Tolkien’s English and the ‘Fiction of Authenticity’

An after-dinner speech given at the Tolkien Society’s AGM, 19 April 2008, revised 2015 for the anniversary meeting of Taruithorn

Note: the conclusion of this piece is in no way intended to undermine Tolkien’s achievements, but simply to draw attention to a logical tension within the linguistic framework of his Legendarium

Mathom, eleventy,  flet, wolfrider, barrow-wight, kingsfoil: not Elvish but English words skilfully devised by Tolkien to play their part in his great story. In our book The Ring of Words,[1] Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and I set out to investigate such words and names, denoting people, natural features, artefacts, and institutions of Middle-earth, especially in the Third Age. Words referring to hobbit custom, such as smial, shirriff, thain, and farthing; words used by others, such as elven, flet, halfling, and waybread. Whether they relate to human, elvish, entish, or even orkish life, they are English-style words because the story is told in modern English, and the protagonists—the hobbits, Aragorn the Ranger, Gandalf, and so on—are represented as speaking modern English. Alongside English there are many glimpses of other languages: sometimes Elvish ‘loanwords’ are employed alongside their English equivalent, for example lembas alongside waybread, or Haradrim alongside and much more usually than Southrons. This makes it clear to the thoughtful reader that the protagonists did not really speak English, as the narrator of The Lord of the Rings points out, but actually spoke the Common Speech or the Westron (the latter a word invented by Tolkien on the basis of the pre-existing real word Southron).

Now Tolkien has been compared with Lewis Carroll in his inventiveness, and although he himself pointed out the great differences, he was not wholly averse to the comparison. In Through the Looking-glass (1871) Carroll introduced the mock-heroic poem ‘Jabberwocky’. I’m sure you know the first verse:

Twas brillig and the slithy toves 

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; 

All mimsy were the borogoves 

And the mome raths outgrabe.[2]

Carroll had written this single verse sixteen years previously. It occurred in a work called The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch, written in 1855 but not published till 1932, and in this context, Carroll pretended it was a fragment of Anglo-Saxon verse. Let’s consider the words wabe and outgrabe: to a reader with only a rather general idea of Old English they might appear ‘Anglo-Saxon’ enough. For example, outgrabe looks like an archaic past tense of an irregular verb, like outspake or outbrake.[3] 

But Tolkien would never have passed off words like these either as Anglo-Saxon or as modern descendants of Anglo-Saxon words. Why not? First, because they conflict with the known principles of English sound-development. In Anglo-Saxon a single b could not occur at the end of a word or between  two vowels; only a double -bb- could arise between vowels, and in such a place it could only be preceded by a short vowel. Hence there are no words of Anglo-Saxon origin that end in -abe or have it in the middle; nearly all words with b in this position, such as label and gable, are taken from other languages;  and in any case no Old English ‘strong’ verb could have had a b in this position, so outgrabe is an impossible past tense. 

Secondly, and more importantly, because they are wholly invented; they are not based on words in real languages. All Tolkien’s invented English words are based on some previously existing word, or name, or word-forming element in modern English, Middle English, Old English, or Old Norse (the language of the sagas). There is one exception, strangely enough: the word for which Tolkien is most famous. It is a remarkable paradox that hobbit is virtually the only word of English form that Tolkien (apparently and untypically) invented from nothing. If Tolkien had inadvertently saddled himself with two such etymological monstrosities as wabe and outgrabe, he would have tried to ‘discover’ philologically convincing explanations for them. It is characteristic that Tolkien, uneasy that hobbit seemed to have no prehistory, devised an (imaginary) Anglo-Saxon  compound to be its etymological ancestor, namely holbytla (hole-dweller), and put this into the mouths of the Rohirrim, whom he represented as speakers of Anglo-Saxon.

Tolkien’s English words and names are successful and satisfying because they fit properly into the sound pattern of English; they are not barbarous or outlandish or absurd. They fit into the structure of English; they use word-forming elements such as -ling and -ish or they form part of an existing set, as for example eleventy and tweens. They fit with vocabulary that is appropriate to Third-Age Middle-earth: a world based on agriculture, with a traditional social structure and customs; they eschew word elements drawn from modern scientific terminology or urban slang (the latter is reserved for orcs and Saruman’s henchmen). Above all, they are all in some sense ‘real’ words: form and meaning are rooted in historical truth. Some of them exist in current English, but with a different meaning. For example, farthing—not too long ago the name of a coin. Tolkien’s meaning ‘one of the four parts into which a territory is divided’ is not found in any English dictionary. But it is a real meaning belonging to the equivalent word in Old Norse, fjórðungr: Iceland used to be divided into four fjórðungar, north, south, east, and west. Tolkien has taken a word from Old Norse and converted its form into the equivalent form in English, because just as English farthing is made up of fourth and the ending -ing, so the Norse word is made up of the equivalent Norse elements. Mirkwood is a similar adaption of a Norse compound into English form, being based on the Old Norse name for the great central European forest, Myrkviðr. Where he has introduced an Anglo-Saxon word Tolkien has carefully applied his knowledge of the historical sound changes of English to give the word a current English form: so Anglo-Saxon máðm ‘treasure’ has got the form it would now have if it had survived, mathom, and Anglo-Saxon eorcnanstān ‘precious stone’ has likewise been updated to Arkenstone. All these words have a definite feel about them: they are strange and yet lie just on the edge of familiarity, so that they seem to come from a half-forgotten time.

Tolkien did not just pluck each word out of some handy source on the spur of the moment. Rather he brooded on a word till it yielded its secret: a special application within the story or even a whole story of its own. The Old English words máðm, orþanc,  samwīs, emnet, entisc, and dēagol (and others) all occur within a few pages of each other in lists at the back of Joseph Wright’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar, a book which Tolkien would have used as an undergraduate.[4] I think that he contemplated each word for a long time. Flet is an ancient word meaning ‘floor’ and ‘hall’; Tolkien, having explained the word as an inhabited platform in a tree, adds the aside ‘as such things were called in those days’. In fact it has never meant this in our world. But it did in Middle-earth: this is the story that Tolkien drew from a word he had thought about ever since he encountered it, probably in Beowulf. A particularly good example of this process is the word ent; in Old English literature it’s rare and mysterious: Roman ruins are described as orþanc enta geweorc, ‘the cunning works of giants’. Tolkien wrote:

I always felt that something ought to be done about the peculiar A. Saxon word ent for a ‘giant’ or mighty person of long ago—to whom all old works were ascribed[5].

From this tiny, obscure word he drew what many people think is his most brilliant invention: Treebeard.[6] The way that Tolkien worked at chosen words from the past until they yielded up a new application or a new history is of a piece with his approach to narrative. As he wrote about this:

My feeling throughout, especially when stuck, [was] that I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at times to wait until ‘what really happened’ came through[7].

Again, take the name Westernesse: it has an air of mystery and ancientness: its termination, as Tolkien himself pointed out, is like that of fabled lands in Arthurian romance, Logres, Lyonesse. Remarkably, this word occurs only in the little known Middle English romance King Horn. But he introduces it as if it is a perfectly familiar term that will explain the unfamiliar name Númenor: ‘It was called Númenor, that is Westernesse, and Andúnië or the Sunsetland’.[8] The Lord of the Rings introduces it even more baldly; it just mentions: ‘The Kings of Men that came over the Sea out of Westernesse’[9]. But it was familiar and natural to Tolkien. Tolkien’s special words have a dual nature: their links with the languages of the actual world are necessary to give them historical depth and half-familiarity, but Tolkien has infused them with a deeper meaning. If he had just made up words, as Carroll did, The Lord of the Rings and the other works would simply not have the same powerful evocativeness.

