Why does Tolkien create so many languages?

 

In English and Welsh, Tolkien claims language as a marker of identity in two distinct ways: a person’s “ethnic” identity and a person's individuality. In the very beginning of the lecture, he quotes Sjéra Tómas Sæmundsson, who when speaking of the importance of Icelandic and its preservation, said:

‘Languages are the chief distinguishing marks of peoples. No people in fact comes into being until it speaks a language of its own; let the languages perish and the peoples perish too, or become different peoples. But that never happens except as the result of oppression and distress.’

Language define a person’s identity: to natively speak Welsh is to belong to a clearly set, distinct identity. We are different because we speak Welsh. To disrupt this cycle, to prevent or disrupt the parent teaching the child their language, is to prevent the parent from teaching their child how to be Welsh. A language is an identity marker.

Unfortunately, I erred in the prior paragraph. I said to “natively” speak Welsh: native how you and I understand it. But that is not what Tolkien believed: “'But the inherited, first-learned, language - what is usually mis-called "native" - bites in early and deep. It is hardly possible to escape from its influence.’” (The Notion Club Papers). There is, in each person, the capacity for a different, truly native language. A language that appeals to them, that perhaps comes easier to learn. As he says later in The Notion Club Papers:

We each have our own personal linguistic potential: we each have a native language. But that is not the language that we speak, our cradle-tongue, the first-learned. Linguistically we all wear ready-made clothes, and our native language comes seldom to expression, save perhaps by pulling at the ready-made till it sits a litde easier. But though it may be buried, it is never wholly extinguished, and contact with other languages may stir it deeply.

Language is not merely a distinguisher of people. Tolkien asserts in The Notion Club papers that every language is so unique that its different qualities can never correctly suit the native speaker. We have our own language within us. Each person, and each language is an individual. A language can and should be individualistic.

Tolkien must write so many languages, because he wishes to create individuals. How could Tolkien introduce us to his world, or the characters within it, without creating different languages.

Consider when Gandalf reads aloud the original words of the ring within Rivendell:

This I have done, and I have read: Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul”. The change in the wizard’s voice was astounding. Suddenly it became menacing, powerful, harsh as stone. A shadow seemed to pass over the high sun, and the porch for a moment grew dark.

A language so evil changes Gandalf, even for a moment. It darkens the porch – changing Rivendell itself. A character speaking a certain language within Mordor is the equivalent of wearing a specific type of dress in all scenes, or even just more subtly giving them a character trait. To speak a language is to speak like a person, and to, especially in this world, speak and draw on the qualities of its creators. Tolkien describes our native language, and even the languages we speak as ready-made clothes, but ready-made clothes still give you character. Your choice of brand and the designers behind it shape you in their image: Gandalf speaks the Black speech and he and Rivendell become blacker.

But this act of characterization is most clear with Frodo: the only hobbit of the four who can speak some Sindarin, which is in opposition to the Black Speech, as when the hobbits meet Goldberry:

He stood as he had at times stood enchanted by fair elven-voices; but the spell that was now laid upon him was different: less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvelous and yet not strange.

Again, Tolkien makes clear the individualistic nature of languages and the power they hold over a person. Goldberry’s singing in Sindarin prompts a spell of delight for the hobbits: it is nearer to their hearts and familiar. Sindarin allows them to trust Goldberry, and allows Goldberry to trust them, as she says after Frodo sings to her: “‘I had not heard that fold of the Shire were so sweet-tongued. But I see you are an elf-friend; the light in your eyes and the ring in your voice tells it”.

Frodo is sweet-tongued because he speaks Sindarin: the ring in his voice is of the same enchantment. This is no power held by Common Tongue, as “that fold” of the Shire is not sweet-tongued. Frodo is the hero he is because, as we set up, he speaks a little Sindarin. He is different from the rest of the hobbits. Tolkien sets us up in the very beginning of the novel, through a language difference, to glean this. For Tolkien, to introduce languages is to do two things simultaneously: introduce the peoples of Middle-Earth (to be different peoples is to speak different languages) and importantly his characters: what languages they know and choose to speak defines them on an individual level as well.  

