Creating a Language for a History

An interesting question brought up in class discussion was the apparent contradiction between Tolkien’s attempts to cast Lord of the Rings as a historical work that is connected to our world and his insistence that the languages in Lord of the Rings are fully invented with no direct connection to any real-world languages or sources. If Tolkien claims that the Legendarium is a mythology for England and a lost history of our world how can the languages that serve as an origin point for the Legendarium be entirely disconnected from the languages and history of our world? Rather than claiming that his inventions are the origins of modern languages as he does with the “Hey Diddle Diddle” nursery rhyme, Tolkien aggressively shut down any attempt to find a connection between the names and languages of middle-earth and current language and myth. Would it not better support his conceit to incorporate the Volsupa and claim that it is a list of the dwarves in his story rather than deny any significant connection? Can the linguistic separation and historical connection between the Legendarium and our familiar reality coexist?

Part of the reason for Tolkien’s seemingly contradictory anger over the search for meaning in his languages might simply be possessiveness over his work. However, it also seems to be a response to a threat to the narrative of creation that he puts forth for the Legendarium that supports his historical aspirations. Tolkien wrote that his languages came first and from them grew the myths and stories. The progression of creation is reliant on the existent on his created languages, through which the “history” of Middle-Earth came to him. Speculation on the creation process and potential sources or connected meanings disrupt this proposed creation process. Obviously Tolkien did create the languages and the stories, but the idea that it seem historical and real was clearly important to Tolkien based on the frequency that he mentioned it in correspondences. If Tolkien derived names from Greek words or the Dwarves were taken wholesale from the Voluspa the order of the creation of the stories is disrupted. 

These speculations on linguistic meaning require that the language came from already existing history and mythology of our world rather than myth coming from the language. The internal consistency of Tolkien’s world would be less stable if there were so many connections to various sources of meaning. One way that Tolkien makes his work feel historical is with small jokes or references such as the suggestion that “Hey Diddle Diddle” is a fragment of a song Bilbo wrote. Tolkien could have responded similarly to speculation about the origin of the Dwarves names by claiming that the Voluspa is the remnants of the story of his Dwarves. I think he does not do so for a few reasons. The names of a significant number of characters is a far larger part of the story than a fairly insignificant song that appears only once in a book. Expanding the scholarly jokes to such an extent might have strained the idea of The Lord of the Rings as a lost history by making it too concrete or opening the way for an endless stream of connections and speculation. Once again it might have threatened Tolkien’s pride as a philologist in a way a small joke he made did not and additionally, many of the proposed points of connection that Tolkien railed against were perilously close to allegory. Claiming that a nursery rhyme came from a hobbit has no possible allegorical connections, but claiming that the name Endor is derived from the Bible seems to lead directly into a claim that the Lord of the Rings is a biblical allegory. 

     Tolkien’s insistence on the a historicity of his invented languages does not seem in significant contradiction with his attempts to make The Lord of the Rings feel historical and connected to our world. In fact in some ways the self-contained and unique nature of languages like Quenya and Sindarin is important to the narrative character of the books. The sense that the languages are complete despite the fragments that the reader is exposed to reinforces the historical character of the text. In the same way that all the appendices and in-text references to a undisclosed universe of history and knowledge makes the world feel rich and vast beyond the window provided by The Lord of the Rings, the glimpse of a unfamiliar but apparently complete language makes the world feel real and historical. The total uniqueness of the language and resultant fact that what fragments we are given in the text is incomprehensible without Tolkien’s help also elevates the feeling of a historical source. It feels like a long lost historical source without other sources for context in the appearance of some kind of translation and guess work around unfamiliar language. I also think that the internal consistency and distance from familiar modern language serves to preserve the distance Le Guin argues is so central to the fantasy genre. Even if Tolkien is committed to the framing of The Lord of the Rings as a historical narrative the style is clearly fantasy rather than historical or realistic fiction. Using an elvish language that is recognizably connected to a familiar language would have broken the sense of distance created by Tolkien’s use of archaisms. The fact that the languages are unique and the sole source of the stories being told means that everything has the same narrative feeling and texture, avoiding the slippage in style the Le Guin calls out in so many works of fantasy.  

-LBG