Let’s go back to the word farthing. The adaptation is a kind of learned word-play: Tolkien’s farthing, based on Old Norse, is a kind of pun on the familiar farthing, the name of the small coin, and the link is the etymology. His coinages are full of learned word-play. Consider the place-name Cracks of Doom, where the Ring is destroyed. The phrase crack of doom was an established English expression (occurring in Macbeth) in which ‘crack’ refers to sound: it means the last trump, the trumpet-call announcing the day of judgement. Tolkien has deliberately taken ‘crack’ in a different meaning, that of a physical fissure in the ground, and applied it to the fearful chasm on the mountain Orodruin. The phrase borrows its terror from the original meaning but it is a pun—a play on two different meanings of ‘crack’. Another example is the ent-name Quickbeam, whose primary meaning is ‘sudden beam (of light)’, as the Sindarin equivalent Bregalad shows. It is also a play on the English dialect word quickbeam meaning ‘rowan’ or ‘mountain ash’, the kind of tree beloved of the ent Quickbeam. Or take the name of Beorn. In Anglo-Saxon the word means ‘warrior’or ‘hero’.  Its Old Norse cousin, bjǫrn, means ‘bear’. From that etymological divergence Tolkien in The Hobbit spins the story of a mighty man who changes into a bear by night—based on the northern stories of so-called ‘skin-changers’. 

Also in hobbit history there is a learned pun which probably not many people notice. When the hobbits migrated from the east into the Shire in Third Age 1601, they were led across the Brandywine by the two brothers, Marcho and Blanco.[10]  A number of hobbit names end in -o, and several, like Frodo, Drogo, Odo, and Otho, are borrowed from medieval Frankish, as are some other hobbit names like Fredegar and Isengrim. Marcho and Blanco’s names have this Frankish o-form and are based on two Germanic words meaning ‘horse’, which in Old English are mearh (compare ‘mare’) and blanca (literally meaning ‘the white one’). Now why should Tolkien give the two brothers the name ‘horse’? Well, consider the two leaders of the first Anglo-Saxons to cross the Channel and settle in England, according to tradition: Hengest and Horsa. Both their names mean ‘horse’. (You will recall that Tolkien used to lecture on Hengest, literally ‘stallion’.) If you’re not convinced about Marcho and Blanco, let me point out that in an earlier draft of The Lord of the Rings the brothers’ names are Italian, Marco and Cavallo, and cavallo is the Italian for ‘horse’.[11]

Tolkien enjoyed puns; there are many in his writings. He liked the silly sort; for example, in a letter written during the Second World War he refers to the hens he kept as the ‘fouls’ (because they were messy and uncooperative).[12] But he also frequently used puns that had both a more serious motivation and a more learned etymological foundation. An example occurs in his 1959 Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford where he remarks ‘when I survey with eye or mind those who may be called my pupils (though rather in the sense “the apples of my eyes”)’.[13] This plays on the etymology of the two English words pupil. The apple of one’s eye, which now means ‘the object of one’s regard’ originally meant ‘the pupil of the eye’ (which was thought to be a hard round object). English pupil (of the eye) is from Latin pupilla, with the same meaning, which originally meant ‘doll’ or ‘young girl’. Pupilla is the feminine of pupillus meaning ‘student’, and from this word we get the other word pupil. I guess not many of the 1959 audience grasped this pun. (By the way, the reason for the eye’s pupil being called ‘doll’ was of course the little image of oneself reflected in the other person’s eye (sometimes called a baby, as in looking babies).) This ‘serious punning’ is the ability and desire to read the same thing in two or more different ways and at the same time to discern an underlying, suggestive, connection.

Moreover, in the invented languages  too there are words and names with the same radical duality. The first name in the Legendarium, as you know, is Eärendel. Tolkien knew, and appreciated, its real Germanic etymology (a root meaning ‘dawn’). But, as John Garth says, he wanted also to read in it the unconnected Anglo-Saxon word ēar, meaning sea.[14] Eärendel, then, has two roots: it is an Anglo-Saxon name probably meaning ‘morning star’, but it is also a Legendarium name meaning ‘sea-friend’. Tolkien coyly ascribes the duality to coincidence, in the Notion Club Papers, when Arry Lowdham argues that ‘it is not Anglo-Saxon, or rather, it is not only Anglo-Saxon…I think it is a remarkable case of linguistic coincidence, or congruence’. [15]

Let’s go back to the earlier point that English in Tolkien’s narrative represents the Westron, the real Common Speech of humans and hobbits. Tolkien summarized this transposition of Middle-earth tongues into real world languages in a note of February 1942:

Language of Shire = modern English, Language of Dale = Norse (used by Dwarves of that region), Language of Rohan = Old English, “Modern English” is lingua franca spoken by all people (except a few secluded folk like Lórien) - but little and ill by orcs.[16]

Were you taken aback, as I was, on first reading, in Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings, that the hobbits’ real word for themselves was kuduk and the Rohirrim really called them kûd-dûkan? Christopher Tolkien refers to this ‘transposition of languages’ as ‘the fiction of authenticity’. He surmises that the need to account for the Dwarves having Old Norse names (instead of Dwarvish ones) was the starting-point for the whole theory:

The conception emerged that the Dwarves had ‘outer names’ derived from the tongues of Men with whom they had dealings...And this was very evidently an important component in the theory of the ‘transposition of languages’: for the Dwarves had Norse names because they lived among Men who were represented in The Lord of the Rings as speaking Norse.[17]

However, the doctrine of the transposition of languages collides with Tolkien’s creative use of learned word-play. Take the name of Saruman’s tower Orthanc; we are told that it

had (by design or chance) a two-fold meaning; for in the Elvish speech orthanc signifies Mount Fang, but in the language of the Mark of old the Cunning Mind.[18]

Orthanc comes from Anglo-Saxon. As a mysterious-sounding word for ‘cunning’ it had probably appealed to Tolkien for a long time—it is in those lists in Wright’s Grammar that I mentioned, where it is a near neighbour of entisc—it was another word, perhaps, that something ought to be done about. But according to the ‘fiction of authenticity’ Old English only represents the language  of the Rohirrim; therefore their actual word for ‘cunning mind’ could not have been orthanc, so it could not have coincided with an Elvish name, derived from orth ‘mount’ and anc ‘fang’. As long as the reader is ignorant of the ‘fiction of authenticity’, this name which mysteriously means both cunning mind and Mount Fang has magic, but when the transposition of languages is applied, the ingenious play on words collapses like Isengard itself. To a correspondent who tried to read significance into the resemblances between Elvish words and words in actual languages, Tolkien responded, in effect, that Eärendel is simply a beautiful and suggestive name borrowed from Anglo-Saxon, turned into Elvish, and nothing more.[19] But when it came to Eärendel’s ship Wingalótë, his tune was different. (To understand this point you need to know that Eärendel in Germanic mythology appears to have been connected with a giant named Wade or Wada. Wade had a celebrated boat called Guingelot which Tolkien transmuted into Eärendel’s ship Wingalótë, analysed as an Elvish compound meaning ‘foam-flower’.) Tolkien said in his notes:

Wingalótë..must be retained, since..it is in intention formed to resemble and ‘explain’ the name of Wade’s ship Guingelot.[20]

