A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. Andrew Higgins

mockery of the Elvish languages).

      Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,

      yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron! (Fellowship, p. 377)

      Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,

      ash nazg thrakatulûk

      agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. (ibid., p. 254)

      Tolkien was not only interested in inventing pleasing sounds and fitting meanings for individual words; he created groups of related words that displayed a shared sound aesthetic and related morphological meaning. An example of this can be seen in the Qenya base root MORO, which itself through primary world word-association suggests a feeling of literal or metaphorical ‘darkness’ (e.g. by evoking words of Indo-European languages such as ‘murder’, ‘murky’, ‘morte’, etc.). Tolkien used this root to construct a series of words directly and indirectly related to concepts of darkness and, by extension, the night and hidden things.

      mōri night

      morinda of the night, nightly

      mōriva nocturnal

      morna, morqa black

      moru hide, conceal

      morwa unclear, secret (PE 12, p. 62)

      This particular base root would persist in his language invention and was used to form the names of two very dark places in The Lord of the Rings: Moria (‘Black Chasm’) and Mordor (‘Land of Darkness’). Tolkien was particularly proud of the ‘coherence and consistency’ of his word and name invention, which he felt was lacking in ‘other name-inventors’ (Letters, p. 26).

      A third characteristic of Tolkien’s language invention is his construction of elaborate grammars, an element that very few previous inventors of fictional languages engaged with in such detail. The earliest notes and doodles found in Tolkien’s undergraduate essay books reveal that he was fascinated with the structure of languages and the development and change of words over time. He would imaginatively reflect this in the make-up of his own phonologies and grammars, which contain dense and intricate philological notes demonstrating the depth of his knowledge. The sheer pleasure (a word he uses several times in ‘A Secret Vice’) he derived came in the invention of the intricate nature of these grammars and the complex and detailed philological ideas they explored. Tolkien’s grammars reflect a similar structure to the historic and comparative grammars he read in his own academic studies, such as C.N.E. Eliot’s A Finnish Grammar (1890) and Joseph Wright’s A Primer of the Gothic Language (1892). Arden Smith describes Tolkien’s work on his own invented grammars as starting with ‘very detailed material on historic phonology, after which he would move on to the morphology section, before the end of which the manuscript would generally degenerate into a mass of incomplete notes in a virtually illegible scrawl’ (Smith 2014, p. 204). However, it was through this very work on invented grammars, phonologies and attendant documents that Tolkien expanded his Elvish languages and, given their intertwined nature, developed new elements of his mythology. It has been said that Tolkien developed the narrative of his mythology through successive small changes to his texts rather than large ones (Scull 2000). Given the evidence of much of Tolkien’s early Elvish language invention, it would seem the same was true here; a process of constant ‘niggling’.

      A good example of Tolkien’s linguistic niggling and changing ideas about grammar can be seen in his work on inventing and refining the pronominal system of Qenya, and its later revision in The Lord of the Rings as Quenya, the language of the High-elves (see Return, p. 1127). In its earliest phase of development (c.1917–18), Qenya pronouns were conceived as immediately preceding a verb and joined by a hyphen. Therefore, ‘I come’ would be expressed as ‘ni·tule’ (PE 14, pp. 52–3). In an example from a form of Qenya Tolkien used in his ‘Father Christmas letter’ of 1929, called Arktik, this hyphenated form had, by now, split from the verb and become a separate element: ‘ni vela’ ‘I see’ (Father Christmas, p. 30). By the early 1930s, however, Tolkien started to change his mind once more, and in a document known as Qenya Conjugations (PE 16, pp. 116–28) he started to express pronouns using suffixes added to the end of the verb form. Tolkien would continue to develop this idea in the Quenya of The Lord of the Rings. For example, the penultimate line in Galadriel’s lament, Namárië, is ‘Nai hiruvalyë Valimar’ ‘Maybe thou shalt find Valimar’ (Fellowship, p. 378, emphasis added), where the form -lyë (‘thou’) is added to the end of the verb form hiruva (‘shalt find’). Given the several detailed notes Tolkien made on this specific passage in the Namárië poem, it is clear that by the time he wrote this section of The Lord of the Rings he firmly believed that the Quenya pronoun should now be a suffix added to the verb form and only be used as a standalone word form for purposes of emphasis (see example in PE 17, pp. 75–6). These series of changes represent a complete re-conception of the placement of the pronoun in the earliest version of Qenya.

      The fourth characteristic of Tolkien’s language invention is his intertwining of myth and language to create ‘an illusion of historicity’ (Letters, p. 143) through which he could imaginatively reflect how languages change over (hypothetical) time and through the cross-migration of peoples. Tolkien’s thoughts here were evidently influenced by two key elements. First, the fact that languages do not exist in a void, but belong to their speakers, who share many cultural characteristics which feed into the uses, conventions and historical developments of language. Therefore, if Tolkien was to achieve progression from the simpler childhood concept of inventing languages for social interaction, to more private and artistic linguistic inventions, then he would need to invent those peoples, cultures and attendant mythologies that would allow these languages to develop and prosper. Secondly, as Tom Shippey has shown, the linguistic paradigm that Tolkien adhered to both as student and as teacher was comparative philology: a discipline which came out of Germany in the nineteenth century and was based on the idea that languages change over time, not randomly, but through the operation of regular sound shifts (Shippey 2005, pp. 32–4). As Tolkien’s language invention skills grew, his own invention moved from the creation of isolated, static languages, devoid of historical context or internal development, to families of related languages, each designed to appear to have undergone characteristic internal development and all emerging from a common ancient source language through long years of gradual and systematic changes of sound over time.

      Tolkien’s narrative of the Elves clearly reflects, and mythically re-imagines, the paradigm that eighteenth- and nineteenth century philologists explored of the existence of a ‘proto-language’ spoken by a hypothetical common people, the Indo-Europeans, which through time and migration had become splintered into different language groups and dialects. In Tolkien’s basic story, which he developed and refined throughout the evolution of his legendarium, the Elves awake in the East and are invited by the Valar to journey to the West. Some groups of Elves decide to accept this invitation and take part in a great march to the West, while others stay in the Great Lands. This first division is followed by a splintering of their languages. Some of the Elves who march to the West relinquish the journey along the way and form their own social and linguistic communities, while others make the entire journey to the home of the Valar in the West. In a later part of the history of the Elves, a group who come to the West, the Noldoli, are determined to return to the Great Lands and, in so doing, also develop another form of Elvish. In each step of this process of migration and diffusion, different versions of Elvish languages and related dialects are created, whilst these groups also come into contact with other peoples, such as Men and Dwarves, whose own languages are in turn influenced by their contact with the Elves. In c.1937, Tolkien would use the model of the ‘Proto-Indo-European’ tree of languages to create his own ‘Tree of Tongues’, which explored how the (now eleven) Elvish languages related to each other as well as to the languages of other peoples in Middle-earth (Lost Road, pp. 196–7; see also PE 18, pp. 28–9). It would be this expansion of his ‘nexus’ of languages for Middle-earth that Tolkien would take with him into his writing of The Lord of the Rings, and into the work he did on his mythology after its release in his attempt to prepare