How To Construct Reality: The Languages of The Lord of the Rings

The flavor of a language as Tolkien describes it, how it feels in one’s mouth, goes a long way to endearing one to it. Language, real language, is a sensory experience, “sound plus sense, that satisfies, that is when made durable,” as Lowdham in Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers explains. That being said, the languages of Middle Earth are undeniably constructed in the sense that Tolkien invented them, whether he would like through Lowdham to have us believe that had an organic origin. Yet there is a sense when one reads The Lord of the Rings and other works within Middle Earth that the names and words of these languages make sense, feel organic to the characters, and in some sense real. So how does Tolkien construct his languages to be “real”? 

Let’s start with Tolkien’s letter to Mr. Rang where he repudiates his attempts to find significance in coincidental similarities with “real world” language systems. As he discusses in the first page of the letter, the process of inventing the languages of Middle Earth was “largely antecedent to the composing of legends and ‘histories’ in which these languages could be ‘realized.” This sentence gives us a clue into part of what makes a language real or become real for Tolkien, the legends and histories that surround them. Languages have their own histories and the coupling of sounds and senses that cement them into a durable realness come from these histories. Just as the languages of the Elves as described in “The Lhammas” move and change into the Lindar, Noldor, and Teleri into further divisions and iterations, their languages change with them and in so doing record that history. The phonetics play a key role in Tolkien’s languages of creating the environment through which the cultures who use these languages spring into being.

Here is where the adoption of phonemes from extant languages like Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English play into making the languages of Middle Earth real for readers. Tolkien makes it quite clear through Letter 297 that he constructs languages on a phonemic level and that any borrowing done was a matter of sounds that appealed to Tolkien. He creates languages that have an intuitive phonological sense to them, or in other words, they sound right. While he makes it clear that the exercise of building these languages was a matter of personal taste, by constructing them in a phonetically consistent way, Tolkien is crafting languages with intuition to them, that become organic through this intuition. Although we have yet to discuss in detail the relationship between “real” language and music, the grammar of a language, its intuitive sense of sound construction, is not unlike music theory. When a language works, it is like music and all of its parts come into harmony so that names and words come to fit into this weaving tapestry of rightness through their harmonious following of a grammar crafted by people.

So for the purposes of the reader, most of Tolkien’s languages are “real” in that they are spoken by his characters and have a history to them that has shaped them “organically” into the shapes they are in at any given moment. While the speakers of these languages are not existent outside of Tolkien’s world, the languages are just as real for the reader as any spoken languages in our world in that we can, just like Frodo, be taken in by the sounds of these languages and be in wonder of the histories they hold. Furthermore, with all the information Tolkien gives in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings as well as in “The Lhammas” and some of the letters, there is nothing stopping these languages being spoken in our world. In fact, take a look at footage of the Fellowship movie premiere, and you will see plenty of people conversing in admittedly not fluent Quenyan or Sindarin. Tolkien gives us detailed pronunciation guides in Appendix E and information on the phonological rules that determine these pronunciations, so why not use that information to speak the languages?  

That being said, Tolkien deliberately creates some languages to be artificial within Arda, such as Khuzdul given to the Dwarves by Aulë and Black Speech devised by Sauron. While both Khuzdul and Black Speech were constructed languages, there is a clear difference between Khuzdul and Black Speech in that the former is revered by the Dwarves and tied to their creation while the Orcs had existed prior to the creation of Black Speech and had already been cobbling together words from other languages so that there was too much regionalization in dialects for different tribes of Orcs to be able to communicate at all. Khuzdul is a marker of Dwarvish history and so they feel an affinity for it and preserve it as to preserve their origin. Black Speech was not unlike the Russification of the acquired states of the Soviet Union in that it had no link to the histories of the peoples it was given to and so it failed to catch on in colloquial use. Sauron proves the problem of constructed language in establishing a sense of realness that Tolkien avoids by establishing his “non-constructed” languages as created and developed by its speakers. While Tolkien’s languages cannot be so real as in The Notion Club Papers to have been discovered already real with an established history, he can create phonologically harmonious languages and then build the legends and histories around them as well as the speakers themselves to make them real enough. 

-Alyse