Tolkien here says that his myth requires Wingalótë to have a root in both worlds. And how about Atalantë , a name for Númenor, and Avallóne or Avallonde,  a name for Tol Eressëa? These derive their atmosphere from their resemblance, in form and significance, to Atlantis the drowned land of Greek legend, and Avallon the Faerie destination to which the wounded King Arthur was taken after his last battle. Tolkien however surprisingly remarks, in a letter:

It is a curious chance that the stem √talat used in Quenya for ‘slipping, sliding, falling down’, of which atalantie is a normal (in Quenya) noun-formation, should so much resemble Atlantis.[21]

The dilemma is that, on the imaginative level, the linguistic links between the Legendarium and our actual history and legend are vital, but on the logical level they are self-contradictory and can only be treated as coincidence. We can illustrate this from Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings. In ‘The Shire Calendar’, Tolkien sets out the hobbit names for the days of the week: Sterday, Sunday, Monday, Trewesday, Hensday, Mersday, Highday. Supposedly they are translations of the original Elvish names, reflecting the ruling elements of Arda: Stars, Sun, Moon, Two Trees, etc. Christopher Tolkien writes:

The rhyming of ‘Trewsday, Hensday, Mersday, Highday’ with our ‘Tuesday, Wednesday (Wensday), Thursday, Friday’ he naturally called an accidental likeness; but it was an astonishing coincidence! I am much inclined to think that the Hobbit calendar was the original conception, and that the names of the days were in fact devised precisely in order to provide this ‘accidental likeness’.[22]

Probably the first step, once Tolkien had decided to retain Sunday and Monday, was to create a ‘Star-day’. This was done by turning Saturday into the punning name Sterday, which could plausibly be presented as a modern development of the (invented) Old English Steorrandæg. But according to the ‘transposition of languages’ the hobbits did not really speak English, archaic or otherwise, so why invent a whole set of archaic day names as if to suggest a mysterious connection with ours?

To conclude: many words and names of Tolkien’s mythological world, chiefly the English ones, but also some Elvish ones, are inherently rooted, by word play and word echoes, in their counterparts in real-world languages. Originally, in The Book of Lost Tales and its successors, the mythology was meant to be an extension of the ‘real’ mythology of our world, so this was only to be expected.[23] Our human languages were even supposed to have evolved from Elvish ones.[24] However, independently of all this, Tolkien with carefree abandon in The Hobbit applied Old English and Old Norse names and words to the inhabitants of Middle-earth. When the Legendarium  ceased to be the prehistory of England  and the two narratives were linked up, the linguistic material rooted in our world posed a dilemma. To solve it, the ‘fiction of authenticity’ emerged, stating that the real-world languages are only used to translate the Middle-earth languages. But this strikes at the taproot, the linguistic echoing and word play that are crucial to Tolkien’s creative imagination. As a symbol of this dilemma stands Orthanc, the cunning mind. 

---

[1] Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[2] Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871) i. 21.

[3] Carroll explains it as ‘Outgrabe, past tense of the verb to outgribe’ (1855 Lewis Carroll Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch (1932) 140).

[4] See Peter Gilliver, Edmund Weiner, and Jeremy Marshall, ‘The Word as Leaf: Perspectives on Tolkien as Lexicographer and Philologist’ in Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger (editors), Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration (Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers, 2008), 75.

[5]  Letters 157.

[6] Though Tolkien probably did not invent the name Treebeard: see Gilliver et al. (2008), 72–3.

[7]  Letters 163.

[8]  The Fall of Numenor, HME V. 14.

[9] LR, Prologue.

[10] LR, Prologue and Appendix C.

[11] HME XII. I. i. 9 and note 14.

[12] Letters 55.

[13] The Monsters and the Critics (1983), p. 240.

[14] John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, (London: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 45.

[15] 1946, in HME IX. 237.

[16] HME VI. xxiii. 424.

[17] Commentary to Appendix on Languages in HME XII. ii. 70-71.

[18] LR iii. viii.

[19] August 1967, in Letters 297.

[20] ‘The Problem of Ros’ in HME XII. ii. xii. 371.

[21]16 July 1964, in Letters 257.

[22] ‘The Calendars’ in HME XII. i. iv. 125.

[23] HME I. 24.

[24] ‘The Lhammas’, HME V. 179.

Tolkien and the aesthetics of philology

A talk given to the Oxford Tolkien Society, Taruithorn, on 6 March 2015 

1. Beauty in language and pleasure in language. 

I gave you a slightly fancy title because academic audiences expect fancy titles. I didn’t put a colon in the middle, which most academic titles have, because I really dislike them. An alternative title would have been ‘Tolkien and the delight of language’. But I did have a reason for using the word ‘philology’. ‘Language’ is too vague. Lots of people talk about pleasure or delight in language, for example:

Stylistics may be defined as the study of language as art rather than as basic communication. It has to do with the aesthetics of language rather than its basic function, with that ‘expressiveness which transcends the purely referential and communicative side of language’, with emotive overtones, with special emphasis, with calculated effects; concerned, as Stephen Ullmann has said, not with the elements of language as such, but with their expressive potential. [S. Ullmann, Language and Style, 1964, pp. 101, 111, quoted, and Peter Rickard, 1992. The French Language in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Introduction, p. 43.] 

This is ‘beauty in language’ in the sense not intended. Tolkien of course did write ‘with expressiveness’, ‘with emotive overtones, with special emphasis, with calculated effects’, none better, but that is not the side of aesthetics of language which I want to talk about.

I intended to concentrate on that notable piece ‘A Secret Vice’, and indeed I will. But looking at the volume in which it is published, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, I realized how much relevant material there is in the two essays which flank that piece, ‘English and Welsh’ and ‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’. A certain similarity between these three pieces is to be found in the fact that Tolkien, for varying reasons, ends each lecture with a series of illustrative snippets from other languages: Welsh, Old English, Elvish. These lectures tell us what Tolkien found delightful in other languages and provide a glimpse—a rather enigmatic one, in some ways—into his views on language. We find further clues in the features of the invented languages themselves.

When you open a book on linguistics or a grammar or dictionary of a particular language, the thing you won’t find is an enthusiastic encomium of language or of the language described therein. You may find something in a grammar of English about how it has become a valuable medium of communication worldwide, but this of course has little to do with its linguistic characteristics and everything to do with social, political, and economic factors. Sometimes you wouldn’t think, reading a book by a grammarian or linguist, that they had any actual enthusiasm for the language. Scientific objectivity rules out such expressions of personal partiality. But Tolkien’s lectures are peppered with expressions of warmth about languages. In ‘English and Welsh’ he speaks about:

A personal and if you will subjective expression of strong aesthetic pleasure in contact with Welsh, heard or read… [‘English and Welsh’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 190] 

In the course of two pages (190–1) he uses ‘pleasure’ in this context eight times. When we move to ‘A Secret Vice’, we find the same number of occurrences of this word, eight, over five pages (206–210). And he tells us that the highest pleasure is to be found in the art of inventing languages:

And it [sc. the linguistic faculty] is allied to a higher art of which I am speaking, and which perhaps I had better now define. An art for which life is not long enough, indeed: the construction of imaginary languages in full or outline for amusement, for the pleasure of the constructor or even conceivably of any critic that might occur. [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 202] 

Please note the astonishing claim. The construction of imaginary languages is a high art.

