Since I started this column in 2019, I’ve been avoiding one famous—possibly even the most famous—example of using linguistics in SFF literature: the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s not because I don’t like Lord of the Rings—quite the opposite, in fact. It’s just such an obvious topic, and one which people have devoted decades of scholarship to exploring. Hell, my Old English prof has published academic scholarship on the topic, in addition to teaching a Maymester class on the languages of Middle-earth. But I suppose it’s time to dedicate a column to the book that first made me think language was cool and to the man who wrote it.
Tolkien was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, modern South Africa. His father died when he was 3, and his mother died when he was 12. He was given to the care of a priest and attended King Edward’s School, where he learned Latin and Old English, which was called Anglo-Saxon back then. When he went to Oxford, he ended up majoring in English literature, and his first job post-WW1 was researching the etymology of words of Germanic origin that started with W for the Oxford English Dictionary. This sounds both fascinating and utterly tedious, given the obvious lack of digitization at the time and thus the necessity to read and annotate print books to find and confirm sources.
Tolkien’s academic career began around the same time, and he worked on reference materials for Germanic languages (a vocabulary of Middle English and translations of various medieval poetry) before being named Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Diana Wynne Jones attended his lectures and found them “appalling” because she thought that “Tolkien made quite a cynical effort to get rid of us so he could go home and finish writing The Lord of the Rings.” (Does the timeline match publication history? No, probably not, but this is what Wynne Jones remembered 50 years later.)
He was academically interested in the history of language: how words and grammar changed over time. He was focussed on English, but by necessity he had to know about other Germanic languages (German, Norwegian, etc.) in order to pursue etymological studies. This interest in dead languages carried with it an interest in translation, taking a poem from a long-gone society and bringing it to the modern reader (see my column on Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf translation for more info on that).
As a youth, Tolkien encountered invented languages first from his cousins, then moved on to making up his own a little later. He also learned Esperanto before 1909. If you put his academic interest in language history together with his nerdy interest in invented languages, you can see how he decided to invent an Elvish language and give it a history. And then develop distinct branches of that language and give them their own histories. And then come up with people (well, Elves) who spoke the languages and give them a history.
Tolkien set up the entire history of Middle-earth as a frame story, one based in the premise that he was publishing his own translations of ancient texts that he’d found. The frame is entirely unnecessary (and unless you read the appendices and prologue, you probably don’t know it exists), but the man was a giant nerd about language and translation, so it was completely obviously the thing he needed to do in order to tell this tale. Logically.
The prologue of LOTR, “Concerning Hobbits,” tells us that The Hobbit is a translation of a section of the Red Book of Westmarch, which itself started from Bilbo’s memoirs of his journey with the dwarves. The book, bound in plain red leather, has gone through multiple titles by the time Frodo adds his memoirs and passes it on to Sam:
My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. And What Happened After.
Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and the accounts of his friends. What we did in the War of the Ring.
Here Bilbo’s hand ended and Frodo had written:
The Downfall
of the
Lord of the Rings
and the
Return of the King
(as seen by the Little People; being the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire, supplemented by the accounts of their friends and the learning of the Wise.)
Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo in Rivendell.
Then the Appendices are all about the history of Gondor and the Elves, and transliteration notes and a discussion similar to what you’d find in the translator’s notes or introduction of a text, where they justify the various decisions they made, especially controversial ones. He had an idea, and he committed to it. That’s dedication.
Tolkien’s academic interest in Germanic languages, especially Old English, is most obvious in the Rohirrim. In the frame narrative, the language of the Rohirrim is unrelated to the language of Gondor (but is related to the Hobbits’ language, as noted when Théoden—or maybe it was Éomer—remarks that he can sort of understand Merry and Pippin’s conversation). Tolkien, as the translator of the RBoW for an English-speaking audience and as an Anglo-Saxon scholar, decided to use Old English to represent it. So the king is Théoden, which is an OE word for “king or leader,” from théod (“people”), and Éowyn is a compound word that means approximately “horse-joy.” The name they give themselves, Eorlings, contains the same eo(h)- “horse” root as Éowyn. Tolkien gives this as “the Men of the Riddermark.” Eorl is also the name of one of their early kings, much like the legendary Jutes who led the invasion of Britain in the 5th century were called Hengist and Horsa, both of which are words for horse (heng(e)st = stallion).
