Tolkien’s “Mythopoeia,” the first assigned reading for the course, got me thinking about the way my understanding of the world depends on language. Without language, I’d be totally lost, unable to interpret or understand anything at all. My facility—or lack thereof—with English allows me to understand my surroundings. A world without language would be very confusing. How would we be able to make sense of anything? As Tolkien writes, we “look at trees and label them just so.” However, it should be obvious to all that we are born into a world already shaped by existing languages. The location of one’s birthplace determines the language they speak and, as Tolkien’s work reveals, profoundly shapes their identity.
My thoughts, for instance, are bound by the limits of the English language, the only one that I can speak well. Nevertheless, I recognize that there are sensations, emotions, and countless other parts of the human experience that I cannot describe using language. Now, one might rightly point out that if I cannot give these feelings a name, how can I be sure they are real?
Tolkien, in both his Letters and the aborted Notion Club Papers, wrestles with this problem. One of the Oxford dons in the story—named Lowdham—informs the other members of the Notion Club that he has been visited by “linguistic ghosts” or some kind of echoes of a forgotten past. Lowdham, like a proper philologist, interprets these visitations as evidence of another, mythical realm, arguing that language possesses the power to transport us to another plane of thought or imagination. The rest of the novel, or what remains of it, deals with the relationship between the world of the 1980s and the prehistoric language that has assailed the senses of poor Mr. Lowdham while presenting itself as a relic of a lost civilization. In the process of hunting down and then reconstructing ancient languages, Tolkien—and I admittedly lack the requisite training in physics to proceed along these lines but will do so anyway—complicates the Newtonian notion of time as a singular force, moving forward at the regular pace of one second per second and sweeping the past aside. It’s easy for us to accept the familiar, secular argument that, to ape the immortal words of Lynyrd Skynyrd, once Tuesday’s Gone, she’s never coming back.
Not so fast. Tolkien believes the past can be reconstructed by sifting through the philological wreckage of forgotten languages and cobbling it back together again. We can reenter the past through language.
Reading through the Notion Club Papers and listening to the class discussions, it occurred to me that Tolkien seems to view language—and most important names—as literal historical artifacts that must be handled with appropriate care. They have tremendous power. In much the same way that one feels a sense of history and majesty standing before Napoleon’s tomb, one can be moved by the mere presence of a historically important word. Dana Gioia’s poem “Words” offers a far more eloquent articulation of this worldview than I can hope to offer by pointing out that “one word transforms [a kiss] into something less or other—/illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.” By attaching any one of these adjectives to the noun, the nature of the kiss is utterly transformed. Not only that, but everything associated with it takes on a totally different meaning. The act of identification—or more precisely—the act of naming something is akin to the act of creation. That is the power of language.
All of Tolkien’s fiction, and even some of his scholarly work, invites the reader to consider the provocative notion that language has the power to open the doors of human perception to an unprecedented degree and take us to wondrous places. Now, on some level, most of us acknowledge this, having allowed ourselves to be transported by great works of literature, music, or even prayer. I certainly remember my first time reading The Lord of the Rings and the magical way in which Tolkien’s prose, poetry, and facility with names literally transported me to Middle-earth. Still, Tolkien’s letters—especially the one to the unfortunate Mr. Rang with whom I sympathize greatly—reveal a man tormented by the sense that people are misunderstanding his project and the responsibility with which one must treat these languages and names. They allow us to access another world entirely. We must be sure we stay on the proper path.
Tolkien makes it very clear in “On Fairy Stories” that indeed he takes this all very seriously, writing this world of our imagination “cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.” Faerie, a world that we can only gesture toward, exists just beyond the reach of our language. It’s a vibe or a feeling rather than a place. One wonders how Tolkien would have responded to the charge that one knows Faerie when they see it, but not before. Lowdham’s sweaty anguish in the Notion Club Papers stems from his doomed attempt to translate his experience in Faerie—that other wild, mystical realm—into our physical world. He is, by transcribing these ancient, primordial words, literally creating a new world within the Oxford of the 1980s. Predictably, it all goes horribly wrong. By exhuming the desiccated husk of a lost civilization and injecting it with the white light of creation, Lowdham invites the total annihilation of the world.
Through this fascinating time-travel tale, Tolkien offers both a warning and a rallying cry. He argues that, by preserving and updating ancient languages, we retain access to the worlds that those languages created, building upon his argument that it is language that creates reality rather than the other way around. All this ties into our broader conversation about the style in which Tolkien chooses to engage his readers compared with most modern fantasy writers. Style and language are everything in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien does not shy away from allowing his masterfully-constructed languages to outshine his characters and plotpoints.
Modern authors seem determined to not let language get in the way of their stories. Elmore Leonard—admittedly not a writer of fantasy but still a respected author—lives by the principle that the reader should never notice the writing; style should never impede the plot development. Ursula K. Le Guin, in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” inveighs against this development in modern literature by arguing that fantasy creates new worlds—that is its unique power. Both Le Guin and Tolkien frame names and language as keys that can be used to unlock gates to hidden worlds or even tools that can create new worlds. Le Guin laments the fact that modern fantasy too often borrows language from the reader’s physical reality to construct something that, in her eyes, merely masquerades as fantasy. These writers fail to recognize that a name can contain an entire world within it, something that Tolkien grasped. Names are not something that we project onto the world. Rather, as we all discover at an early age, they arise out of the world.
ES
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