It’s important to notice how according to Tolkien the pleasure is associated with the mere sound of a language’s words—the phonetic elements, even without knowledge of their meaning:

The basic pleasure in the phonetic elements of a language and in the style of their patterns, and then in a higher dimension, pleasure in the association of these word-forms with meanings… [‘English and Welsh’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 190] 

The very word-form itself, of course, even unassociated with notions, is capable of giving pleasure—a perception of beauty, which if of a minor sort is not more foolish and irrational than being sensitive to the line of a hill, light and shade, or colour. [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 207] 

 

2. Fitness between sound and meaning. 

Moving on from the simple sound of language, as we have seen in one of the quotes above, Tolkien closely connected with it the idea of an association of word-forms with meanings, of fitness between sound and meaning. So, you start with a language whose choice and arrangement of sounds is pleasing to you in itself. But you pass directly from there to the connection between the arrangements of sequences of these sounds, which we call words, and the notions or ideas that they stand for in that language.

Writing in the context of language invention, Tolkien says:

This idea of using the linguistic faculty for amusement is however deeply interesting to me. I may be like an opium-smoker seeking a moral or medical or artistic defence for his habit. I don’t think so. The instinct for ‘linguistic invention’—the fitting of notion to oral symbol, and pleasure in the new relation established, is rational, and not perverted. In these invented languages the pleasure is more keen than it can be even in learning a new language—keen though it is to some people in that case—because more personal and fresh, more open to experiment of trial and error. And it is capable of developing into an art, with refinement of the construction of the symbol, and with greater nicety in the choice of notional-range. Certainly it is the contemplation of the relation between sound and notion which is a main source of pleasure. [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 206] 

So Tolkien found great pleasure in contemplating the relationship between the sound of words and what they meant. He made it clear that he wanted to investigate the associated questions:

No vocal noises mean anything in themselves. Meaning has to be attributed to them by a human mind. This may be done casually, often by accidental (non-linguistic) associations; or because of a feeling for ‘phonetic fitness’ and/or because of preferences in the individual for certain phonetic elements or combinations. The latter is naturally most evident in private invented languages, since it is one of their main objects, recognized or unconscious, to give effect to these likings. [Lett. 294, 8 February 1967]

I am personally most interested perhaps in word-form in itself, and in word-form in relation to meaning (so-called phonetic fitness) than in any other department. Of great interest to me is the attempt to disentangle—if possible—among the elements in this predilection and in this association (1) the personal from (2) the traditional. The two are doubtless much interwoven—the personal being possibly (though it is not proven) linked to the traditional in normal lives by heredity, as well as by the immediate and daily pressure of the traditional upon the person from earliest childhood. The personal, too, is doubtless divisible again into (a) what is peculiar to one individual, even when all the weighty influence of his native language and of other languages he has learnt in some degree has been accounted for; and (b) what is common to human beings, or to larger or smaller groups of them—both latent in individuals and expressed and operative in his own or any language. [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 211] 

 

3. The concept of the ‘native language’ 

I am sure that Tolkien had a generalized love of language, in the sense that language as a phenomenon was a principal and dominant interest of his. But the love he is speaking of here is a love of particular languages. He believes, for one thing, in an idea that I have not encountered anywhere else:

Language—and more so as expression than as communication [we need to return to this proviso later]—is a natural product of our humanity. But it is therefore also a product of our individuality. We each have our own personal linguistic potential: we each have a native language. But that is not the language that we speak, our cradle-tongue, the first-learned. Linguistically we all wear ready-made clothes, and our native language comes seldom to expression, save perhaps by pulling at the ready made till it sits a little easier. But though it may be buried, it is never wholly extinguished, and contact with other languages may stir it deeply. [‘English and Welsh’ in The Monsters and the Critics, 190] 

These tastes and predilections which are revealed to us in contact with languages not learned in infancy..are certainly significant: an aspect in linguistic terms of our individual natures. And since these are largely historical products, the predilections must be so too. [‘English and Welsh’ in The Monsters and the Critics, 194] 

He says the same in a letter of 1967:

It is these preferences, reflecting an individual’s innate linguistic taste, that I called his ‘native language’; though ‘native linguistic potential’ would have been more accurate, since it seldom comes to effect, even in modifying his ‘first-learnt’ language, that of his parents and country. [Lett. 294 8 February 1967] 

Whatever one thinks of this idea, it is quite difficult to place it in relation to current theories of language acquisition. Tolkien seems to agree with most modern theoreticians that the language ability is innate. I think (and I speak as no specialist) that where he is original is in asserting that aspects of a person’s linguistic potential are special to that person. We do not just have a passive ability to acquire whatever language is spoken around us in childhood. He thinks we have some kind of inner leaning or bias towards certain linguistic modes. Would he have seen this as analogous to the genetic determination of our features, in that we do not just have a genetic propensity to develop eyes, but we develop eyes of a particular colour and shape? Anyway, Tolkien thinks that the source of the pleasure that we feel in the sounds and meanings of a language are because that language is, as it were, calling to the innate language potential within us.

4. Sound and fitness. 

We have these two concepts, pleasure in the sound of language, and, closely connected, fitness of sound and meaning: both of prime importance to Tolkien and, as far as I know, neither of them much considered by anyone else. What can we learn about these from his writings and from the languages he invented?

Dealing first with the sound of languages. Let’s look at those whose mere sound gave Tolkien this special pleasure, and how they are reflected in the invented languages.

In ‘A Secret Vice’ he mentions:

Greek, Finnish, Welsh (to name at random languages which have a very characteristic and in their different ways beautiful word-form, readily seizable by the sensitive at first sight) are capable of producing this pleasure. [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 207] 

In ‘English and Welsh’ he gives us more. Latin, he says

‘seemed so normal that pleasure or distaste was equally inapplicable’. 

‘The fluidity of Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter, captivated me..but..it did not touch home.’ 

‘Spanish..gave me strong pleasure’ (but he thinks the preservation of so much Latin in it was an ingredient in the pleasure—‘a historical and not purely aesthetic element’). 

Gothic ‘was the first to take me by storm, to move my heart…The contemplation of the vocabulary in A Primer of the Gothic Language was enough.’ 

‘Of all save one among them the most overwhelming pleasure was provided by Finnish, and I have never quite got over it.’ 

[‘English and Welsh’ in The Monsters and the Critics, 191–2] 

And finally, Welsh, about which of course he says a great deal in the essay ‘English and Welsh’. He tells us what appeals to him:

If I were pressed to give any example of a feature of this style..as a source of pleasure to myself, I should mention the fondness for nasal consonants, especially the much-favoured n, and the frequency with which word-patterns are made with the soft and less sonorous w and the voiced spirants f and dd contrasted with the nasals: nant [stream], meddiant [possession], afon [river], llawenydd [joy], cenfigen [envy], gwanwyn [Spring], gwenyn [bees], crafanc [claw], to set down a few at random. A very characteristic word is gogoniant “glory”. [‘English and Welsh’ in The Monsters and the Critics, 194] 

Tolkien’s love of the phonetic shape of Welsh, as he tells us, is expressed in Sindarin. He says:

The names of persons and places in this story [The Lord of the Rings] were mainly composed on patterns deliberately modelled on those of Welsh (closely similar but not identical). This element in the tale has given perhaps more pleasure to more readers than anything else in it. [‘English and Welsh’ in The Monsters and the Critics, footnote 33, p. 197] 

But of course many of those names, or the elements of which they are composed, were already in existence in pre-Lord of the Rings Sindarin (or in earlier nomenclature Noldorin or Gnomish). I think that the resemblance to Welsh is fully borne out by this bit of early Sindarin quoted in ‘A Secret Vice’, which is much earlier than anything in The Lord of the Rings:

Dir avosaith a gwaew hinar
engluid eryd argenaid
dir Tumledin hin Nebrachar
Yrch methail maethon magradhaid
Damrod dir hanach dalath benn
ven Sirion gar meilien
gail Luithien heb Eglavar
dir avosaith han Nebrachar.
[‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 217] 

That is pretty like Welsh in sound: the omnipresent n, the frequent v and w and dh sounds, in particular. There are two major differences: the complete absence of the sound /ə/ (‘schwa’) which occurs a great deal in Welsh (in non-final syllables, written with the letter y), and the position of the stress accent on the first syllable of three-syllable words instead of always on the penultimate syllable (actually it’s slightly more complicated than that in Sindarin). I’d say that the lack of /ə/ and the position of the stress accent in both Elvish tongues owe much to the influence of Latin.