Let me tell you, when I was learning Old English, there were so many vocab words that immediately made me think of Tolkien and say appreciatively, “Oh, I see what you did there, old man. You nerd.” Because he used Old English to represent Rohirric, the songs of the Rohirrim in the text are in alliterative verse (again, see my column on Beowulf):
Out of DOUBT, out of DARK, to the DAY’S rising
I came SINGING in the SUN, SWORD unsheathing
To HOPE’S end I rode and to HEART’S breaking
Now for WRATH, now for RUIN and a RED nightfall!
The language of the Hobbits is a descendant of a Mannish language from the upper Anduin, which is related to that of the Rohirrim. The origin of the word Hobbit, which they call themselves, is “forgotten” but seems “to be a worn-down form of a word preserved more fully in Rohan: holbytla ‘hole builder’.” But later in the same Appendix F, he writes that hobbit “is an invention,” because the common tongue used banakil ‘halfling,’ and he based it on the word kuduk, used by the people in Bree and the Shire. This word, he writes, is probably a “worn-down form of kûd-dûkan,” which he translated as holbytla, as previously explained, and then derived hobbit as a worn-down form that would exist “if that name had occurred in our own ancient language.”
Tolkien used linguistics in an entirely different way than I’ve talked about in this column before. Rather than content himself with making up a few words here and there or doing just enough to give everything a veneer of truthiness, he constructed a whole-ass language (more than one!) and pretended that he was translating a book written in that language into modern English. When I was a wee baby writer (so, like, high school), I, too, wanted to create a similarly huge setting and a bunch of languages and so on. I eventually decided I didn’t want to put in that kind of immense effort but my interest in languages endured, and through a long, circuitous route I ended up getting an MA in (Germanic) linguistics while writing SF. And here we are!
So, what was your first exposure to Tolkien? Did you also try to learn the dwarvish runes and Tengwar? Did you make it farther than I did and actually learn them? Discuss in the comments!
CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke. You can find her current project, a book on practical linguistics for writers, on Patreon.
I must have been 10 years old when I first read The Lord of the Rings. By age 12, I had taught myself a mode of the tengwar, as a private cypher. (I have since forgotten it.) It wasn’t clear to me at the time, how much of the differences between the main language of the book and the 20th century American English I was used to was the difference between American and British Englishes, and how much was Tolkien being deliberately archaic, or even inventing things, such as “dwarves” as opposed to “dwarfs”.
In one of his letters, Tolkien admits that “dwarves” was originally a mistake. He only became conscious of having used a nonstandard plural when reviewers of The Hobbit pointed it out. (Which suggests no one at the publisher noticed or raised the issue.)
There is one word where the conceit that Rohirric isn’t “really” Old English breaks down: we’re told that Orthanc, in addition to its proper Sindarin meaning of “Mount Fang” or “forked height”, means “the cunning mind” in the language of the Mark. “Orþanc” really does mean that in Old English, so it would be quite a coincidence that it would be exactly the same in actual Rohirric, instead of being as different as “kuduk” and “hobbit”.
My senior year in high school, I discovered that one of my friends was at least as much a Tolkien-nerd as I already was. When he moved out of state and I went off to college, we wrote each other letters by transliterating English into either the Tengwar or the Angerthas. These were fumbling and frequently undecipherable by the recipient. Fortunately, the reverse side usually showed the Roman-script version. Over 50 years later, I sure wish I’d saved them.
During the height of my adolescent Tolkien-craze, I definitely learned to write my name in both Tengwar and Cirth script. It made me consider, for the first time, that English idiosyncrasies in spelling aren’t linguistically universal. It also inspired me to start trying to develop my own alphabets and languages, but sadly they never came anywhere near to the level of a secret code for me an my siblings.
I learned the Tengwar for about five minutes in high school, and promptly forgot it again; never got the hang of the Angerthas. But I can still write and sight read the Anglo-Saxon runes I learned from The Hobbit.