ZJ

How Tolkien’s Love of Words Realized Middle-Earth

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

The Language Portal

    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

 

History Becomes Myth and Myth Preserves History

At first glance, the difference between history and myth seems obvious: history is true, and myth is fiction. When J. R. R. Tolkien claims that Middle-earth is real and that the events he writes really did happen in our world, many would call it ridiculous. However, our own “real” history, once one goes back a few centuries, can only be encountered in fragments, since it survives through retellings, interpretations, and the occasional piece of writing that shapes our understanding of that time. Stories like Beowulf show this clearly, a story about a hero killing a fictional monster can also be read as trauma literature, inspired by the slaughters that took place in mead halls between rival factions vying for influence and power. Such stories are therefore grounded in truth rather than pure fiction, and they reveal the culture of the civilization at that time. Rather than treating myth and history as opposites, it is better to say that myth is history that has receded into the distant past, while still preserving historical truths.

Tolkien uses this idea, that history turns into myth given enough time, into the way Middle-earth is presented as our own world in the distant past. In Letter 151 he writes:

“Middle-earth is just archaic English for ἡοἰκονμένη, the inhabited world of men. It lay then as it does. In fact just as it does, round and inescapable. That is partly the point. The new situation, established at the beginning of the Third Age, leads on eventually and inevitably to ordinary History.”

Middle-earth should be understood as a history so distant that it has become legendary, yet still remains relevant to the present. This is why Tolkien also states that “The essentials of that abiding place are all there (at any rate for inhabitants of N.W. Europe), so naturally it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time.” The values that shape North Western Europe are already present in the story and have carried through to the modern day, which is why the world feels familiar to those readers.

    This raises the question of why it matters that ancient history survives into the present at all. Even when shrouded in myth, the core values of a people and their civilization can endure in stories long after historical detail has been lost. Sam voices this idea on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, when he realizes that the old tales from ancient days are not simply stories, but that he and Frodo are living inside that same history.

“No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it... and the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got — you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?” (The Two Towers)

While Aragorn’s father is killed by orcs when Aragorn is only two, Elrond becomes a father to him and teaches him about Númenor, connecting him back to those ancient days. The Fall of Númenor is already many thousands of years in the past, yet through ancestry Aragorn is able to draw on that heritage for identity, authority, and a connection to an ancient world he has never seen. However, the legacy of Númenor is not a golden one. At their height, the Númenóreans were corrupted and sailed against the Valar, which ultimately led to their destruction. This shows that one’s roots do not need to be morally pure in order to remain meaningful.

    The sense of decline throughout Tolkien’s work reflects a loss of origins, as people become increasingly cut off from their past. Gondor, while still a significant power, is only a shadow of what Númenor once was. The island was destroyed, and even those who were not corrupted were forced to flee to Middle-earth. Although the Dúnedain preserved their culture for many generations, they are still doomed to slowly fade away. This aligns with Tolkien’s concept of the “Long Defeat,” in which the persistence of evil and the march of time will always doom the world, except in fleeting moments of unlikely victory or Eucatastrophe. This decline, however, makes it all the more important for humans to stand by their morals and continue fighting against the rising tide, in order to prolong the battle. Accepting near-impossible odds and fighting all the same, the Dúnedain, in the form of the Grey Company, along with many of the other Free Peoples of Middle-earth, give their lives in hope of victory because of the millennia-long stories of who they are and what they hope to protect.

    If myth is fiction and therefore irrelevant, then maps of the world according to thirteenth-century Europe would also have to be considered false. They look nothing like modern geography, and they include places a modern reader would call fictional, such as the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden. Yet they were still true for the people who used them. By combining geography with story, such maps told people about their own history and culture rather than simply helping them navigate. They maintained a connection to the ancient past and strengthened cultural roots against the erosive forces of time. Tolkien works in much the same way in The Lord of the Rings. Through myth, ancestry, and memory, Tolkien shows that the past does not vanish, it survives in the values later generations carry forward.