What about Tolkien’s other intoxication, Finnish? This is not nearly so closely replicated in Quenya, though there are certain aspects of it that resemble Finnish. In fact the older Quenya of the specimens given at the end of ‘A Secret Vice’ seems to me closer in sound to Finnish than the developed version of LR.

Take this verse in ‘A Secret Vice’:

Norolinde pirukendea
elle tande Nielikkilis,
tanya wende nieninqea
yar i vilya anta miqilis.
I oromandin eller tande
ar wingildin wilwarindeën,
losselie telerinwa
tálin paptalasselindeën.
[‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 215–6] 

Compare it with this random snippet from the Kalevala:

Kun hän oli päässyt perille,
hän asettui istumaan
kiryavalle kivelle,
auringonpaisteiselle karille.
Kivi vierähti veteen,
kari vajosi pohjaan,
neito kiven mukana,
Aino karin kulmalla.
[Kalevala suomeksi runo 4, 319-327] 

Then, when she got there, / she sits herself down upon the bright boulder: / the rock plopped in the water / the boulder sank down / the maid with the rock / Aino beside the boulder [K. Bosley, The Kalevala, p. 48]

Quenya as seen in LR is more like Latin, but it resembles Finnish in the following ways:

• the severe restriction of the voiced stops /b/, /d/, and /g/, the first of which occurs only after /m/, the second only after /l/, /n/, and /r/, and the third not at all, 
•  the limitation on what consonants can be word-final (only /l/, /n/, /r/, /s/, and /t/) 
•  the combination of the semivowel y with other consonants, as in, for example, ilye, máryat, tyeller, hyarmen (these last two being particularly original, and to me, especially attractive). 

In other ways it is completely different, for example in the combination of /w/ with consonants, as in ninque, vanwa, hwesta, and in featuring initial /ŋ/ and /ŋw/ (I like ngwalme ‘torment’) and the /ç/ sound before /t/ as in Telumehtar. And /k/ is far less common in Quenya than it is in Finnish.

Moving on to ‘fitness’: what did Tolkien mean by it? Do his invented languages shed light on this idea? In this connection I want to consider three areas of his invention: vocabulary, grammar, and historical development.

4.1. Vocabulary 

Firstly, it may be true that when inventing languages Tolkien chose word forms that were to some extent ‘phonaesthetic’. The idea of ‘phonaesthesis’ is that certain sounds or sound combinations symbolize basic concepts, or at least that they have ‘recognizable semantic associations due to recurrent appearance in words of similar meaning’ (Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar). A quite well-founded example in English is sn- symbolizing nose-related unpleasantness (snarl, sneer, sneeze, etc.). A less demonstrable one is the idea that the i-sound in combination with certain consonants often conveys small size, lightness, or insubstantiality (e.g. little, slim, thin, flimsy, mini-, etc.). Many phonaesthetic associations may be derived from the actual languages which one knows, and therefore culturally conditioned. 

Perhaps whether they are universal or culturally conditioned does not matter in Tolkien’s context. He was aiming to make languages that had a fitness in the world of ancient Northern Europe; their resonances need only come from this milieu. Tolkien, in one of his mentions of Finnish and Greek, actually says that they give him ‘phonaesthetic’ pleasure (Lett. 144); in other words, he does seem to have interpreted his ‘sense of fitness’ in terms of some pre-existing association of phoneme with meaning. 

The possibility that he regarded a simple association of sound and meaning, such as between the i-sound and small size or lightness, as a linguistic universal, is possible. Take the word lintë ‘swift’ in ‘Namárië’. It came to Tolkien long before the invention of Elvish and from what he says is unlikely to have a direct model in a known language: 

‘I can also remember [from the childhood invented language Nevbosh] the word lint “quick, clever, nimble”, and it is interesting, because I know it was adopted because the relation between the sounds lint and the idea proposed for association with them gave pleasure’ [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 205]. 

This word could be said to have ‘phonaesthetic’ qualities derived from the short i-sound and the initial l conveying quickness and lightness. Other inventions share this quality, such as wilwarin ‘butterfly’.

Another illuminating remark occurs in his translation of the short poem ‘Earendel’ in ‘A Secret Vice’ [in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 216]. The Qenya line is ‘i súru laustaner’ and Tolkien translates this as 

 The wind ‘lausted’ (not ‘roared’ or ‘rushed’ but made a windy noise)’ 

We can deduce from this that for Tolkien the verb lausta captured a particular idea of the sound of the wind that no English words do. 

Thirdly, speaking of Welsh, he writes in ‘English and Welsh’ [in The Monsters and the Critics, footnote 33, p. 193]: 

It is the ordinary words for ordinary things that in Welsh I find so pleasing. Nef may be no better than heaven, but wybren is more pleasing than sky. 

And he goes on a little later: 

This pleasure is felt most immediately and acutely in the moment of association: that is in the reception (or imagination) of a word-form which is felt to have a certain style, and the attribution to it of a meaning which is not received through it. 

Then he quotes a series of Welsh words that have this quality for him: 

adar, birds
alarch, swan
eryr, eagle
tân, fire
dwfr, water
awel, breeze
gwynt, wind
niwl, mist
glaw, rain
haul, sun
lloer, moon
sêr, stars
arglwydd, lord
gwas, servant
morwyn, maiden
dyn, man
cadarn, firm (adj.)
gwan, weak
caled, hard
meddal, soft
garw, rough
llyfn, smooth
llym, severe
swrth, heavy
glas, blue
melyn, yellow
brith, grey 

In view of these observations, what do we think were Tolkien’s sources when he set out to create the vocabularies of the Elvish languages? Well, there is considerable evidence that he drew on elements of real languages. In view of what he has said about personal predilection, there must have been particular words and forms in real languages that he found so well suited to their meanings that he drew on them. 

 In early Qenya and ‘Gnomish’ there are several words that resemble forms in Germanic. Examples: 

Qenya autë ‘prosperity’ (HME II. 336), compare the Germanic root auð- ‘riches’
Qenya maiwe gull (HME V. 373) compare Old English mǽw ‘gull’
Qenya mat- eat (HME V. 371: compare Gothic mats ‘food’
Qenya qalmë ‘death’, qalin ‘dead’ (HME I. 264) compare Old English cwealm ‘death’, cwelan ‘die’ – but perhaps also suggested by Finnish kuolla?
Qenya qet- ‘speak, talk’, Gnomish cwed- (HME II. 348), compare Gothic qiþan, Old English cweðan ‘speak’. 

But Tolkien seems to have drawn vocabulary items from several other languages that he liked. In ‘Tolkien’s Invented Languages’ we itemized as many as we could identify. 

