In the first two chapters of The Road to Middle-Earth, Shippey argues that Tolkien’s imagined universe emerges directly from his engagement with the discipline of philology. Although it fell out of fashion among contemporary scholars, philology held a high status in the late 19th century as a means of understanding the history and culture of a people through their language. Trained in this discipline, Tolkien uses the analysis of language to illuminate the medieval past. He views a “reality of history” contained within the evolution of languages and names. This interpretation of reality through the language itself shapes his writing process, establishing languages first and then building worlds around them. The formation of Middle-Earth through Tolkien’s philology demonstrates the world of Lord of the Rings as grounded in the real significance of language, giving Tolkien’s universe the “inner consistency of reality” which enables the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
Tolkien’s intellectual training views words as windows into the secondary world: man’s tools of sub-creation. His philology treats language as a record of cultural memory instead of arbitrary labels for a pre-existing world. This unique method is best described in his allegory of the man and the tower, as Shippey illustrates in his work. The man inherits the stones and the field, allowing him to build a tower that looks upon the sea. However, the man’s descendants criticize him for not restoring the original house of his fathers, and his friends demolish the tower to look for hidden carvings within the stones. The contrast between the creative will of the man and that of his friends and descendants portrays the different understandings of language held by scholars and philologists, according to Shippey. The man represents the Beowulf poet and Tolkien himself, building works of poetry through the inheritance of language in order to access the realm of Faerie. This philological approach rejects a purely historical analysis of the work and instead attempts to access the secondary reality of ancient peoples.
For instance, only a philologist can fully comprehend the significance of the dragon for the Beowulf poet. While a purely historical lens may dismiss the dragon as pure fantasy, Tolkien argues this misses a crucial insight into the mind of the medieval poet. The dragon, more than “idle fantasy,” is “a potent creation of men’s imagination.” By inheriting the creature from his medieval forefathers, Tolkien’s inclusion of dragons in his world of Middle-Earth goes beyond arbitrary storytelling. It constructs a mythos grounded in the reality of Old English, intertwined with ancient stories and languages that give Middle-Earth its pseudo-historical atmosphere. There is truth in Tolkien’s stories because they emerge from words themselves, containing inherited realities which underlie their etymologies.
Additionally, Tolkien manages to convey deep histories and interactions between peoples within the names he bestows on his characters. His grasp of the importance of names is evident in his engagement with the Goths and their language, as detailed by Shippey. While most historians take the conflict between the Goths and Huns at face value, Tolkien centers his focus on the name Attila itself: meaning something like “little father” in Gothic. The name’s etymology reveals a new understanding of the relationship between the Goths and Huns, suggesting that some Goths likely joined the Huns’ pillaging and gave their leader the title Attila. In his letters, Tolkien notes that “without those syllables the whole great drama both of history and legend loses savour for me.” As Attila exemplifies, the complexity of the Goths’ history is contained within their words. Even the name of a foreign leader contains within it a deep significance which fleshes out the history and mythos of a people.
While these words contain an inherited culture within themselves, there is also a subjectivity that Tolkien attributes to language. As he describes in his essay English and Welsh, phonemes largely shape how we experience language and the spoken word. In this way, the sound of the word itself carries unique significance outside of the literary and historical context in which it emerges. While reality exists in itself, there is a transformative aspect to attributing a word to each thing. The thing itself remains the same, but the meaning changes based on the word we choose to use. Through the imagination of the speaker, reality is altered through languages and names on a personal and spiritual level.
This interaction between the primary and secondary worlds reveals the spiritual power of language that Tolkien harnesses in Lord of the Rings. Reading the work is meant to feel spiritual, as Tolkien suggests in ‘On Fairy Stories,’ where he emphasizes the importance of the ‘spell’ which good fantasy manages to cast on its reader. The suspension of disbelief comes from understanding the work as in essence true. Tolkien illustrates this process by relating the words spell and evangelium to compare the power of fantasy with the Gospel. Shippey suggests that a similar “supremely convincing tone” is at the heart of Tolkien’s essay and literary projects. By emulating the Gospel, Tolkien creates Middle-Earth’s mythological atmosphere through the real significance of its languages and names. The words themselves are at the center of the work, conveying the truth of their universe in their phonemes and literary influences.
It is thanks to Tolkien’s deep philological practice that he crafts Lord of the Rings in such a convincing manner. By studying the intricacies of language, he was able to recognize words as the bedrock of the human spirit: the containers of meaning that allow for sub-creation in the realm of fantasy. This understanding allowed him to compose his world’s names and languages with real significance, building the sincerity and expansiveness that keeps us returning to Middle-Earth today.
-MJS
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