Sound and language in Middle-earth

• 1. Tolkien Philologist Author

  ›

  J. R. R. Tolkien was both a philologist and an author of high fantasy. He remarked to the poet Harvey Breit that he was a philologist and all his work was philological. He explained to his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that this meant his work was fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. The invention of languages was the foundation for him. The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To him, a name came first and the story followed. Human sub-creation mirrored divine creation as thought and sound together brought into being a new world.

  12

• 2. Artistic Literary Movements

  ›

  Around 1900 there were multiple artistic and literary movements that stressed language and the sound of words. These included Italian Futurism, British Vorticism, and the Imagism of Ezra Pound. Gino Severini's 1912 Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin incorporated words like Bowling and POLKA in its imagery. Nonsense poets such as Lewis Carroll with his Jabberwocky sought to convey meaning using invented words. Edward Lear also sought to convey meaning using invented words during the late 19th century. These movements suggested that meaning could be conveyed even with words that were apparently nonsense.

  68

• 3. Aesthetic Pleasure Sound

  ›

  The linguist Allan Turner writes that the sound pattern of a language was the source of a special aesthetic pleasure for Tolkien. In his essay about constructing languages, A Secret Vice, Tolkien wrote that the person inventing a language must address the fitting of notion to oral symbol. The pleasure in such invention derives mainly from the contemplation of the relation between sound and notion. He stated that he was personally more interested perhaps in word-form in itself than in any other department. This focus on phonetic fitness placed him at odds with conventional linguistic theory.

  45

• 4. Linguistic Heresy Theory

  ›

  Tolkien called this approach his major linguistic heresy because it contradicted the usual structuralist view of language. Linguists believed there is no connection between specific sounds and meanings. Thus pig denotes an animal in English but pige denotes a girl in Danish. The allocation of sounds to meanings has been taken by linguists to be arbitrary. Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky strengthened the idea that linguistic signs are unrelated to their real-world referents. However, scholars like Otto Jespersen and Roman Jakobson disagreed with the conventional view. Modern studies show sound symbolism is widespread across cultures.

  37

• 5. True Names Power

  ›

  Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, said the Ent Treebeard in The Two Towers. In The Hobbit, the Wizard Gandalf introduced himself with the statement I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me. When Tom Bombadil named something, like the ponies that the Hobbits were riding, the name stuck. The animals responded to nothing else for the rest of their lives. The sound of the phrase Tom Bombadil itself fits very well with the name's jolly, rumbustious owner. Knowledge of a true name might give one power over that thing or being within the narrative context.

  15

• 6. Keatsian Listening Style

  ›

  Tolkien allows his characters to listen and appreciate in highly Keatsian style, enjoying the sound of language. The Hobbit Frodo Baggins sat dreamily in the safe Elvish haven of Rivendell after recovering from his near-fatal wound with the Nazgûl's Morgul-knife. When the Hobbits met Gildor and his Elves while walking through the Shire, they felt they subliminally understood something of the meaning. While crossing the grassy plains of Rohan, the immortal Elf Legolas heard Aragorn singing a song in a language he had never heard. He commented that it was laden with the sadness of Mortal Men even though he could not guess what it meant.

  68

• 7. Phonetic Fitness Analysis

  ›

  The linguist Joanna Podhorodecka examines the lámatyáve, a Quenya term for phonetic fitness, of Tolkien's constructed languages. She compares two samples of Elvish and one of Black Speech, tabulating the proportions of vowels and consonants. The Black Speech is 63% consonants, compared to the Elvish samples' 52% and 55%. Among other features, the sound I like the i in machine is much rarer in Black Speech than in Elvish. The sound U like the u in brute is much more common. In aggressive speech, consonants become longer and vowels shorter, so Black Speech sounds harsher. Further, Black Speech contains far more voiced plosives making the sound of the language more violent.

  6