Sound and language in Middle-earth

• 1. Introduction

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  Sound and language in Middle-earth begins with a puzzle. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien placed the poem A Elbereth Gilthoniel on the page in untranslated Sindarin and simply moved on. No gloss. No footnote. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey asks rhetorically what any reader could be expected to make of it. The answer reaches back to a belief Tolkien held his entire professional life. He believed the sound of a word was directly connected to its meaning, and that certain sounds were inherently beautiful. He once told his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that "the invention of languages is the foundation" of all his work. The stories, he explained, were made "rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse." Why would a professional philologist stake out a position that linguists considered a heresy? And how did he build that belief into every syllable of an invented world?

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• 2. Tolkien's Linguistic Heresy

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  The linguist Allan Turner writes that "the sound pattern of a language was the source of a special aesthetic pleasure" for Tolkien. The standard view of linguistics, established by Ferdinand de Saussure, holds that words bear no natural connection to what they denote. From the 1950s, Noam Chomsky's generative grammar school reinforced that position. In English the word "pig" names an animal; in Danish "pige" names a girl. The allocation of sounds to meanings is, on this account, purely accidental. Tolkien knew this view well and felt some discomfort about his contrary conviction.

  Otto Jespersen and Roman Jakobson also refused the purely arbitrary view. The scholar Ross Smith notes that these were "unassailable giants of linguistic theory and philosophy" who disagreed with the mainstream. In "A Secret Vice", his essay on the invention of language, Tolkien wrote that the pleasure of constructing a language derives mainly from "the contemplation of the relation between sound and notion". Tolkien declared that "word-form in relation to meaning", which he called "phonetic fitness", interested him more than any other area of linguistics. Tom Shippey sets out the conditions under which the theory would work: people would need to recognise different styles in language, sense the depth of history in words, and judge some sound combinations beautiful. If those conditions held, he argues, untranslated Elvish could do a job that translated English could not.

  The cross-cultural bouba/kiki effect has since demonstrated that such associations have a genuine basis. People across cultures consistently associate sounds like "bouba" with roundness and "kiki" with sharpness. The researcher Svetlana Popova comments that Tolkien "came very close" to the findings of psycholinguistics. His sense of what makes language pleasurable agrees with the findings of David Crystal. Tolkien is also recorded as saying that the phrase "cellar door" sounded more beautiful to him than the word "beautiful" itself. Shippey notes that the phrase had attracted admiration from others since at least 1903.

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• 3. Nonsense and Significance

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  The Tolkien scholar Dimitra Fimi places Tolkien's beliefs in a context that spans multiple artistic movements. Around 1900, Italian Futurism, British Vorticism, and the Imagism of Ezra Pound were each pressing on the same question. How much meaning could sound carry on its own? A generation earlier, nonsense poets had made related experiments. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and the verse of Edward Lear sought to convey something real through invented words. Tolkien's belief was part of a broader interrogation of language that ran through late 19th and early 20th-century Western art. Tolkien himself went further, arguing that human creation of language "to some extent mirrors divine creation". Thought and sound together, he believed, could bring an entirely new world into being.

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• 4. True Names

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  "Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language," says Treebeard the Ent in The Two Towers. In The Hobbit, the Wizard Gandalf introduces himself with the declaration: "I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me." Both moments touch on the ancient idea of the true name. This is the belief that a name can be inherently congruent with the being it names. In many traditions, knowing a true name gives power over what it names. Tolkien hints at this idea in several places across his Middle-earth writings.

  Tom Bombadil, the enigmatic character in The Fellowship of the Ring who always speaks in a singing metre, is its fullest embodiment. Allan Turner comments that in Bombadil's speech, "the propositional content of language seems to have been absorbed into the music of the sounds alone." When Bombadil names something, Tom Shippey notes, the name sticks permanently. The ponies the Hobbits are riding respond to nothing else for the rest of their lives. Ross Smith remarks that the sound of "Tom Bombadil" itself fits very well with its "jolly, rumbustious owner."

  Harvey Breit, a poet and New York Times book reviewer, once asked Tolkien directly about his identity as a writer. Tolkien's answer was unequivocal: "I am a philologist and all my work is philological." Tolkien constructed Elvish to sound pleasant and the Black Speech of Mordor to sound harsh. Every phonetic detail was in service of that aim.