Yeah, guilty as charged. I read LOTR in high school during the 70’s. I learned to write in the Cirth and Tengwar, and during my SCA days created an anglicized Tengwar I used extensively in calligraphy. I also worked on creating a crude Elvish-English dictionary from the little sources available. I had to keep a journal for English class and used the Gondorian calendar for a while, then worked out the Elvish calendar with Loas. My high school English teacher barely tolerated my interest until she took a graduate class one summer and apologized to me next semester about my fixation after finding out what a revered scholar Tolkien was in languages.
Interesting that others concentrated on the writing. I taught myself Sindarin from internet sources in a resurgent interest when the movies came out, though I’ve forgotten it now.
I was read the Hobbit as a bedtime story, a chapter each night in the sixties when I shared a room with my kid brother. From that I went on to read the book myself, and then read LOTR when I was eight. I was brought up in Oxford, and for a while Tolkien actually lived further down our road – I put it like that as we lived there longer than he did, but I knew him by sight, though I was never impertinent enough to try and talk to the great man. Although I was basing my judgement of his probable reaction on the only academic I really knew (my father), and Tolkien might well have been kind to a young admirer who just wanted to say thank you for the pleasure he’d given her.
I did try to learn Tengwar, but was never fluent as I had no one who shared my obseesion at the time. Much later when I’d forgotten all I knew of it, I was disgusted by a friend who used it decoratively without checking that what they wrote meant anything, as I didn’t think doing so would have been that hard.
My first exposure to Tolkien was the Rankin and Bass films, which I absolutely loved as a young child (I can still sing every song from The Hobbit). I eventually read the books (by eventually, I mean in my twenties) and came to appreciate Tolkien’s made up languages, which I play with to this day, constructing names for various role playing characters out of Sindarin. I never got into the scripts, though.
I discovered Tolkien’s work the time I started high school. I remember trying to write my name and a few other phrases in Tengwar, writing a few LOTR-inspired poems, and even trying to translate one of them to Quenya. Later, when I was doing my Bachelor’s degree, in one translation class we were given the opportunity to create a “crazy project”. So I wrote a little poem and then translated it into Quenya (would have preferred Sindarin, but seemed more doable for me in Quenya). My teacher told me she “could not understand practically any of it but could see how much work I had put into it” so I got an A. I will copy the result here – I have no doubt that people who have studied linguistics and Tolkien’s work and are even moderately expert in his languages will find it crude and full of mistakes, and that is okay, nevertheless, I was quite proud of myself when I finished it.
I meren silmëo
Eressëa nalla, i nainië maiweo
Coivëa nye olorinyallon
Ar ela! Vélëan Anar corna lantëa
I ëar vahala pella
I undómë vanyëa nulla írë sá fifírua
minna Ambar lómion
epeta órë Isil ta marya
Sí miulëa tinda isilmërya
Mal i cala ya úviën ammelda
Ná anvanya illion
ya illumë silë ta calimavë ar poicavë
mardinna taurë ardava
Óalassë vántan írë órenya líra
Ná silmë merenya
Tenna i lómë atavaimëa rámaryar
ar ára ortëa mí Rómen
I learned the Tengwar pretty well when I read Lord of the Rings for the first (and second through about 20th) time when I was 14 or 15. I used to write my diary in it. But I could write it better than I could read it! I think I still have those diaries but I’d have to go through them letter by letter to figure out what I wrote.
As I remember it, around 1989 or 1990 I was a kid with an obsession, a database program on my Apple IIgs, and library access to the Etymologies section from The Lost Road and Other Writings. I’d turned to that after cataloguing every elvish word in LotR and the Silmarillion, and made a very large if hopelessly naive attempt at Quenya and Sindarin dictionaries (largely by assuming that “Sindarin” could be slotted in where E had “Noldorin”).
I ended up seizing on one of Christopher Tolkien’s introductory essays that noted that he’d been skipping work of a more purely linguistic or philosophical nature, and wrote what seems in hindsight to be a horribly presumptuous letter to the publisher asking about access to such material. I don’t know if my age came across through the typewritten lines or it was just usual procedure, but I got a very kind letter back from Rayner Unwin — which did, however, mostly boil down to “just wait a bit, okay”.
I do still have the floppy disks with that dictionary attempt, off in a storage locker; I’d have to rebuild an Apple II system to read them, though.
