish script (we’ll get to that).
Weirdly, in-universe it’s mostly restricted to Sauron’s evil higher-ups like the Nazgul
that speak it - most orcs just speak like a cockney variant on Westron (English)
And then there’s the Dwarves and their Dwarvish language, Khuzdul. Based partially on Semitic
languages like Arabic and Hebrew, --
Yeah, about that...
Tolkien noted some similarities between Dwarves and Jewish people: both were, in his words:
"at once natives and aliens in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but
with an accent due to their own private tongue…". Tolkien stated that "[Dwarves’] words
are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic."
So, yeah, maybe a little tone deaf.
Khuzdul has its own script that is based on nordic runes, and is derived from Cirth,
another invention of Tolkien. But in universe not much is known about it, because the Dwarves
keep it ~secret~, so it has very little vocabulary compared to Elvish languages
Tengwar, the writing system used to write Elvish and black speech, is utilized much
more in terms of script. Most famous use - One ring to rule them all/Ash nazg durbatulûk,
ash nazg gimbatul
It has been described as a script that looks like a "mixture of Hebrew, Greek, and Pitman's
shorthand,” but we can only speculate on what writing systems influenced Tengwar. The
way it incorporates vowels reminds me of abugida scripts like Devanagari, which is used for
north indian languages like Hindi. So given all we know about these languages,
is it possible to speak Quenya and Sindarin? No.
The vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of Tolkien's invented languages, even of Quenya and Sindarin,
are far too incomplete to allow its casual, conversational, or quotidian use.
So a lot of what you see in the movies is guesswork, much of which was constructed by
linguist David Salo, who kinda filled in the plugs in the DNA sequence gaps with frog DNA.
Even before the publication of the final volume of The Lord of the Rings, fans begin to write
to Tolkien to ask for more information about his invented languages. And he actually indulged
them… for a little while
Un...til they started calling his house in the middle of the night and he had to move
and remove his listing from the phone book Starting in the 1960’s, Linguists and scholars
began to create societies dedicated to the study of his languages, like the Elvish Linguistic
Fellowship, which collabed w/ JRR’s son Christopher in the 90’s to edit and publish
his father's numerous manuscripts of detailed linguistic material.
Ever since, there have been Tolkien language bulletins, magazines, and societies popping
up dedicated to studying his languages.
And they exploded in popularity with the release of the lord of the rings films, starting in
2001. And Tolkien’s influence lives on
Richard Adams’s Watership Down has the rabbit language “Lapine” which is integrated
throughout the text so that the reader absorbs it through context clues, So when towards
the end of the book good rabbit tells bad rabbit “Silflay hraka u enmeer rah”
- effectively, $$%$##&*(&&^% - the reader understands it without needing
it translated
Nowadays, conlangs are in the popular mainstream. As Star Trek was becoming A Thing just as
LotR was exploding in popularity in the US, Klingon - the most immediate (and obvious)
descendant, is now the most highly developed conglang there is … that we know of...
And also has the highest number of speakers for any fictional conlang (besides Esperanto, which
is still …. trying.)
Now producers of movies and tv shows actually hire professional linguists and members of
conlang societies to build languages for dialogue. The Dothraki language in George RR Martin’s
ASOIAF which Martin had only briefly outlined in the novels was developed into a full functioning
language in Game of Thrones.
And for Avatar, James Cameron hired linguist Paul Frommer to create the Na’vi language
(largely based on Polynesian languages and things that sound “tribal yet futuristic”
like the Papyrus font)
Even video games like Skyrim and Dragon Age have their own language systems. In Skyrim
learning to use the dragon language is a crucial part of the gameplay.
Tolkien’s work played a crucial role in elevating language invention to a key part
of inventing imaginary worlds and elements of invented language are now part and parcel
of science fiction + fantasy.
David Peterson, who fleshed out George R. R. Martin’s Dothraki and High Valyrian languages
from a few words to fully fleshed out conlangs, claims that prior to 1991, people looked down
on conlangers…
But, post 2015, he says the conlang community has really taken off… “There are conlangers
active on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook who have no connection to any of the original
communities--and they’re drawing inspiration from languages that didn’t exist even five
years ago.” (15-17)
So it's kind of funny that Tolkien was so shy about the fact that he had a hobby of
inventing languages, since it ended up being incredibly influential on not just fantasy
fiction but fiction in general.
So don’t be ashamed of your “secret vice” - post that cringe - you might accidentally
invent a genre.