Black Speech

• 1. Introduction

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  Black Speech is the language J. R. R. Tolkien constructed for the servants of Mordor, the domain of the Dark Lord Sauron. It exists in The Lord of the Rings as a tongue so vile that Tolkien himself refused to drink from a goblet engraved with its most famous words. A fan had sent him that goblet inscribed with the One Ring inscription, and Tolkien, treating the words as a genuine curse, kept it only as an ashtray. That single anecdote tells you almost everything you need to know about what this language was built to do. How does a constructed language become so persuasively evil that its own creator will not put his lips to it? And what does it reveal about Tolkien's deepest beliefs about the relationship between sound and moral meaning?

• 2. Sauron's Design

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  Carl F. Hostetter, linguist and Tolkien scholar, wrote that Sauron created Black Speech "in a perverse antiparallel of Aulë's creation of Khuzdul for the Dwarves". Where the Dwarves received a language as a gift, Sauron's slaves received one as an instrument of control. Sauron's aim was for Black Speech to become the single official language of all his dominated lands and servants. He only partly succeeded. The language infected the Orcs' vocabulary, but the Orcs could not be kept to a standard form. It fractured into mutually unintelligible dialects, and by the end of the Third Age, most Orcs were communicating in a corrupted version of Westron, the common tongue of Middle-earth. Tolkien noted one Orc's use of the Common Speech, which the creature "made almost as hideous as his own tongue". The language was, by Tolkien's account, used only inside Mordor, and never willingly by anyone outside it.

• 3. The Ring Inscription

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  The sole surviving text of pure Black Speech is the inscription on the One Ring, written in the Elvish Tengwar script. The couplet comes from the Rhyme of the Rings, a verse in Tolkien's mythology describing the Rings of Power. Tolkien glossed each element precisely: ash, meaning "one"; nazg, meaning "ring"; durbatulûk, meaning "to rule them all"; gimbatul, meaning "to find them all"; thrakatulûk, meaning "to bring them all" and "to bind them"; and burzum-ishi, meaning "in the darkness". The suffix -ulûk encodes a verbal ending expressing object in the third-person plural, with the element ul meaning "them" in completive or total form. Tolkien was explicit that he had "tried to play fair linguistically" and that the inscription was "meant to have a meaning and not to be a mere casual group of nasty noises." He added, with characteristic dry wit, that an accurate transcription "would even nowadays only be printable in the higher and artistically more advanced form of literature."

• 4. Sound and Harshness

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  Hostetter observed that the guttural sounds of Black Speech, with consonants like sh, gh, and zg, were both Tolkien's real intention and Sauron's fictional one. Tom Shippey, the Tolkien scholar, examined the word durbatulûk specifically and wrote that "the harsh vowels and jagged consonants and consonant clusters lend themselves to rough and rasping pronunciation, a fitting evocation of the voices of Orcs." Joanna Podhorodecka, a linguist who studied Tolkien's constructed languages through the lens of symbolic vocal gestures, found that Black Speech is 63% consonants, compared to 52% and 55% in two Elvish samples. Front vowel sounds like the i in "machine" are much rarer in Black Speech than in Elvish; back vowel sounds like the u in "brute" are far more common. Podhorodecka linked this consonant density to the phonological profile of speech shaped by aggressive emotions. Linguists including David Ashford and Helge Fauskanger note, however, that Tolkien's judgement that these sounds are "hideous" is a subjective one. Fauskanger points out that the Elves' specific objection may have been to the uvular r used by the Orcs, not to any universal quality of the sounds themselves.

• 5. Doubly Artificial

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  M. G. Meile labelled Black Speech "Sauron's Newspeak", drawing on George Orwell's dystopian language as a point of comparison. His argument was that the language is "doubly artificial": where Tolkien's Elvish languages were already invented, Black Speech was constructed within the invented world itself, created by the Dark Lord as an "evil Esperanto" for his slaves. Meile argued that this doubled artificiality made the language more significant than the small number of defined words might suggest. Tolkien described Black Speech as made in mockery of Quenya, the most formal of the Elvish tongues, meaning it was designed to shadow what Tolkien elsewhere called "the linguistic embodiment of good." Meile found correspondences that bear this out. The Quenya word for Orcs, those monsters made in mockery of the Elves, is urco or orco; in Black Speech it becomes Uruk. Swedish linguist Nils-Lennart Johannesson also compared Black Speech systematically with Quenya and Sindarin, finding more sonorant sounds and more open syllables in Elvish than in either English or Black Speech. He concluded those differences were "sufficiently prominent" to make Elvish sound "pleasant and harmonious" and Black Speech "harsh and strident."

• 6. The Hurrian Connection

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  Russian historian Alexandre Nemirovski identified what he called a strong similarity between Black Speech and Hurrian, an extinct language of northern Mesopotamia. E. A. Speiser's Introduction to Hurrian appeared in 1941, meaning the language had only recently been partially deciphered at the time Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings. Helge Fauskanger corresponded directly with Nemirovski, who argued that Tolkien had designed Black Speech "after some acquaintance with Hurrian-Urartian language(s)." The evidence is entirely linguistic. Both languages are agglutinative, building words by adding suffixes rather than changing word roots. Nemirovski tabulated specific parallels: the Black Speech durb-, meaning "to rule", against the Hurrian turob-, something predestined to occur; gimb-, meaning "to find", against the Hurrian -ki(b), meaning to take or gather; and krimp-, meaning "to tie", against the Hurrian ker-imbu-, meaning to make longer, possibly extending to the sense of binding a rope. Ashford adds that Black Speech is both agglutinative and ergative, calling this "something of a rarity even now." In the 1940s, ergativity was a recent linguistic discovery, making Tolkien's use of it particularly timely. Ashford finds the case for a Hurrian connection persuasive given the striking parallels in both syntax and morphology.

• 7. Fragments and Film

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  Appendix F of The Return of the King preserves a handful of Black Speech and Orkish words: Lugbúrz for the Dark Tower, uruk for orc, snaga for slave, ghâsh for fire, and Nazgûl as a compound of nazg (ring) and gûl (wraith). "The Scouring of the Shire" provides sharkû, meaning "old man". The only known sample of debased Black Speech appears in The Two Towers, where a Mordor Orc insults the Isengard Uruk Uglúk. Christopher Tolkien published a translation in The Peoples of Middle-earth, and a different translation later appeared in the journal Vinyar Tengwar, the two versions diverging enough to show how unstable the language's interpretation remains. For Peter Jackson's film trilogy, linguist David Salo extended the language to create two new phrases. He took burzum-ishi from the Ring Verse and invented three additional abstract nouns using the same -um suffix. The word ashi, meaning "only", he derived from ash ("one") in the Ring Verse; the remaining words he coined from scratch. Tolkien himself noted that when forming nazg he may have been influenced by the Irish nasc, meaning "ring, fastening, tie", while explicitly denying any connection to Old English.