J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) is the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings.

Languages

See also Languages of Middle-earth.

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Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology.

Related Topics:
Language - Philology

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He specialized in Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with Old Icelandic as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918. In 1920, he went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged 33, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".

Related Topics:
Greek - 1915 - Old Icelandic - Oxford English Dictionary - 1918 - 1920 - Leeds - Linguistics - Heroic verse - Middle English - Germanic - Gothic - Medieval Welsh - 1925 - Viking Club

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Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance" and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered west-midland Middle English his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955 (Letters, 163), "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)".

Related Topics:
Racial - 1955 - English and Welsh - West-midland - W. H. Auden

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Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for the construction of artificial languages. The best-developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which are at the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from 'phonaesthetic' considerations. It

Related Topics:
Artificial language - Quenya - Sindarin

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was intended as an 'Elvenlatin', and was phonologically based on Latin basis with ingredients from Finnish and Greek (Letters, 144). A notable addition came in late 1945 with Numenorean, a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis myth, which by The Notion Club Papers ties directly into his ideas about inheritability of language, and via the "Second Age" and the Earendil myth was grounded in the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's 20th century "real primary world" with the mythical past of his Middle-earth.

Related Topics:
Finnish - 1945 - Numenorean - Semitic - Atlantis - The Notion Club Papers - Second Age - Earendil

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Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages. In 1930 A congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends." (Letters, 180).

Related Topics:
Auxiliary language - 1930 - A Secret Vice - 1956 - Volapük - Esperanto - Ido - Novial

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The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's spellings

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dwarves and elvish (instead of dwarfs and elfish). Other terms he has coined, like legendarium and eucatastrophe are mainly used in connection with Tolkien's work.

Related Topics:
Legendarium - Eucatastrophe

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