Infofiche

Tolkien's works are all intimately related to the invention of fictional languages. From the detailed grammar of Quenya to the more philosophical Entish, his linguistic creations serve to add depth to the setting, and interiority to the peoples he has populate it. Language is everywhere in The Lord of the Rings, even invisibly. In this blog post I'm going to explore a few of the ways Tolkien goes about using fictional languages in his work. Join me beneath the fold to read more!

Tolkien's relationship with fictional languages begins long before the writing of LotR, the Hobbit, or any of his other works. He writes in The Secret Vice (a wonderful lecture about the joys of conlanging) how he constructed and created languages a child as part of play, and how he continued this hobby into adulthood. As he invented his languages, influenced by aesthetic tastes developed during his education in philology, he felt the need to consider the sort of people who would speak such a language. Combine this with an interest in Norse mythology, and you get the Elves of Middle Earth, developed after their languages, Quenya and Sindarin, so that somebody could speak them.

This is an interesting order to do things in. At first appearance it would seem to imply a very strong linguistic relativity, so strong that the language created its own speakers. Except this isn't the case in Middle Earth; Elves are created first and have language taught to them by the gods (who speak their own language which Tolkien did sketch). In the text of the novels, there is never any suggestion that Quenya or Sindarin makes the elves the way they are. If the language reflects the Elves, it is because they are the only people who speak it natively; there is no other culture it could be associated with.

So even though Tolkien wrote the novels to provide a people for his languages, within the setting, this linguistic relativity doesn't exist. Another example of Tolkien avoiding linguistic relativity is the Ents, whose language's nouns are all the entire life story of the thing they name - presumably uniquely. It is unclear as to whether the Ents are (normally) so slow because of their language (linguistic relativity), or whether their language is just what a species of very slow people would have. Indeed, we see the Entmoot proceed not at all slowly when it comes to taking action against Saruman, where presumably the Ents' language wasn't a barrier to more hasty cognition.

Despite the rejection of linguistic relativity, Tolkien's fictional languages nonetheless have a strong association with the people who speak them, because Tolkien enjoyed working in that way. This means that they stand in as symbols of these people, and the things associated with them, even when those people are not on the page - this is evoking the Absent Paradigm of Marc Angenot [2] . If an inscription is in an elvish language, it stands in for Elvenkind more generally. As we read and become more familiar with the languages and peoples, their symbolic power increases because we know more about them. In structuralist terms, as we develop our paradigms of the languages in Lord of the Rings, this allows us to make more inferences.

This allows Tolkien's world to feel haughty and magnificent, even when it isn't very. A door carved in the side of a mountain (which is just very large hill) could be just a door like Bilbo's, but because it is inscribed in Quenya it evokes the adjectives we associate with Elves, which in Tolkien's setting are ancient, strange, and powerful (notwithstanding the inconsistent depiction of Elves between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings).

A similar effect comes from Tolkien's prose, which other scholars have identified as having a system of styles or registers that Tolkien switches between to tell his story [3] . The basic, "Hobbit" style is characterised by simple sentences and a focus on the emotions evoked by a material place. This stands in contrast to the more epic style used in other parts of the text - normally where Frodo is not present to narrate. This subtle effect relies on Tolkien's knowledge (invention) of the different sort of literary registers that exists in his world and allows him to make a "diffuse and cumulative" effect on the reader as they gain familiarity with the setting.

So that's how Tolkien uses language to effect the reader's experience and contribute to the building and verisimilitude of his world. There's one more thing he does that I want to discuss, which is using languages to expand the empathy sphere.

Ada Palmer (about whose works I have written before on Infofiche,) suggests that one of the notable things Tolkien, and a distinguishing historical feature of his work, is that it gives significant interiority to the non-human; making them coequal with ourselves [1] . One reason for this is that the main characters are inhuman, although very similar to some real life humans. But the interiority and personality of the Elven, Entish, Dwarven and Hobbit characters seems to come from Tolkien's refusal to world build in half measures. One way he realises this interiority is by giving them language.

One of the most common ways SFF authors mark an alien as alien is by giving them an alien language, I.E. a language which is incomprehensible to the other characters, and/or reader, of the story. Think of the scene in a SF show where during negotiations with the humans, the aliens turn to each other and converse in a really strange language, designed to alienate us from them (see Klingon). Another way to make a group seem alien is to give them no language at all, or a language in an inaccessible modality. It is notable that Tolkien spent effort giving his Orcs language, something many later works don't do.

In Lord of the Rings, however, even when extracts of Quenya are left untranslated, they are never alien to the narrator, Frodo, who speaks it. This reduces the distance between us and Elves, and their language gives us access to their literary culture, and so their material culture and so on - in effect, because it is treated as a normal, accessible language, it makes us more able to empathise with them.

This is best demonstrated in contrast with a character and people whom Tolkien does not do this; Dwarves. Tolkien has Dwarven be a constructed language in setting (very interesting), and one which they refuse to teach to outsiders. Gimli is also the initially the least humanised character of the fellowship, Frodo (and we) find him standoffish, angry, driven and we know next to nothing about what Dwarves are like, outside of quests to mountains to reclaim ancestral gold. We get very few glimpses of their language, and it doesn't appear Tolkien fully constructed it.

Now, over the course of the story Gimli is humanised and enters the empathy sphere fully, but the rest of Dwarvenkind is not, except by associated with Gimli. We still have no idea of their literary culture, material culture - anything about what they are really like. If the books continued, we have very little to go off as to what the next Dwarven character would be like - other than Gimli at the beginning. A large part of this is due to Tolkien not giving us access to their language, partly due to his not constructing it. He keeps their interiority as a species of person closed off and distant, less coequal with ourselves than the Hobbit or Elven characters.

(There is also the metatextual fact that Dwarven appears to be a Semitic language and, notwithstanding the antisemitic tropes Tolkien had his Dwarves embody anyway, it is a language family he was less interested in and thus less likely to construct fully.)

In total, Tolkien's use of individual fictional languages for developing his world remains unequalled, and it a large part of what makes his works so special. The epic and mighty sense of scale, the deep and interesting people, and the unique prose style are all due to his construction and creation of various languages. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next month :)