- HOME PAGE
- About JRR Tolkien
- About The Tolkien Society
- F.A.Q.
- Events
- Education
- Resources
- Tolkien Park
- Guestbook
- Birthday Toast
- Tolkien 2005
- Contacts
- Links
- Mathoms
- Media News
- TS Trading
- Members Only
A short summary
by
Ian Lahey
Universitá Degli Studi Di Udine
Facoltá Di Lingue e Letterature Straniere
Corso di Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere
J.R.R. Tolkien's unique approach to writing owes much to his philological inclination. His interest focused first on a single word and its origins, then its etymological history and its relationship with other words and languages. His creative process could be easily assimilated to the recovery of ancient texts rather than to artistic creation. His plan to write a fictional history, to compensate for the lack of a solid mythology in Anglo-Saxon folklore, probably came from an early inspiration in 1913, when, while reading some Anglo-Saxon poems, he came across these lines:
'Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended.'
The word 'Earendel' glossed as 'a shining light' by the Anglo-Saxon dictionary, had a special flavor for Tolkien, it seemed to come from some period "far beyond ancient English".
Writing an invented mythology did not mean, for Tolkien, writing falsehood. His belief was that just as speech is invention about objects and ideas: "You call a tree a tree but it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name"
so myth is invention about truth. In fact, language, story-telling and myth are closely related and are much older than written tradition.
Fairy stories are one of the oldest sources of material, old as myths, although obviously altered in long centuries of re-telling. Modern culture, according to Tolkien, has affected fairy stories the most, diminishing them until they fit into a rationalistic frame, tame and apt as educational material for children. Both fairy stories and myths find common roots in the 'mixing pot', an imaginary cauldron of all unwritten heritage. Some of the ingredients are as old as language itself, while others are more recent, Britain is full of signs of prehistoric lore. From this pot archetypes such as magic and fantastic beasts can become mixed with true events, such as the discovery of the carcass of a whale, the result is the creation of a new monster, to be listed in the bestiaries along with dragons and other creatures.
Tolkien liked to think that our ability to create and our perpetual desire to do so is a reflection of the existence of a First Creator. Man becomes 'sub-creator' within a larger framework of God's Creation. But since art seems to have no practical purpose, it is usually at strife with our modern world.
Tolkien's sub-creation could be considered then 'true' in these terms, it has a mythological approach, re-creating and re-interpreting reality, and it is a work of art, a sub-creation which, although not as solid as the 'Primary Reality' so Tolkien called it, of God's Creation, it still has a share of its existence.
Tolkien's major works are all set in an imaginary world called 'Arda'. The centermost continent, where the Trilogy of the Ring takes place, is known as Middle Earth. Tolkien made clear, in one of his letters, that Arda is not a fictional invention, it is imaginary because it is set in an imagined past, but it is the past of our own Earth, Middle Earth especially would coincide with N.W. Europe.
Knowing with precision when the events narrated in Tolkien's books take place is not impossible since there are clear references in his books and his letters. The period of time starting from Tolkien's own myth of creation to the end of the Ring Trilogy spans about 21,000 years, divided into Ages, after which the Fourth Age, known as the Age of Men, begins, and Elves and other fantastic creatures dwindle away. From this moment to our days, according to Tolkien, about 6,000 years have passed. This period would seem too short to completely remove all memory of Elves , Dwarves, Dragons and so on from our world, but this is exactly the effect the writer intended to obtain: an explanation of the presence, in our collective memory, of these fantastic creatures. A particular note of interest comes from one creature which would seem to constitute a kind of its own: Tom Bombadil. While the author firmly maintained that his legendary corpus was in no way to be interpreted as an allegory, he had to admit that Tom Bombadil constituted the sole exception.
While outlining these other races which, fictionally, lived alongside Man before the Fourth Age, Tolkien, being a linguist, chose to start by defining their languages, some of which he had begun to invent, as a childish hobby, long before this stage. Of course not all the languages reached a stage of advanced complexity, some were simply sketched to provide etymological background for other languages. Some, like Avarin, are limited to six words, others like Entish, the language of the Tree-folk, are virtually impossible to transcribe since their complexity in tone and duration, any 'translation' would be a very brief and incomplete synopsis. The two most important languages are those of the Elves: Quenya, the most conservative, very similar to the original language spoken by the first Elves, and Sindarin, a branch of Elvish which broke off from Quenya and underwent drastic modifications.
In some cases, like Westron and Rohirric, two tongues spoken by the Men of Middle Earth, Tolkien chose to render them with other languages. Westron, being the common tongue spoken in the Trilogy, was obviously translated with Modern English, while Rohirric was rendered by Old English, Tolkien tried to reproduce for English readers its archaic flavor in relationship to the Common Speech, but it must be understood that Rohirric was not the ancestor of Westron the way Old English is the ancestor of Modern English.
Quenya was developed by Tolkien as early as 1915 as a hobby, his principal intention was to obtain a combination of sounds and meaning which would give pleasure. The initial version, called Qenya, although still unpolished and incomplete, already had some of the principal elements of the more mature language of the Elves. Quenya is an inflectional language, with nine case endings, it is agglutinative, since it has the tendency to form compounds, and pronominal endings can be connected together at the end of the verb so that a sentence like "I have found it" is translated with the single word utuviényes.
It is the most documented language among those created by Tolkien, with a vocabulary of over 3'000 words. Its author never stopped adding, perfecting and evolving it until his death in 1973 in order to achieve the maximum both in phonoaesthetics and in fictional etymology. In fact, as with his entire literary creation, which was meant as a fictional history which left vague signs in our culture, Quenya also was designed to appear as if it had influenced our modern languages (together with Sindarin), since it has, potentially, most of the qualities which are present in both Romance and Germanic tongues, and its vocabulary too has some words which will appear familiar, some for Italian, some for Spanish or other European languages.
The phonology of Quenya is very restrictive, only a few consonant clusters are allowed at the beginning of the word, and a limited number can occur medially.
One of the best ways, according to Tolkien, to measure the success of an "art language" was to test its effect in poetry. Quenya appears to be very successful in this exercise. This thesis examines three poems from three different periods of time: Narqelion from the initial stages of Qenya, the language in its early experimental form, Namarië in what is known as 'LOTR style Quenya' the language used in 'The Lord of the Rings' and Markirya, written in the last decade of Tolkien's life, and probably a sample of the language at its highest stage of evolution. The text of Namarië is reproduced here as a sample, with Tolkien's translation underneath.
T.S. Eliot's essay: 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' discusses how every new work of literature not only innovates and adds new material, but also reconfigures all previous literature to date, so that there is never one new text which differs from the old tradition, but rather the entire corpus which constantly evolves.
What to say then of Tolkien's work? His intent was not to strive for innovation, his fictional history does not overlap the history of our world but rather seems to be carefully woven into the existing canvas of tradition, lore and myth. The result was that when 'The Lord of the Rings' was published, it succeeded in not being simply an amusing tale of swords and sorcery, but in deeply touching and subtly adjusting the tradition of our own 'Middle Earth' i.e. north western Europe, so that, somehow, it seemed to be expecting to be told this very tale. The final outcome was -paradoxically- innovative.
Would it then be possible that Eliot's theory might work both ways, so that the individual interested in writing a text which will integrate and evolve the existing corpus, will ultimately end up with something new?
Tolkien's books haven't affected literature alone, what started as a philological experiment, as 'secret vice' - the creation of an alternative past starting from the languages and then the myths which, through the ages, could have possibly resolved into our reality - has ultimately had an effect on the languages, the society and even the political scene of our age, the Age of Men.