For example, a few from Finnish: 

the root KULU- gold : Finnish kulta
tie ‘path’: Finnish tie ‘way’
the root TUL- ‘come, approach’: Finnish tulla ‘to come’
the root AN- ‘give’: Finnish anta ‘to give’, annan ‘I give’ 

Several apparently from Latin: 

Qenya lambë ‘tongue’ from the root LAVA- ‘lick’: Latin lambere ‘to lick’
Qenya má ‘hand’: Latin manus ‘hand’
Qenya manë ‘good’: Latin manes
Qenya niqe ‘snow’: Latin nix, genitive nivis
Qenya talas ‘sole of the foot: Latin talus ‘ankle’
Qenya vâ ‘went’, vand- ‘way, path’: Latin vado ‘I go’
the root ORO- ‘rise’: Latin orior ‘I rise’
the root OWO- and oa ‘wool’: Latin ovis sheep
the root UR- ‘be hot’: Latin uro ‘I burn’ 

 Perhaps from Greek: 

Sindarin orod mountain: Greek oros
Qenya erumë desert: Greek eremos 

Speaking for myself, much of Tolkien’s vocabulary does seem to me to have that quality of ‘fitness’. Why is this? In ‘Tolkien’s Invented Languages’ (in From Elvish to Klingon), we speculated that some Elvish words simply recall real-world words that are vaguely relevant, for example: 

Quenya carnë (Sindarin caran) ‘red’: carmine ‘crimson pigment’, carnation, or Latin caro, carn- ‘flesh’.
Sindarin minas ‘tower’: minaret or minatory (suggesting something looming above one).
Quenya mornë (Sindarin mor-) ‘black’: Greek mauros, English Moor(ish), perhaps even morose.
The root tin- ‘sparkle’ and its derivatives, such as tintilar ‘they twinkle’: twinkle or scintillate. 

In another discussion Tolkien does seem to imply that invented names, at least, are often derived from such pre-existing patterns: ‘One’s mind is, of course, stored with a “leaf-mould” of memories (submerged) of names, and these rise up to the surface at times, and may provide with modification the bases of “invented” names.’ (Lett. 324). 

Tolkien admitted only to a few such influences, such as the suffix –dor ‘country’ coming from Labrador, and discouraged the investigation of them. But one reason that I think they can be traced is that we know that originally some of the key names in the Legendarium were intended to resemble real-world names, because in its early stages there was meant to be a direct link. You’ll recall that early on, since Eressëa was England, Warwick – Welsh Caergwâr – was Kôr, Gnomish Gwâr, the harbour of Eressëa was Avallóne, resembling Avalon, and so on. Although this foundational element of the Legendarium was later set aside, it could not be totally expunged; but more importantly from the creative point of view, Tolkien went on creating language this way. It’s a kind of two-track or multi-track mode of linguistic thinking. An invented word looks in several directions at once. 

Let me give you one example. The Elvish words for ‘swan’ are Quenya alqua, Sindarin alph (plural eilph). These are related: the ancestor word alkwa became /alxwa/, then /alfa/, finally alph in Sindarin. In the document called the ‘Etymologies’, Tolkien gives the ultimate root as ALAK- ‘to rush’. So much for the invented story. What, in his own imagination, is Tolkien calling up? I think two unrelated words for ‘swan’ in different languages that he liked. The first is Old Norse alpt, probably from the same root as Latin albus ‘white’. The second is Welsh alarch, plural elyrch, from a British root *alarko, very similar (in sound) to his invented Elvish root. We know Tolkien liked this Welsh word, as he tells us so in ‘English and Welsh’ (see above). No word can come from two different roots, and anyway in the developed Legendarium it can’t be related to real-world languages at all. The link is in the realm of Tolkien’s linguistic taste. 

 4.2. Grammatical arrangements 

Clearly Tolkien’s invented languages are a success because they work grammatically. It’s like the difference between a completely static model village and one in which the model trains actually run round the tracks. This means that he had to have taken a very close interest in the way that grammar operates in real life languages. A technical, informed interest, not just a language user’s one.

Remarkably, in ‘A Secret Vice’ Tolkien speaks of the language inventor having 

 the same creative experience as that of those many unnamed geniuses who have invented the skilful bits of machinery in our traditional languages, for the use (and often the misunderstanding and abuse) of their less skilful fellows. [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 212] 

A throwaway line that seems to make an extraordinary assertion: that grammatical structures in real languages have been consciously created by skilled people just as they are in invented languages. It echoes the idea, which we shall discuss below, that linguistic change in Elvish is consciously directed. 

You probably remember the story of the little man in the camp: 

The man next to me said suddenly in a dreamy voice: ‘Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!’ [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 199] 

I think there is an important insight into Tolkien’s approach to grammatical structures when he says in the ‘Valedictory Address’, with reference to a completely different situation: 

The wide view, the masterly survey; plans and prophecies: these have never been in my line. I would always rather try to wring the juice out of a single sentence, or explore the implications of one word than try to sum up a period in a lecture, or pot a poet in a paragraph. [‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 224] 

I think we can apply this to his attitude to language. Some people’s minds would move from particular instances to general rules or principles, and they would then concentrate on the general principles, and not be especially interested in or moved by their instantiations in particular grammatical forms. I believe that for Tolkien it was the other way round. He loved the individual form which resulted from the general law. In devising his languages, he would be concerned to introduce really good morphological, inflectional, and syntactic devices because of the pleasurable forms they would produce, not for their own sake. 

In his invented languages we can trace the kinds of features he liked. For example, Tolkien appreciated the initial mutation of consonants in Welsh: 

cath ‘cat’, ei gath ‘his cat’, ei chath ‘her cat’ 

a form of which he incorporated in Sindarin: 

lasto beth lammen ‘listen to the words of my tongue’: peth ‘word’
ernil i Pheriannath ‘prince of the halflings’: perian ‘halfling’ 

He also evidently loved vowel mutation, used especially for forming plurals in Welsh and Germanic, which he also incorporated into Sindarin: 

orod mountain plural ered
amon hill plural emyn
annon door plural ennyn
Perian halfling plural periain 

And like Welsh, Sindarin favours placing the modifier after what it modifies. We read ‘Im Narvi teithant i thîw hin’ ‘I Narvi carved these signs (literally the signs these)’ – one is irresistably reminded of the Welsh construction seen in y llyfrau hyn ‘these books’. 

In Quenya on the whole he displays more exotic linguistic tastes. The dominant idea in the grammar of Quenya is that of suffixation. Nouns take a range of inflectional suffixes. In outline these are suggestive of Finnish, although when you compare them in detail they are unlike. 

Endore-nna ‘to Middle-earth’ cf. Finnish talo-lle ‘to the house’, taloon ‘into the house’
Eare-llo ‘from the Great Sea’ cf. Finnish talo-lta ‘from the house’
ya-ssen ‘which-in’ cf. Finnish käde-ssä ‘in the hand’
alda-r-on ‘trees-of’ cf. Finnish talo-in ‘of the houses’, vuor-ten ‘of the mountains’ 

It has suffixes for possessive pronouns, as in atar-inya ‘my father’ cf. Finnish isä-ni ‘my father’. When there are both inflections and possessive pronouns, the pronouns precede the inflections: 

óma-ry-o ‘voice-her-of’
tie-lya-nna ‘path-your-on’ 

The Finnish arrangement is the opposite: 

 tie-llä-si ‘way-on-thy’ 

There isn’t time to go into the intricacies of Quenya verbal inflection, but I will just mention the remarkable system of first person plural morphology, which affects both verbs and nouns. In the first person plural (‘we’) there is a distinction between ‘inclusive’ use, whereby the speaker includes the person addressed, and ‘exclusive’ use, whereby only the speaker and anyone he speaks for are included, for example laituva-lme-t ‘we (exclusive) shall bless them’, omentielvo = omentie -lva -o ‘of our (inclusive) meeting’. This is an especially original idea: no European language this side of the Caucasus makes this distinction grammatically. 

