A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. Andrew Higgins

such projects, the proliferation of which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reached ‘epidemic proportions’ (Yaguello 1991, p. 52). As Yaguello notes:

      the period 1880–1914 witnessed frenzied activity in this sphere. Monnerot-Dumaine lists 145 projects for this period alone, which amounts to almost 40% of the total of 368 [invented] languages spread over four centuries. (1991, p. 53)

      As Fimi has discussed (2008, pp. 93–5), it was in the midst of this intellectual climate that Tolkien started working on the earliest stages of his legendarium, and the ‘coeval and congenital’ construction of his fictional languages. Some of the most significant IALs from that period, of which Tolkien will have been aware, included Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, and Novial (see Letters, p. 231). Two of them are referred to in Tolkien’s writings presented in this volume.

      Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof’s IAL was published in 1887 under the pseudonym ‘Doktoro Esperanto’ (Doctor Hopeful), which eventually gave his language its name. His ‘hope’ was that his language would unite humanity and bring in a new era of international tolerance and respect. Esperanto was designed to be intelligible by Europeans with very little study. According to D.B. Gregor, speakers of Romance languages could immediately recognize 80% of Esperanto, speakers of Germanic languages 63%, and speakers of Slavic languages 17% (Gregor 1982, p. 28). It boasted a grammar with no exceptions and relied on a system of roots and affixes. Esperanto acquired a strong following and continues to be spoken by around one million people today (Smith 2011, p. 38).

      Esperanto’s success inevitably led to many imitators, reformers and improvers. Novial (nov-‘new’ + IAL) was such a project by prominent linguist Otto Jespersen. Jespersen chose roots for Novial ‘according to the principle of greatest internationality’ and used auxiliary verbs in a similar way to English (Smith 2011, p. 39). There are two instances in Tolkien’s published writings where he referred to Novial (pretty much unfavourably – see below) but he mentioned Esperanto by itself on a number of occasions in his published corpus, including in ‘A Secret Vice’, in his preamble to introduce the subject of imaginary languages.

      Tolkien seems to have learnt Esperanto by 1909, as suggested by evidence contained in a small notebook he kept at the time called the ‘Book of the Foxrook’.^fn7 In this notebook the seventeen-year-old Tolkien outlined a secret code consisting of a ‘rune-like phonetic alphabet’ and ‘a sizeable number of ideographic symbols’, which Tolkien called ‘monographs’, each of which represented an entire word (Smith and Wynne 2000, p. 30). This ‘Private Scout Code’ (as Tolkien called it) worked, presumably, by using the ‘monographs’ for most words, and the rune-like alphabet (each enclosed in a cartouche) ‘to spell personal names or words for which a monograph was not available’ (ibid., p. 31). He appears to have invented a writing system that combined a phonetic alphabet (clearly associated with the sounds of English) and ideographic symbols. The instructions on the sounds that his rune-like alphabet represented, though, are in pure Esperanto, and he maintains that – with a few exceptions – his alphabet is used to spell phonetically ‘as in Esperanto’ (ibid., p. 31).^fn8

      Tolkien refers to the Esperanto World Congress of 1930 in ‘A Secret Vice’ (p. 4) and a year later he had become a member of the Board of Honorary Advisers to the Education Committee of the British Esperanto Association. In a letter supporting Esperanto, published in The British Esperantist in May 1932, he claimed that he wasn’t a ‘practical Esperantist’ but that ‘25 years ago I learned and have not forgotten its grammar and structure, and at one time read a fair amount written in it’ (cited in Smith and Wynne 2000, p. 35)^fn9. In his letter, Tolkien claims that the most important obstacle for any IAL is ‘universal propagation’ adding that one of the main reasons he supports Esperanto is that ‘it has already the premier place, has won the widest measure of practical acceptance’ (ibid.). These utilitarian concerns notwithstanding, Tolkien also praises Esperanto for its ‘individuality’, ‘euphony’, ‘coherence and beauty’, elements that he attributes to the ‘genius of the original author’ (ibid.).

      Oronzo Cilli (2014) has recently uncovered further links between Tolkien and the Esperanto movement. Tolkien’s name is cited as one of the ‘patrons’ of the 24th British Esperanto Congress which was held in Oxford at Easter 1933. Tolkien is also a co-signatory (together with 23 other academics and educators) of an article on ‘The educational value of Esperanto’ published in the May 1933 issue of The British Esperantist, which seems to have originated in a meeting of the same title recorded in the congress proceedings (see Cilli 2014). Whether Tolkien participated in the 1933 congress or not, he lends his support to a series of statements in favour of Esperanto which broadly agree with his earlier expressed ideas about this IAL: its endurance, popularity, and usability. This document concludes that Esperanto should be ‘the first language to be studied, after the mother tongue, in the schools of all countries’ (cited in Cilli 2014) and also refers to the ever-increasing original literature in Esperanto. This last point is of special importance when it comes to considering Tolkien’s next (and last) recorded comment on Esperanto, which comes from a letter composed over 20 years later. In 1956, in a draft letter to a certain Mr Thompson, Tolkien delves into his creative process and notes:

      It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa. Volapük^fn10, Esperanto, Ido^fn11, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.) So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing ‘legends’ of the same ‘taste’. (Letters, p. 231)

      In contrast to Tolkien’s own invented languages, which are indissolubly bound up with the history and legends of the various peoples in his complex secondary world, many IALs divorce language from culture. IALs arguably offer a ready-made linguistic idiom that is simpler, easier to learn, and more logical than natural languages, but may also be perceived as neutral, non-personal, a-historical, standardized, sterile. Okrent notes that this may be the reason why many people talk about IALs with scorn or dismissive humour. An IAL asks us to ‘turn away from what makes our languages personal and unique and choose one that is generic and universal. It asks us to give up what distinguishes us from the rest of the world for something that makes everyone in the world the same’. They are a ‘threat to beauty: neutral, antiseptic, soulless’ (Okrent 2009, pp. 111–12). Tolkien’s 1956 comment on IALs follows a similar line of argument: he characterizes them as ‘dead’ languages (a term usually used for languages with no living speakers) because they are not rooted in a cultural context. But, applicable though his comments may be to Volapük, Ido and Novial, they oversimplify the long historical development of Esperanto and the gradual development of an ‘Esperanto culture’. The younger Tolkien who co-signed the 1933 article discussed above seems to be more keenly aware of the success of Esperanto over many years, which led to the composition of original literature in this IAL. Okrent (2009) has handled the idea of an ‘Esperanto culture’ with honesty and sensitivity and has given a colourful and fascinating account of the shared culture of Esperanto speakers when they find themselves in ‘Esperantoland’ (anywhere in the world Esperanto is spoken – and definitely at congresses and other regular gatherings of Esperanto supporters). She offers evidence of the development of idiomatic language in Esperanto to suit its speakers’ shared values, principles and anxieties, and the development of a shared identity beyond national boundaries. The fact that Esperanto has allowed a shared tradition and culture to ‘breed’ among its speakers, makes it more sympathetic to Tolkien’s ideals for invented languages than the older Tolkien is willing to admit.^fn12

      The general consensus in Tolkien scholarship is that Tolkien originally expressed admiration for Esperanto but changed his mind later on, or at least lost his original