Quenya

Tolkien is not always given due credit for his deep familiarity with Arthurian romances. Yet, in the 1920s, he co-edited and translated the Middle English romantic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Tolkien and Gordon 1925). Around 1930, he tried his own hand at romantic poetry in the incomplete and only recently-published The Fall of Arthur (2013). And of course he taught the genre for many years at Oxford. More than this, however, Tolkien’s epic romance The Lord of the Rings is replete with Arthurian allusions, including (as Veryln Flieger has noted), ‘the withdrawal of a sword, a tutelary wizard, the emergence of a hidden king, [and] a ship departure to a myth-enshrined destination’. Such allusions make it clear that—even as he sought to supplant what he saw as the imperfectly- naturalized myth of Arthur with his own evolving ‘body of more or less connected legend’ dedicated ‘to England’— Tolkien’s great novel also carried on a deft dialogue between modern and premodern views of friendship, love, and romance. Thus, in the sad tale of the Ents and Entwives, Tolkien explored the tragedy of lost love: the ‘old trouble’ of ‘hearts [that] did not go on growing in the same way’. The rich medieval theme of frustrated love comes into his epic in the form of the ‘love triangle’ between Aragorn, Arwen, and Éowyn. Love in the form of mutual respect and sympathy are the focus of several key turning points in the narrative, as we see in the love between Frodo and Sam, Gimli and Galadriel, and Aragorn and Éomer. And the theme of love’s perversion, of ironic, cynical, and sarcastic references to love and to the birth of hate, emerge in several scenes where ‘love’ appears in the mouths of the orcs, and of Gollum. Throughout, Tolkien’s keen philological ear is much in evidence, not only in his careful usage of ‘love’ and its many derivations and inflections—e.g., loved, beloved, lovely, loveliness, lover, etc.— but also in his deliberate development of several nuanced Elvish roots for ‘love’, such as ban-, mel-, and -(n)dil.

This paper owes its central theme to Tolkien’s statement that “a primary ‘fact’ about my work [is] that it is all ... fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. ... The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse” and that “there is a great deal of linguistic matter (other than actually ‘elvish’ names and words) included or mythologically expressed in the book” (Letters 165). Scholarly reactions to these claims have been varied, with some taking them as indicating a general lack of seriousness in Tolkien’s work (Wilson 1956) and others preferring instead to explain them away (Isaacs 1968; Reilly 1968). More recent studies instead demonstrate how deeply Tolkien’s philology has influenced his fiction at all points (Flieger 1983, Ryan 1991, Shippey 1982). This paper builds on these studies by noting Tolkien’s interest in the Proto-Indo-European terms for ‘dawn,’ ‘east,’ and ‘star’, and their influence on his scholarly interpretation and fictional adaptation of the Old English theonym Éarendel. Tolkien’s etymological, esthetic, and mythopoeic considerations of this figure are found to be intertwined in complex and intriguing ways, shedding significant light on the origins of the Eldarin root √EL and its development into distinct terms for ‘behold!,’ ‘star,’ ‘elf,’ and ‘journey(er)’. Further, it will be shown that these philological considerations not only motivate the appearance of stars in The Lord of the Rings, but also emerge explicitly in dialogue, poetry, and song, and, not least, as important structural and compositional elements in several key scenes, such as the ‘chance meeting’ with Gildor near Woodhall, Sam’s vision of a ‘star of hope’ above the Ephel Dúath, and several characters’ inspired, glossolalic invocations of Elbereth in times of dire need.

Beyond popular accolades and prestigious positions at powerful research institutions (which unfortunately are not at all involved), there are some real benefits to a study of JRR Tolkien's invented languages and scripts. For one thing, they provide a challenge: poorly attested, highly restrictive in genre, and without comprehensive dictionaries and grammars. Like scholars of Etruscan, Gothic, Tocharian, and other fragmentary tongues known primarily (or solely) from disconnected manuscripts, students of Tolkien's languages employ the methods of comparative linguistics to decode these tongues, all of which are (carefully designed to appear to be) historically related. Further, although a philologist of distinction, it is frequently lamented that Tolkien did not publish nearly as many philological papers as some of his contemporaries; nonetheless, he worked for some sixty years perfecting the histories and relationships of his invented languages. In recent years, Tolkienian linguists have shown that these languages became the repositories of some of his most profound reflections on linguistics, philosophy, and the theory of translation: ample reward indeed for intrepid decipherers.