In the first edition of The Lord of the Rings, the reading was omentielmo, because at the time –lma was the first person plural inclusive. In later editions it was changed to omentielvo, because the ending –lma was transferred to the first person plural exclusive and –lva became the new inclusive. (See notes to Lett. 205.) That Tolkien devised such a grammatical category shows that he was very well informed about grammatical systems worldwide, and although his invented languages are very European in some ways, he was open to influences from elsewhere. 

But what is primary: the ingenious grammatical feature, or the intriguing sound patterns it produces? Surely what is important is the ebb and flow of musical endings: 

 Et Eärello Endorenna utúlien
Sindanoriello caita mornie i falmalinnar imbe met
Andave laituvalmet
Nai tiruvantes i hárar mahalmassen mi Númen 

 The grammatical devices are there simply to produce this harmonious end result. 

 

4.3. Historical development 

English philology as popularly understood in the Oxford of Tolkien’s day was historical linguistics, regarded as having a rather narrow slant towards Anglo-Saxon sound changes. I don’t think Tolkien discussed this study much, but of course he practised it constantly. When he was an OED lexicographer he wrote etymologies connecting words to their possible roots; through an academic lifetime he continued to investigate the origin and development of word forms; and as a language inventor, of course, he constructed a whole glossary of Elvish words arranged under their roots, showing how the various forms developed in a range of half a dozen languages. 
 In inventing a language he mentions two contrasting processes of word form generation: 

 You may, for instance, construct a pseudo-historical background and deduce the form you have actually decided on from an antecedent and different form (conceived in outline); or you can posit certain tendencies of development and see what sort of form this will produce. [‘A Secret Vice’, in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 211–12]

Tolkien must have used both of them. He clearly at times, and certainly in the early stages of his languages, started from the ‘pseudo-historical background’, i.e. the Legendarium. He ‘decided on’ a form and he deduced it from an antecedent by running the ‘tendencies’—the sound laws and so forth—backwards. Supremely, as he shows (Lett. 297) in the case of the Old English name Éarendel, of uncertain meaning, which, in 1914, he adopted into the incipient Legendarium and adapted as the Qenya name Eärendil. Subsequently he reanalysed it as Eäre + ndil and generated the two roots *AYAR ‘sea’ and *(N)DIL- ‘to love’. 

It is very likely that this occurred in other cases, e.g. the name of Eärendil’s boat Wingilot, taken from Middle English and re-etymologized as from wingë ‘foam’ and lótë ‘flower’. He said ‘To me a name comes first and the story follows’ (Lett. 165) but since almost every name had a meaning, an etymology must also follow, whether from new roots invented for the purpose or conveniently fitting existing roots. Another example is the place name Rohan, which he admits to liking and borrowing as the Sindarin name of the Mark. It needed an etymology: roch ‘horse’ + -and ‘region’. This etymology necessitated two sound laws: medial –ch- is weakened to /h/, and final –nd is simplified to /nn/ and then /n/. 

Although he says relatively little about it, I think that the processes of historical sound change were a further source of Tolkien’s linguistic pleasure. If you catch the bug (or perhaps it is a gene), there is something inexplicably fascinating, and at times rapturous, about the way in which forms in one stage of a language morph into others or diversify into several in daughter languages. 

A highly original set of Elvish sound changes is the one he devised to explain the fact that in some words (series 1) Sindarin initial consonants b-, d-, g- = Quenya v-, l-, zero, while in others (series 2) Sindarin b-, d-, g- = Quenya m-, n-, ng-; e.g. 

(1) Sindarin Balan ‘Power’, Quenya Vala; Sindarin dú ‘night’, Quenya lómë; Sindarin galadh ‘tree’, Quenya alda.
 (2) Sindarin bar ‘dwelling’ (in Bar-en-Danwedh), Quenya mar (in Eldamar); Sindarin dûn ‘west’, Quenya númen; Sindarin Golodh, Quenya Ngoldo. 

Tolkien arranges that in Primitive Elvish, there are two initial consonantal series, (1) B, D, G, and (2) MB, ND, NG; they produce the same outcomes in Sindarin, but quite different ones in Quenya. Series 1 is not really surprising, but series 2 has no parallel in any well-known European language, and rather resembles a feature in some African languages (compare mbira, mbongo, Ndebele, ngege). The divergent development in each language is equally ingenious. Sindarin has ‘strong’ voiced initial consonants in both cases. Quenya ‘softens’ the first series into fricatives and the second into nasals. 

There is a huge array of sound-changes underlying the Elvish languages, some paralleling known language families (e.g. Sindarin vis a vis Welsh) and some entirely original. The ‘Etymologies’ list strings of cognate words exhibiting these sound changes. Tolkien surely enjoyed the devising of these sets of cognates, so absolutely like those in real world languages. Here, I think, was the heart of Tolkien’s aesthetic enjoyment of language. 

 

6. The making, moulding, and marring of languages. 

 The idea that a language can be devised by an agent and that its development can be influenced or directed by its speakers is recurrent within the Legendarium. 

 Most notably, in the case of the Elves. Although for the most part the development of the Elvish languages is described as if directed by impersonal linguistic changes, in ‘Dangweth Pengoloð’ (HME 12, pp. 395–402), Tolkien puts forward an original theory of language change in Elvish. The question it sets out to answer is why, if the Elves do not die and if their memories reach back to past ages, their languages do not remain unchanged. Part of the answer lies in ‘the changefulness of Eä (the created world)’. However, Pengoloð says, the Eldar also for aesthetic reasons alter the sounds of their speech from time to time, in a regular and consistent way. Because they know and are aware of the whole of their language at every moment, they will introduce a sound change throughout the language ‘as a weaver might change a thread from red to blue, either throughout his web, or in such parts thereof as were suitable to the new pattern, but not randomly here and there nor only in one corner’ (p. 399). 

After the shape of the Elvish languages had been fixed by the publication of LR, Tolkien spent much time trying to explain and reconcile words and forms that didn’t quite fit into the overall schema. For example, by making Quenya the ancient ‘Elven Latin’ and Sindarin the developed language of Middle-earth, he had a problem explaining why Primitive Elvish /þ/ remained in the latter but became /s/ in the former; it was the subject of an essay called ‘The Shibboleth of Fëanor’ (HME XII. 332–366). Here he writes: 

The change þ > s must therefore have been a conscious and deliberate change agreed to and accepted by a majority of the Ñoldor, however initiated, after the separation of their dwellings from the Vanyar… The change was a general one, based primarily on phonetic ‘taste’ and theory, but it had not yet become universal. It was attacked by the loremasters, who pointed out that the damage this merging would do in confusing stems and their derivatives that had been distinct in sound and sense had not yet been sufficiently considered. (HME XII. 332–3) 

It’s a long story, but essentially a rift occurs between the Noldor loyal to Fëanor, who maintain /th/ in memory of his mother Míriel Therindë in whose nickname the sound occurs, and those loyal to his father Finwë and his second wife Indis. Hence the use of /þ/ becomes a shibboleth, a test of loyalty, for Fëanor. 