It never ceases to amuse me that Middle-Earth in all it’s many splendours is a mere reserve into which the Good Professor might let his languages live free ‘in the wild’ as it were – it also quite thoroughly impressed me that much of a century later he’s STILL the Daddy when it comes to World Building.
How many Fantasy authors have created a history, drawn the maps, painted at least some of their own illustrations, crafted whole language groups AND written a classic of the genre with their own two hands?
When I was around 14 I think I wrote emails to both Christopher Tolkien (via secretary) and to the publishers of the new Norwegian translation, (nynorsk), because it bothered me that Tolkien’s introduction to the story written in tengwar wasn’t translated. I ended up constructing my own mode for Norwegian and tried to translate it myself.
I also did a tengwar calligraphy piece on Namarie for my arts class, which is the only decent thing I’ve made in that class. Later I did a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and got Helge Fauskanger to check one of my first papers
In the frame narrative, the language of the Rohirrim is unrelated to the language of Gondor (but is related to the Hobbits’ language, as noted when Théoden—or maybe it was Éomer—remarks that he can sort of understand Merry and Pippin’s conversation).
The first bit isn’t really true, since a) everyone in Gondor speaks Westron, as do the Hobbits, and this is closely related to Rohirric; and b) the ancestral language of the Dunedain (Adunaic, no longer spoken in Gondor) is in fact related to the ancestor of Westron and Rohirric. I think of the human languages only Dunlending and the speech of the Druedain are said by Tolkien (in Appendix F) to be unrelated to Westron et al.
I’m not sure what the second bit is referring to — Merry and Pippin always speak Westron, which Rohirrim like Theoden and Eomer can speak.
Because he used Old English to represent Rohirric, the songs of the Rohirrim in the text are in alliterative verse
I will point out an interesting and subtle (partial) exception to this, which is the Lament for the Rohirrim that Aragorn recites (“Where is the horse and the rider”), which starts off in proper alliterative form — with the addition of end-rhymes –and then drifts away from that, ending in non-alliterative end-rhyming verse.
I’m pretty sure this is deliberate, possibly in order to suggest the fading of traditional Rohirric customs in the long stretch of time.
Such fond memories! I read Tolkien at about 10, and I too made up my own language based on his Elvish with its own alphabet and its own words. I also made up a calendar with 45-day months and 5-day weeks, and the week that was left over was a holiday. It went hand-in-hand with Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, where I made up my own aliens. I drew them (with crayons) and outlined their planets and habitats and social customs. I get that feeling now, every time I go down a rabbithole to figure out the subculture on a wayward planet or the time it takes to travel from one planet to another or a complete backstory on a minor character. And one of my regrets is that I’ve never taken Latin, though it’s seeped in through my pores and study of Romance languages. It’s so great to read here about other people’s experiences with the amazing phenomenon that is Tolkien! Oh, and I will forever raise a glass to Tom Bombadil and Beorn.
This article has made my day! It’s so fascinating to know how intricate Tolkien studied these older languages and employed portions of it for his own world. great article!
Taper Wikel, by Luthien the Fair, please tell me you still have Rayner Unwin’s letter!
To the Author. And excellent article.
I found Tolkien in Freshman? Sophomore? Year of High School.
Never tried to read or write the languages, since I knew 2 languages at the time, (my native American English and French-Canadian) and was working on a 3rd (German) and couldn’t spell in any of them.
My story was that Tolkien was making the rounds of my high school that year. Everybody was reading it, even the jocks and the slackers and the Vo Tech bunch (vocational students as opposed to college track kids). Everybody. By the time I had run out of Dickens and Dumas and Andrew Lang’s Fairy Stories ( and by that I mean that the high school library’s stock was a little thin) and I wanted to read the books, there was a 5 week waiting list! So I grabbed the Two Towers and put my name down for the rest. When that stupid door slammed shut on Sam, I think I screamed and started going into withdrawals. I then made my father buy me the set fir Christmas, and then I got the entire set from the Library when the time came and then Christmas Day (my family did Midnight Mass) I got presents and breakfast out of the way, and then for the next 3 days I did nothing else but eat at intervals, sleep when I could no longer stay awake, and read. Finished all 4 books in three days, including the Appendices.
