What Remains: Language, Dreams, and the Fragmentary World of Tolkien

Looking at the works of Tolkien through the lens of language and dream help us situate the sense of reality behind his tales. But the very subjectivity of dreams and language also introduces a barrier of access. Both seem to offer access to something deeper: a past that is not constructed but inherited, not fully known but nonetheless recognized. At the same time, however, this access is neither stable nor universal. Because it depends on something as subjective as linguistic “taste” or the experience of dreams, it is never fully available but appears unevenly and under particular conditions. What emerges is not a continuous or complete reality, but one encountered in fragments, shaped not only by what survives, but by who is able, or willing, to perceive it.

We see language as a central part of Tolkien and understand it as a tool for building depth, but there is still this, often overshadowed, quiet function of language as a boundary. At the most obvious and lived level, language already separates those who can understand those that cannot. Yet, Tolkien complicates this by suggesting another less visible form of exclusivity: amongst those who understand, there is a distinct experience ties to each person. In The Lost Road, Alboin describes language as having a “flavour”, noting that “the languages he liked has a definite flavor”, (43) and that he is drawn in particular to the “Northern” one. This preference is not rational or fully explained, it is felt. It is not comprehension that matters but attraction. Tolkien reinforces this in Letter 163 to W.H. Auden, where he describes linguistic pleasure as something closer to appetite than intellect, “more like the appetite for a needed food” (312) and admits that Spanish is “the only Romance language that gives me a particular pleasure of which I am speaking of” (312). Language, then, is not neutral or equally available, it is experienced unevenly and shaped by what Tolkien calls “linguistic taste”, which “changes like everything else, as time goes on”, and which may even function as a “test of ancestry as blood-groups.” (313) The implication is that language carries with it a past that is not accessible to all, to responds to a language there seems to be the need to put effort to belong to it or be aligned with the history it carries. Tolkien, I believe unintentionally, leaves this subtle but quite significant distance, not everyone is equally positioned to access what a language preserves and therefore cannot all equally perceive the reality that emerges through it. So, language is not simply connecting us to the past but determining who is able to recognize it as such. 

Beyond language’s uneven form of access, The Lost Road also suggests that this access comes at a tradeoff. Alboin’s experience is marked beyond this attraction to certain “flavors”, but by a societal pressure away from them. Early on, he anticipates that “I shall dream tonight […] The Latin-mood will go,” (46) as if the two states cannot coexist, this contrast becomes sharper as he begins to advance within the structures of ordinary life. His father’s disapproval causes his response to the dreams as “Confound you dreams!” (46) seeming to be a rejection of the mode of experience that resists control and a shift toward discipline. This “Latin-mood”, then, comes to signify more than a preference but the societal expectation of orientation towards a certain language, and by means, a certain past. This shift is reinforced through Alboin’s increasing alignment with institutional life, he “had behaved himself moderately well at the university,” and the narrative retrospectively marks this period as coinciding with “the strange, sudden cessation of the Dreams.” (46) This again reassures us of the duality within society of abiding and learning languages (thereby histories) deemed worthy of society and those that we have true preference towards. Languages like Greek and Latin are presented in the Lost Roads as legitimized, having fragments worth unfolding. Thereby, access to these fragmentary, inherited forms of reality requires a certain openness, one that structured, forward-moving life tends to close off. The barrier, then, is not only linguistic or ancestral, but also self-impose. To move forward in one mode implicitly means to leave another behind. 

This leads us to the realm of dreams. Through Tolkien’s own imaginative material, we get the feeling that what is accessed is never whole. In Letter 257 to Colin Bailey, he keeps returning to what he calls “the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave,” something that “still occurs occasionally,” (486), that always ends in the same way of surrender without resolution. We see the themes of decadence constantly present in Tolkien’s worlds, and we can draw a line from the languages as a past that have left traces of a world that no longer pertains. Tolkien’s mythmaking comes from this repetition of something partial not necessarily grounded on a stable origin. This same structure extends into Middle earth itself. The world we encounter is not one coming into being, but one that has already passed its height. The movement toward Weathertop is marked by ruins, where past greatness is only available through what remains of it. Even spaces that seem to resist this decay, such as Bombadil’s house or later Lothlórien, do not offer permanence so much as interruption. They exist briefly outside time or power, but cannot be sustained, and the narrative moves on from them. What follows is not preservation, but this diminishment: the Shire returns altered and reduced, and the Grey Havens mark the point where what cannot be integrated into the present must leave it entirely.

What Tolkien ultimately reveals is not simply a hidden world, but a particular condition of access to it. Language distinguishes who can perceive it, social structures determine what is worth preserving, and dreams offer only partial returns of what has already been lost. Even the world itself, as it appears in The Lord of the Rings, does not present a complete reality, but one that persists through what remains after it. The past survives not as something fully recoverable, but as fragment, as echo, as repetition. What Tolkien’s work suggests is that there is more to reality than this, but it exists in forms we are not always prepared to sustain.

-LMN