 The key thing to notice that we have a sound change such as has occurred in real world languages    (/þ/ > /s/ has happened in both Latin American Spanish and Yiddish), but with the following differences: 

1.  it is based on taste—essentially the same mechanism underlying one’s attraction to a language, according to Tolkien 
2. it is consciously directed to all instances of the phoneme, and 
3. the loremasters object to it on the ground that words will get confused. 

In the real world, as far as we know, sound changes arise randomly like evolutionary mutations and are not based on anyone’s predilections; they spread by unconscious mechanisms through the phonology of a language, though sometimes they do not reach every corner; and however much the learned, if they notice them at all, object, their establishment is completely irresistible. 

A degree of conscious control is also attributed to the Dwarves in their linguistic history: 

The father-tongue of the Dwarves Aulë himself devised for them… The Dwarves do not gladly teach their tongue to those of alien race; and in use they have made it harsh and intricate… Yet in secret they use their own speech only, and that (it is said) is slow to change; so that even their realms and houses that have been long and far sundered may to this day well understand one another. (HME XI. 205) 

In commenting on the brutality and ugliness of Orkish speech Tolkien points towards similar processes: 

The Orcs had a language of their own, devised for them by the Dark Lord of old, but it was so full of harsh and hideous sounds and vile words that other mouths found it difficult to compass, and few indeed were willing to make the attempt. And these creatures, being filled with all malice and hatred, so that they did not love even their own kind, had soon diversified their barbarous and unwritten speech into as many jargons as there were groups or settlements of Orcs. [‘The Appendix on Languages’ HME XII. 35]  

It is said that they had no language of their own, but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it was for curses and abuse. [LR Appendix F]  

Many indeed of the older tribes, such as those that still lingered in the North and the Misty Mountains, had long used the Westron as their native language, though in such a fashion as to make it hardly less unlovely than Orkish. [LR Appendix F]  

It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years, and that he had desired to make it the language of all those that served him, but he failed in that purpose. From the Black Speech, however, were derived many of the words that were in the Third Age wide-spread among the Orcs, such as ghâsh ‘fire’, but after the first overthrow of Sauron this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgûl. [LR Appendix F] 

The concepts here are worth examining. First there’s the idea that a being like Sauron can ‘devise’ a language. (Originally, he the Orcs’ language, the later scenario is that Sauron devised the Black Speech for all his servants, but failed to get it adopted by any but the Nazgûl). But equally, it seems that lesser beings can diversify the speech given to them, or take other languages and ‘pervert’ them. 

Then there is the idea that, at least when used by a race as debased and malicious as the orcs, a language, as regards its sound, could be ‘full of harsh and hideous sounds’, unpronounceable by other races, and, as regards its meaning, could be merely ‘barbarous’, a ‘brutal jargon’, ‘perverted’; a jargon that is ‘scarcely sufficient for their own needs’ – i.e. critically lacking in expressiveness, presumably in terms of both lexis and syntax. Useful only ‘for curses and abuse’. 

 

5. Language as music 

Reviewing these areas of language: the sound system alone and the sounds in relation to the vocabulary, the grammar, and the historical development, the thread that I discern running through it all is the primacy in Tolkien’s heart of the heard sound of a language; normally, as an attractive, pleasurable sound; but where malice intervenes, as a harsh, ugly sound: in fact, language as music. Take these two passages from LR: 

The singing now drew nearer. One clear voice rose now above the others. It was singing in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little, and the others knew nothing. Yet the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in their thought into words which they only partly understood. [LR I. iii. 79] 

At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape… [LR II. i. 233] 

In both cases the hearers have little or no literal comprehension of the speech they hear, but the sound of it works on their minds to produce shapes: words or visions. Again, in A Secret Vice’, after he has quoted several passages of verse in Elvish, he writes: 

 I may say that such fragments, nor even a constructed whole, do not satisfy all the instincts that go to make poetry. It is no part of this paper to plead that such inventions do so; but that they abstract certain of the pleasures of poetic composition (as far as I understand it), and sharpen them by making them more conscious. It is an attenuated emotion, but may be very piercing—this construction of sounds to give pleasure. The human phonetic system is a small-ranged instrument (compared with music as it has now become); yet it is an instrument, and a delicate one. [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 217–8] 

Very strikingly, Tolkien writes: 

The purely communicative aspect of language—the one that seems usually supposed to be the real germ and original impulse of language. But I doubt this exceedingly; as much as one doubts a poet’s sole object, even primary one, being to talk in a special way to other people. 

He granted that 

the communication factor has been very powerful in directing the development of language; but the more individual and personal factor—pleasure in articulate sound, and in the symbolic use of it, independent of communication though constantly in fact entangled with it—must not be forgotten for a moment. [‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics, p. 208] 

The idea that the communicative aspect of language might not be the primary aspect one is quite extraordinary and fascinating. 

 

7. Conclusions… 

In modern linguistic theory, no language is inherently better than any other; the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary and the same idea can be expressed in innumerable phonetic forms, none apter than another; the development of language is not under the conscious control of speakers of the language, but is controlled by psychomotor and sociolinguistic factors of which they’re largely unaware; grammatical and syntactic usage is also largely unconscious and cannot be altered by so-called ‘rules’; and, of course, ‘giving pleasure’ is not a relevant category to the discussion of a language itself (as opposed to its use in discourse); you can’t say that ‘beauty’ is inherent in the forms or structures of a language. 

 In Tolkien’s writings, we read of the language learner being drawn by the beautiful sound of a language to his or her true ‘native language’. The sounds of a language elegantly and pleasingly fit on to the meanings of the words. A mind devises a language for its creatures to use. These language users vary their language according to their taste, in some cases to make it produce more beautiful sounds, in others to produce ugly, violent, and aggressive utterances. These are the scenarios we seem to visit in Tolkien’s writing about language and language making. Of course, he seems to be saying, language communicates; but this is a subordinate purpose. Rather, like the primeval gods in ‘The Music of the Ainur’, the ultimate purpose of the speaking peoples in using language is to make beautiful music.

Note that:

1. This topic is investigated in Dr Dimitra Fimi’s book, Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) (see  especially chapter 3: ‘“Linguistic Aesthetic”: Sounds, Meaning and the Pursuit of Beauty’), which I had not read before giving this talk.
2. An extended edition of ‘A Secret Vice’, co-edited by Dr Dimitra Fimi and Dr Andrew Higgins, is due to be published in a few days (7th April). It includes a hitherto unpublished essay by Tolkien on ‘Phonetic Symbolism’.

References. 

Works by Tolkien: 
The Lord of the Rings. References are to ‘LR’ followed by the book and chapter number (i.e. books I to VI of the complete work, not the three named volumes). 
The History of Middle Earth (12 volumes). References are to ‘HME’ followed by volume and page. 
Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. References in the text are to Lett., generally followed by the letter number rather than the page number. 
‘English and Welsh’, in The Monsters and the Critics 
‘A Secret Vice’, in The Monsters and the Critics 
‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’, in The Monsters and the Critics 
The Monsters and the Critics and other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1983
Other works: 
K. Bosley 1989. The Kalevala. Oxford: World’s Classics. 
Risto Pottonen, ed. 2008. Kalevala suomeksi Helsinki: Books on Demand GmbH. 
Peter Rickard, 1992. The French Language in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 
E. S. C. Weiner and Jeremy Marshall ‘Tolkien’s Invented Languages’ in Michael Adams, 2011. From Elvish to Klingon. Oxford: OUP.