A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. Andrew Higgins

to exploring projects in both prose and poetry, he was developing new versions of his expanding mythology that intertwined neatly with his language invention. From the summer of 1925 to c.1931 Tolkien revisited his earliest version of the tale of Beren and Lúthien (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ in The Book of Lost Tales) and turned it into a long poem in octosyllabic couplets: ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’ or ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (Lays, pp. 150–329). Before the end of 1929, Tolkien gave Lewis ‘The Lay of Leithian’ to read. In a letter to Tolkien, Lewis wrote that he stayed up all night reading it and praised the work for its reality and mythical value (Lays, p. 151). Lewis also provided Tolkien with a list of suggested changes, somewhat parodying academic commentary on real medieval manuscripts (see Lays, pp. 315–29).

      As for the rest of Tolkien’s mythology, it was expanding from a ‘Sketch of the mythology’ in 1926 (which itself was a re-conceived version of the earlier ‘Book of Lost Tales’) to the ‘Quenta Noldorinwa’ (Shaping, pp. 76–218), which would establish the main narrative of the mythology before he started work on The Lord of the Rings. Associated with the ‘Quenta’ is Tolkien’s first ‘Silmarillion’ map, which geographically represented the secondary world Tolkien had created by this time and included place-names in Qenya and Noldorin (Shaping, pp. 219–34). In the early 1930s Tolkien also started to express his mythology using a historical-chronicle form, similar to works such as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Tolkien worked on ‘The Earliest Annals of Valinor’ and ‘The Earliest Annals of Beleriand’, partially translating both from English into Anglo-Saxon (Shaping, pp. 262–341).

      In addition to the emerging ‘Silmarillion’ mythology, Tolkien also worked on several other creative projects in prose and poetry. In 1927, he published two poems under the general title: ‘Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, being The Freaks of Fisiologus’ in The Stapeldon Magazine, a publication of Exeter College, which Tolkien attended as an undergraduate. In these poems, Tolkien parodies the medieval bestiary by juxtaposing different semi-mythical creatures in playful verse. In 1930, Tolkien also completed work on his Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, a poem modelled on a medieval Breton lay.

      In the early 1930s, both just before and very soon after the delivery of ‘A Secret Vice’, Tolkien was also occupied by two other key literary compositions. First, drawing on his own lectures on the Old Norse Eddas and Sagas^fn4, Tolkien composed two original poems: ‘Völsungakviða en nýja’ (The New Lay of the Völsungs) and ‘Guðrúnarkviða en nýja’ (The New Lay of Gudrún)^fn5. His aim was to attempt a reconstruction of the story of the Volsungs, to include new material covering that which was missing in the Norse Sagas (see Sigurd, pp. 5–12). Second, Tolkien composed an alliterative Arthurian poem. As Christopher Tolkien’s 2013 edition of The Fall of Arthur illustrates, Tolkien attempted to link the departure of Arthur and Lancelot to the West with his own ‘Silmarillion’ mythology (see Fall of Arthur, pp. 123–68).

      Tolkien also wrote poems for his children during that period. By 1931, a doll owned by his children had inspired him to start writing poems and, interestingly, construct a small piece of prose, about the whimsical character Tom Bombadil (see Bombadil). Another of his children’s toys inspired Roverandom, a tale he eventually wrote down in 1927. It was also during this period that Tolkien also started sending his children letters from ‘Father Christmas’ each December. In 1928, Tolkien composed a cycle of poems incorporating fantasy and satire called the ‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’ (see Anderson 2003, pp. 309–11). During this period, Tolkien also wrote Farmer Giles of Ham, a comic tale about a dragon and his bumbling adversary set in the medieval villages around Oxford. Yet another dragon tale emerges sometime around, or shortly after, the summer of 1930 (see Rateliff 2007, p. xiii); a tale that Tolkien told his children, and with which they were so enraptured, that in the early 1930s he was compelled to put on to paper. The Hobbit was published in 1937. It gave the reading public the smallest glimpse of the, by now quite vast, mythology that Tolkien had been developing up to this time.

      ‘A Secret Vice’ is, therefore, a key text, from a key period, that not only brings together Tolkien’s academic and creative work on language, but is probably the first occasion at which Tolkien spoke publicly, if a little cryptically, about his entirely private mythology and secondary world. It could be argued that at 9 pm on 29 November 1931, Tolkien revealed to the world the ‘coeval and congenital’ arts of world-building and language invention – the crux of his creative endeavours and literary success.

       ‘A Secret Vice’ and the Larger Context

      Tolkien was not the first author to invent languages for fiction. ‘Art-langs’ (as they are often termed) are found already during the early modern period in the ‘traveller’s tale’, a genre that flourished alongside real-world exploration, and which gave writers such as Thomas More, Bishop Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac, Gabriel de Foigny and Jonathan Swift the opportunity to invent fictional peoples in fantastic locations (often imaginary islands) speaking exotic languages (see Fimi 2008, p. 94; Higgins 2015, pp. 43–7). In The Book of Lost Tales Tolkien himself used the ‘traveller’s tale’ trope to connect his emerging mythology to England’s re-imagined past, by having the mariner Ottor Wǽfre (later, Eriol) travel to the Lonely Isle and encounter the exiled Elves who speak the earliest forms of Tolkien’s invented languages. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) became an important landmark in the early use of language invention. He created names, place-names and phrases in several imaginative languages spoken by the residents of the fantastical places Lemuel Gulliver is shipwrecked upon. As revealed in this volume, Tolkien referred to Swift in ‘A Secret Vice’ and made notes on his impressions of Swift’s language invention (see pp. 86–7).

      In the Victorian period the traveller’s tale became linked to several of the earliest works of science fiction such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac: The Story of A Wrecked Record (1880) and Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), all of which included specimens of fictional languages (see Higgins, 2015, pp. 47–8). Bulwer-Lytton’s use of language invention is especially interesting as the imaginary language of Vril-ya ‘is constructed as an extrapolation from the accepted truths of the linguistic science of the time’ (Yaguello 1991, p. 45). Indeed, Bulwer-Lytton dedicated this dystopian novel to the Oxford philologist Max Müller whose ideas on language development and decay Bulwer-Lytton imaginatively incorporated into the invented history of the language of Vril-ya.

      Tolkien’s linguistic invention also responded to his times in similar ways. As outlined above, ‘A Secret Vice’ was first conceived and delivered at an important period in the continuum of Tolkien’s literary and academic work. This time also represented a particular social, historical and intellectual moment. The late 1920s and early 1930s saw the last promising flowering of International Auxiliary Languages, important trends and changes in linguistic theories, and language experimentation in art, mainly represented by Modernism as a literary movement. ‘A Secret Vice’ and Tolkien’s accompanying drafts and papers seem to engage with, and respond to, these contemporary trends and contexts.

      Creating a new language, or seeking to re-create a long-lost ideal language, has been an important – yet often overlooked – aspect of the Western tradition. Medieval scholars attempted to recover, or rediscover, the language of Adam, the primeval ‘perfect’ language lost via the sin of Babel, according to the Judaeo-Christian tradition (see Eco 1995; Yaguello 1991, pp. 10–14). Many brilliant minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Francis Lodwick^fn6, Gottfried Leibniz, John Wilkins and George Dalgarno, endeavoured to construct a universal philosophical language, which would be based on a logical and mathematical description of the universe and would eliminate the perceived imprecise, disorganized and unsystematic disposition of natural languages (see Okrent 2009, 19–75). By the nineteenth century, the a priori (made from scratch) languages of the previous era had given way to international languages, constructed a posteriori (using elements of existing natural languages), also termed auxiliary as they were meant to serve