A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. Andrew Higgins

it reflected, and its relation to his mythology, which had been evolving for over fifteen years by that time. The text of the lecture itself, and the attendant drafts and notes that this volume brings to light, focuses on some of the key elements that Tolkien thought were crucial in language invention.

       Theorizing Language Invention

      ‘A Secret Vice’ opens with a preamble, a number of false starts or preludes, before Tolkien comes to his main topic. He begins with mention of a recent Esperanto Congress in Oxford (1930) and offers some evaluative comments on Esperanto as an International Auxiliary Language (IAL). Tolkien recalls a time during World War I while ensconced in a tent, overhearing a ‘little man’ who was composing a language sotto voce, ‘in secret’; but that man, Tolkien explains, remained unforthcoming about his task. Tolkien then references a ‘nursery’ language, Animalic (made up from names of animals, birds and fish), that he learnt as a child. He notes that in contrast to Esperanto, which was constructed as a utilitarian means of international communication, both of the other two examples cited associate language invention with pleasure. Following this somewhat prolonged introduction, Tolkien comes to his topic proper, hailing it a ‘New Game’ or ‘New Art’: ‘the construction of imaginary languages in full or outline for amusement’ (see p. 11).

      Tolkien continues his lecture focusing on autobiographical examples, reflecting on his own progression from helping create crude childhood languages to the invention of more sophisticated and developed ones. He mentions Nevbosh (the ‘New Nonsense’), a language that he co-invented with his cousin, Marjorie Incledon, and which was influenced by English, French and Latin. Nevbosh moved away from the simple substitution of Animalic by phonetically distorting words from learnt languages, but it remained ostensibly a code and fairly transparent for speakers of its source languages. But there were exceptions: Tolkien offers the example of a word that was chosen not based on an English, French or Latin prototype, but because its sound seemed to ‘fit’ its meaning. This element, coupled with the fact that Nevbosh was shared by only two speakers and was not dominated by the need for communication, makes this childhood language an important step towards the imaginary languages of the older Tolkien.

      The next example Tolkien mentions in this largely reflective essay is his first ever private language, created for his personal amusement only and not belonging to a community of speakers: Naffarin. In this language he was free to express his own taste for sounds and structure and chose Latin and Spanish as inspiration. Tolkien points out that the ‘refinement of the word-form’ (see p. 17) made this language a superior specimen compared to Nevbosh and he also talks about the gradual development of a personal ‘style’ and ‘mannerisms’ in language invention.

      From Naffarin onwards Tolkien claims to have aspired to the highest standard of language creation: he attempted to fulfil the ‘instinct for “linguistic invention” – the fitting of notion to oral symbol, and pleasure in contemplating the new relation established’ (see pp. 15–16). At this point in his talk, Tolkien moves away from a reflective-autobiographical style and proceeds to theorize and evaluate the most important elements of his language invention:

      a) the creation of word-forms that sound aesthetically pleasing;

      b) a sense of ‘fitness’ between symbol (the word-form and its sound) and sense (its meaning);

      c) the construction of an elaborate and ingenious grammar; and

      d) the composition of a fictional historical background for an invented language, including a sense of its (hypothetical) change in time.

      Alongside the detailed exploration of each of these elements, Tolkien includes comments on sound symbolism and whether there is such a thing as a personal ‘taste’ for language sounds; as well as on the interconnectedness of language and mythology. He also offers four poems as samples of those of his invented languages that he considers to have reached a worthy level of refinement and to express his personal ‘linguistic aesthetic’. Although he does not name them, Tolkien here gives three poems in Qenya, an earlier version of Quenya, and one in Noldorin, which was later reconceived as Sindarin.

      Tolkien closes his talk with some thoughts on the merits of writing poetry in an invented language as an abstraction of the pleasures of poetic composition, and a comparison of this practice with the pleasure of reading poetry in an ancient language. Tolkien concludes by contemplating the power of language to send the imagination leaping.

       The Languages of Middle-earth

      Towards the end of ‘A Secret Vice’, Tolkien somewhat reluctantly moves from theorizing about language invention to unveiling some key examples of his own Qenya and Noldorin, which by that time had become central to his Middle-earth mythology. To illustrate Qenya, Tolkien gives three poems: Oilima Markirya (‘The Last Ark’), Nieninqe and Earendel (see pp. 27–31). For Noldorin, Tolkien offers an untitled poem which starts with the line ‘Dir avosaith a gwaew hinar’ (‘Like a wind dark through gloomy places’) (see p. 32) which incorporates characters from his legendarium as it had developed by that time, including the evil Orcs, Damrod the Hunter, and the Elf princess Lúthien Tinúviel. Tolkien states that he considers poetry to be the ‘final fruition’ of language development (see p. 26). Therefore, by delivering samples of his poetry in his talk, Tolkien was not only demonstrating the theories he outlined, but also showing that these two imaginary languages had themselves by late 1931 reached an advanced stage in conception and composition.

      The earliest of these imaginary languages, in terms of conception, is Qenya. Tolkien started inventing Qenya in the spring of 1915 through two key linguistic documents: The Qenya Lexicon and The Qenya Phonology (published in PE 12). In the Qenya Lexicon, Tolkien invented a series of base roots by which related Qenya words could be constructed. In the Qenya Phonology, a dense 28-page philological treatise, Tolkien laid out the basic phonetic principles of Qenya, including a series of sound combination rules, which gave Qenya a specific sound aesthetic. As Tolkien noted on several occasions, this sound aesthetic was heavily influenced by his early discovery and passion for the Finnish language (see Letters, p. 214). For example, in his development of the Qenya vowel, Tolkien focused on the use of open, long vowels, and his sound combination rules emphasized a softening of consonant stops; all elements of Finnish phonetics. The Qenya Lexicon and Phonology are the foundations from which Tolkien constructed names for people, places and items in the early poems of his nascent mythology. The earliest evidence of this work is in the July 1915 poem The Shores of Faery, which Tolkien described as the ‘First poem of my mythology’ (Lost Tales II, p. 271). This is the earliest known text in which Tolkien names several places that were emerging in his mythical geography by constructing invented names attested in the Qenya Lexicon and Qenya Phonology (e.g. Eldamar, Valinor, Taniquetil). Andrew Higgins (2015) has analysed the words Tolkien constructed from the base roots in the Qenya Lexicon, and has argued that Tolkien was inventing the words needed to translate some of his own English poetry into Qenya, and to compose poetry in Qenya itself. Tolkien’s use of Qenya for original composition is attested in his early 1916 Qenya poem Narqelion (pp. 95–6).

      After seeing active duty in the First World War, Tolkien revisited the Qenya Lexicon by compiling a list of selected Qenya words called The Poetic and Mythological Words of Eldarissa (PE 12, pp. 29–112) which developed, and to some extent modified, some of his earlier thoughts on Qenya words and their English translations. Qenya was evolving and Tolkien would soon use it extensively in The Book of Lost Tales, the earliest prose version of his mythology. He composed prose fragments and various name-lists related to his mythic narratives, while continuing to develop Qenya independently by creating verb conjugations, pronoun charts and noun declensions. While he was a Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds in the early 1920s, Tolkien made his first complete grammar of the Qenya language (published in PE 14, pp. 35–59, 71–86). It would be this work on the Qenya Grammar, as well as additional lists of invented vocabulary, that