Been a Tolkien fanatic ever since. Almost 50 years.
Read them in grade 4, including the Silmarillion. Then afterwards started collecting any and all references to Khuzdul in an effort to reconstruct the missing bits/ learn the ‘hidden’ language.
I made only a very abortive attempt to learn any variety of Elvish, but I read LoTR many times through when I was about 13, and was inspired to join Usenet groups or mailing lists or the like on conlangs and try to make up a conlang of my own. Which eventually led to my taking linguistics courses in college. My degree ended up saying “Cognitive Science” on it, but at Brown that’s the same department as Linguistics, so… rather a large influence on my life!
Eventually I helped a small group make up an alien language and warning signs for a national-scale LARP chronicle, though my input given my skills and background (I’m a syntax person, not a phonetics person) was more on what it meant for it to be the language of aliens. That is, the available phonemes would be based on alien physiology, the number base would derive from their hand design (we use base 10 because we have 10 fingers). And then on a semantic level, since these aliens were related to the Underworld… where we’d use metaphors of height (something that’s quite deeply embedded in human languages – “higher learning”, “rule over”, etc), they’d use metaphors of depth, and “life/death” or “light/dark” (another heavily embedded concept, e.g., a “bright idea”, “Dark Ages”) wouldn’t be treated with the same emotional/metaphorical valence – which would lead to potentially dangerous differences in warning signs.
To my chagrin, I actually got hoist by my own petard in a later plot! A potentially universe-ending machine had switches labelled something like “life” and “death”, so of course we pushed the “life” switch… with the result that only a time-reversing power, an artifact created by OTHER aliens, and a heroic sacrifice saved the day. I realized only in trying to comprehend our error that those were in fact simply their designators for “on” and “off”… and then remembered what I’d personally done in our linguistic worldbuilding! ooooops. Great example of how much linguistics can matter in a story, though.
Because as much as Tolkien built his world around his linguistics, he did relatively little with it, aside from using it for color; the biggest linguistics issue we ever run across is “speak, friend, and enter”. And ironically for how iconic the Tengwar runes have become, he did a really bad job of considering what it would do to language change to have primarily immortal speakers, if you ask me – the linguistic drift necessary to create Quenya and Sindarin would take vastly longer. Imagine, after all, if we had Old English speakers still alive today.
I think it’s because, like most of linguistics at the time, he worked only in European languages, and was focused on historical, written registers…. he doesn’t even seem to have looked at the really interesting stuff going on right there around him, like Cockney rhyming slang. Broadening of horizons in linguistics to address African and indigenous-American and Asian languages, and the modern speech of lower classes, offers all kinds of new ideas that are amazing for creating conlangs and worldbuilding. Some of the more interesting things I’ve run across include taboo speech (“mother-in-law languages”, the substitution of “adonai” for written “YHWH” in reading Hebrew aloud), entire second languages, dialects, or registers used by the marginalized (women’s languages, queer cants, AAVE….), and radical shifts in the meaning of grammatical gender (the Bantu languages have upwards of a dozen, and they’re things like “animal” and “place” and “people related to me”, not male/female). He’s the granddaddy, but there’s so much more you can do with linguistics in fiction, and often without even having to fully construct a language.
At age 13~14 I made some notes for an imitation of Sindarin, eventually lost without regret. I had noticed that plurals of most simple nouns in Sindarin are shown by changed vowels, e.g. amon ‘hill’, emyn ‘hills’; so I did that for plural and for genitive. To avoid ambiguity, then, I needed more vowels, so each had a different diacritic … ugh. Many years later I learned about umlaut!
What is this MA you wrote about?
I first read the book in sixth/seventh grade, although I kind of skimmed them. Later I did a more thorough re-read and also began delving into all the detail. Two of my favorite miscellaneous realizations are that names like ‘Merry’ are merely meant to be a similar pun in our language because his ‘actual’ name is totally different but just has a similar shortened nickname, and also that he went as far to write a whole story/background (the shibboleth of Feanor) to explain why Galadriel uses the wrong version of a word.
As somebody who does enjoy to write (as well as go on my own rabbit holes/commentary) I can appreciate how much thought he’s put into things, even if it is totally nerdy, haha.