Tolkien, l'Alto-elfico Quenya e il finlandese La disamina che si snoda nel presente articolo verte sull'analisi tra le similitudini e le differenze che intercorrono tra il Quenya, l'antica lingua sapienziale degli Elfi della Terra di Mezzo di cui si narra nelle opere di J.R.R. Tolkien, e il finlandese: prosegue poi accennando la peculiarità di un sistema linguistico, meticolosamente ricostruito dall'autore con criteri filologici assolutamente scientifici, in cui Tolkien fa derivare da un antenato comune sia una lingua d'ispirazione celto-gallese, dunque tipicamente indoeuropea, che una lingua di ispirazione ugrofinnica, vale a dire di tutt'altro ramo linguistico.

A majority of linguistic research concentrates on the conceptual exchange of information, and as a result the emotional aspects of language are found to be superfluous when observing the characteristics of communication. However, the prosody (or melody) within language becomes increasingly more necessary when observed as poetry or music, and one of the key aims of the present paper is to address the shared characteristics exhibited by the means of communication that exist between primitive language and music.

The much awaited book detailing the orthographies of JRR Tolkien's wonderful world of Arda. Please see other posts for content. Available to order now from Amazon;

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elvish-Writing-Systems-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/1782808078/

In The Lord of the Rings, Book III, Chapter 3 (‘The Uruk-hai’), Pippin is threatened by an unnamed Mordor-orc who utters the following Orcish oath: “Uglúk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob búbhosh skai”. Although the context makes it clear that this curse is an unflattering description of Saruman and the orcs of Isengard, the problem for students of Tolkien's invented languages is that Tolkien provided three different translations of the curse, none of which was published during his lifetime or necessarily even reflected his precise intentions at the time of writing. As Christopher Tolkien has noted, “it seems clear that my father was at this time devising interpretations of the words, whatever he may have intended them to mean when he first wrote them” (HoMe XII: xii). Yet some reconciliation of Tolkien's divergent translations seems possible if we take into account: (1) various clues as to Tolkien's original intentions in the main text, appendices, and drafts of the novel; (2) the complex and fragmentary nature of Orcish speech as presented by Tolkien; and (3) the usual perils of translation between very different idioms.  To anticipate, this paper will suggest that all three of Tolkien's translations were actually correct in one or more Orcish dialects. In defence of this suggestion, a detailed word-by-word analysis of the Mordor-orc's curse is undertaken, as well as an exploration of the origins and development of the so-called "Orcish" dialects of debased Black Speech.

A preview of the first chapter from my forthcoming book "The Elvish Writing Systems of J.R.R. Tolkien", covering Tolkien's history in writing systems, the origins of Sindarin and Quenya, the Tengwar, Cirth and Sarati, a history of Arda and Middle-earth, aesthetics of the written word and prerequisites for learning Elvish.

The 'imperfect' or continuous present tense form is a rather late addition to the roster of Quenya verbal tenses, expressed only analytically in Early Quenya Grammar and emerging as a part of basic Common Eldarin system in the 40s. However, the concept of the present and aorist formed differently in the case of 'derived' verbs postdates the last comprehensive Quenya grammar and can only be extrapolated out of a disassembled number of sources, most of which were now made available in Parma Eldalamberon 22. This article attempts to flesh out the grammatical features behind the tabulated forms.

This article situates Tolkien’s “A Secret Vice” (and its accompanying notes and papers) within the cultural and intellectual milieu of the early 20th century. It claims that at the heart of Tolkien’s exploration in this material is the question of language as communication vs. language as art. It argues that Tolkien’s language invention navigates the (perceived) binary between a utilitarian aim for language invention (contemporary International Auxiliary Languages) vs. an aesthetic linguistic pursuit (contemporary Modernist and other avant-garde linguistic experimentation), by choosing a third (middle) way. It examines Tolkien's linguistic invention alongside the work of Sapir, Jespersen, Joyce, Stein, and the Dada and zaum poets.

A preview of the second chapter from my forthcoming book "The Elvish Writing Systems of J.R.R. Tolkien", covering Tolkien's history in writing systems, the origins of Sindarin and Quenya, the Tengwar, Cirth and Sarati, a history of Arda and Middle-earth, aesthetics of the written word and prerequisites for learning Elvish.