-EN

Thinking Like a Hobbit: History or Myth?

Many readers approach The Lord of the Rings like any other fantasy novel. They view it as a shallow good-versus-evil story told in a world filled with magic and monsters. In most pop culture we are exposed to, like Star Wars, the story takes place in a “galaxy far far away”. But to read Tolkien in this way is to completely misunderstand the world in which he sets his epic. Middle-earth is not an analogy for our world. It is, in the framing of the legendarium, our world in its infancy.

This is important to keep in mind while reading, because only in this framework can we truly understand the actions of the characters presented in the story. In a secondary world, the history of characters is only backstory that we don’t need to worry about too much. However, in a primary world, our world, history is a great spiritual and genetic inheritance of the characters. Their perception of history is the driving force of their actions. This history is the faded echo of a more magical age of our world that, for us readers, is long forgotten. Tolkien uses this to showcase different approaches to one’s own history through the lenses of the four races.

Elves in Middle-earth are quite unique in that they are not just long-lived humans, but instead are completely immortal, which is an interesting factor to consider when examining how they confront their own history. Their perception of history is not just a campfire story or a poem recited through the ages, but instead a scar of past experiences. When Legolas describes the passage of time to the other members of the Fellowship, he describes it as follows: "For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them." This grief is the driving factor of the Elves throughout the book. They have witnessed the corruption of paradise, the shattering of the lands of Beleriand, and the slow fading of their own power. They literally remember when the Earth was flat and the Valar walked among them. This is why the present feels dim to them as they reminisce over a greater age.

Men are similar but have a key distinction: they are mortal. Yes, they did fall out of glory with the fall of Númenor and are bound in exile, looking back at the former glory of their kin, but none of them lived it. This is why, unlike the Elves, they fight harder to restore the glory to their kin. Consider Boromir, who tried to take the Ring from Frodo to restore the glory of Gondor. If Elves are burdened by the length of their memory, then men are burdened by its height. Boromir wasn’t inherently bad or evil, but instead lusted for the Ring because of the generational pressure to restore the lost valor of Númenor. Men spend the story looking backward, hoping one day to fall back into glory.

Dwarf history is not written in books. It is written in the memory of the events of Khazad-dûm. Their perception of the past is explicit and gory. They do not look back at glory days of magic, but instead speak of a specific, named terror that drove them from their home (the Balrog). As Gandalf warns, "they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled, Durin's Bane." This history of loss makes the dwarves throughout the story look selfish, stubborn, and secretive. They all remember the betrayal at the hands of the elves, and their grudges last long. Gimli’s initial distrust of the elves is a testament to grudges long forgotten by most. But for the dwarves, they have learned to trust only their own kind.

With this in mind, how exactly are we supposed to approach The Lord of the Rings as a history book? Should we anguish like the elves, longing for a long-forgotten age of magic and wonder? Or maybe, like the men, should we live our lives looking backwards to this lost valor, fighting every day to restore it? Or should we live grudgingly like the dwarves? (I might, because I would be mad too if the ruins of Minas Tirith are never discovered.) But with these options that Tolkien presents, none of them look too appealing. That is why we look to the most relatable of the races: the hobbits.

Despite me already having a lot in common with the hobbits—considering that I love food, plants, and peace and quiet—Tolkien shows us how we should be approaching his story as a history.

The hobbits are the key to this entire riddle. In a world drowning in an epic tale, the hobbits are the ones who forgot. Their records, we are told, "began only after the settlement of the Shire." Their history consists of genealogy and local gossip. But this shortsightedness is not a weakness; it is a great strength. Often when reading The Lord of the Rings, I find in myself the same wonder and amazement as Frodo and the other hobbits discovering such an amazing world. The key to reading Tolkien as a history lies here. We should not anguish over a world lost, despair in the present, or hold a grudge. Instead, we should read this as a history.

-AMM