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• 5. Linguistic Geography

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  Tolkien told Tom Shippey that he had chosen names like Bree, Archet, Combe, and Chetwood for their non-English elements. The goal was to make them sound "queer", with "a style that we should perhaps vaguely feel to be 'Celtic'". Tolkien wanted his readers to feel the distinct nature of each region without being told why, Turner argues. Names in the same Welsh-influenced range, like Crickhollow, produce the same sense of slight exoticism. Hobbiton and Bywater, built from Old English, feel familiar and domestic. Lothlórien and Gondor, in the Elvish tongues of Sindarin and Quenya, feel genuinely alien. Turner maps these three categories into a system: Welsh-rooted for slight exoticism, Old English for the familiar, and Elvish for the alien. The linguist Joanna Podhorodecka later subjected Tolkien's constructed languages to the same kind of analysis, measuring phoneme patterns against emotional effect.

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• 6. Phonetic Architecture

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  The linguist Joanna Podhorodecka examined Tolkien's constructed languages through the framework of Ivan Fonágy's theory of symbolic vocal gestures. She tabulated the proportions of vowels and consonants in two samples of Elvish and one of Black Speech. The difference is stark: Black Speech is 63% consonants, while the two Elvish samples run at 52% and 55%. The sound like the "i" in "machine" is far rarer in Black Speech than in Elvish. The sound like the "u" in "brute" is far more common in Black Speech. Podhorodecka notes that in aggressive speech, consonants lengthen and vowels shorten, which is exactly why Black Speech sounds harsher to the ear. Black Speech also contains far more voiced plosives (/b/, /d/, and /g/) than Elvish, making the language sound more violent.

  Podhorodecka's conclusion is careful: Tolkien's languages were certainly his own individual creation, but their "linguistic patterns resulted from his keen sense of phonetic metaphor." Tolkien's own testimony supports this reading. For Quenya, his "Elven-latin", he chose to include "two other (main) ingredients that happen to give me 'phonaesthetic' pleasure: Finnish and Greek." He gave Sindarin "a linguistic character very like (though not identical with) British-Welsh." Welsh phonetics suited the Celtic nature of the legends attributed to its Elvish speakers. Christopher Robinson concurs that Tolkien took extreme care to ensure phonetic fitness, and that his detailed philological knowledge enabled a polished result. Podhorodecka concludes that these sonic choices subtly shape the "aesthetic and axiological" texture of Tolkien's mythology: both its sensory beauty and its moral structure. That texture becomes most vivid in the fiction itself, in the moments when characters are caught by sounds in languages they cannot speak.

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• 7. Keatsian Listening

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  Frodo Baggins, recently recovered from a near-fatal wound from a Nazgûl's Morgul-knife, is sitting in the Elvish haven of Rivendell when the singing begins. Tolkien writes that Elvish melodies "held him in a spell" even though Frodo "understood them little." The enchantment deepens until Frodo feels "an endless river of swelling gold and silver" flowing over him, "too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended." He sinks into sleep under its weight. Turner describes Tolkien's mode of presenting such listening as "highly Keatsian": the pleasure of sound appreciated for itself, before and beyond any translation.

  Gildor and his Elves, walking through the Shire, produce a similar effect on the Hobbits who encounter them. Turner notes that the Hobbits feel they "subliminally understand something of the meaning" even though they do not speak Elvish. Legolas, hearing Aragorn sing in Rohirric for the first time, offers the most precise description of the experience. He tells Aragorn he takes this to be "the language of the Rohirrim", though he cannot make out its meaning. To him it sounds "like to this land itself, rich and rolling in part, and else hard and stern as the mountains." All he knows, he says, is that the words are "laden with the sadness of Mortal Men." He recognizes the character of a culture in the sound of its words before he catches a single meaning.

  The Council of Elrond brings the opposite extreme, when Gandalf declaims the Rhyme of the Rings in the Black Speech of Mordor. His voice becomes "menacing, powerful, harsh as stone." The Elves cover their ears. Later, the Dwarf Gimli sings of the Dwarf-King Durin. Sam Gamgee, the gardener Hobbit, responds without analysis: "I like that! I should like to learn it. In Moria, in Khazad-Dum!" Shippey calls Sam's response "obviously... a model one." The label captures what Tolkien's entire project was working toward: a reader who feels the rightness of an invented sound before any translation is offered.

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