The Word-Hoard · The Makers

Tolkien, the Philologist

1892–1973

The door in the library

Governing question: What happens when a man reads a word he cannot gloss, and builds the world it must have come from?

For a great many of us he was the first door — the one in the library through which the whole medieval world became visible. This study takes him at his own valuation rather than ours: as a technician of historical linguistics who made things out of what he read. Seven movements, and a list of the places where the popular record is wrong.

He is kept in this library for a reason older than his own books. The battle that broke Suibhne — Mag Rath, 637 — is the battle the Irish poets’ primer names as its own cause of writing, and that primer holds that a language is made first and a world assembled afterwards to hold it. Tolkien reached the same ordering without ever reading a word of it. The convergence is set out in Language Precedes World; this study is the modern half of it.

Movement I

The Discipline

What was he actually trained to do?

He was not a novelist who liked old books. He was a technician of historical linguistics from whose technique much of the fiction grew, and the order of those two facts is the claim this study is built on.

Tolkien belonged to the last generation trained in comparative philology before the discipline fragmented into literature on one side and linguistics on the other. At King Edward's School, Birmingham, he took Latin, Greek, French and German, and went after Old English, Middle English and Gothic on his own. He went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1911 to read Classics, switched to English Language and Literature in 1913 to get at Germanic philology, and took a first in 1915. 1

The career that followed is a philologist's career, not an author's. Assistant lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary from 1919. Reader at Leeds in 1920, Professor there by 1924. Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925, with a fellowship at Pembroke. Merton Professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 until his retirement in 1959.

1922

A Middle English Vocabulary

Written to accompany Kenneth Sisam's Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. An apprentice work in the most unglamorous genre philology has — the glossary — and the foundation of everything after it.

1925

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The edition with E. V. Gordon, revised by Norman Davis in 1967 and still cited. This is the fact that earns him a place beside the Arthurian wing: he did not admire the poem from outside, he established its text.

1929

Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad

The paper identifying the "AB language" — a consistent literary dialect surviving in two manuscripts. Pure philology, of no interest to any general reader, and among the most respected things he wrote.

1936

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics

The British Academy lecture, and arguably the most consequential single lecture in twentieth-century medieval studies. Its argument: the poem is a poem, not a quarry for historians. Note for the Celtic wing — this is precisely the methodological move Kim McCone forces on Irish studies fifty years later.

The pattern to hold on to: every one of these is an act of establishing a text or defending how a text should be read. He spent his professional life on the question of what a document actually says.

Movement II

The Languages Came First

Which was the work — the world, or the tongues?

The tongues. He said so himself, in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings: the Silmarillion material was primarily linguistic in inspiration, and was begun in order to give the Elvish languages the historical background they needed in order to exist. 4

That sentence inverts almost every popular account of him. The world was not decorated with languages. The languages were the work, and the world was the apparatus required to make them real — because a language with no speakers, no history and no literature is a cipher, and he wanted the thing itself.

It had already happened once, in the smallest possible compass. Reading the Exeter Book as an undergraduate he came on earendel in the Advent Lyrics — a name he could not entirely gloss, older than the poem carrying it. He wrote a poem about the figure the word seemed to imply, and everything after grows from the far side of that line. The method is visible there in miniature: a word arrives, and a world has to be built for it to have come from. 5

He named the practice glossopoeia, on the model of mythopoeia, and defended it publicly in 1931 in a lecture to the Johnson Society at Pembroke — later printed as "A Secret Vice" — distinguishing languages built for communication, like Esperanto, from languages built for the pleasure of their own form.

1913

The line that started it

Eala Earendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended. The lines are Christ I, the anonymous Advent Lyrics — not Cynewulf, whose work is Christ II. Two words he would need for the rest of his life sit in one sentence of Old English verse: the name he could not fully account for, and the middle enclosure he would later render as Middle-earth. The first mythological poem followed in September 1914. 5

Quenya

Finnish, and the Kalevala

Begun around 1910 — though the date needs care: c. 1910–11 is when he started inventing Elvish at all, while the Qenya Lexicon, the first concrete Quenya document, is c. 1915. Restructured for decades afterwards. Finnish supplied the phonology; the Kalevala supplied more than phonology. His undergraduate Story of Kullervo is his first sustained prose fiction, and he stated plainly that Túrin was built on Kullervo, wholly changed except in the tragic ending.

Khuzdul

Semitic bones

Dwarvish is built on triconsonantal roots after the Semitic model, primarily Hebrew — and in-story it is unrelated to Elvish at its origin, devised separately by the Vala Aulë. The linguistic decision and the theological one are the same decision.

The conceit

Rendering, not writing

Westron is represented by modern English. So the tongues related to Westron are rendered by tongues related to English: Rohirric as Old English, the speech of Dale as Old Norse. The reader is being handed a translation with its apparatus intact — a philologist's joke that is also a philologist's argument.

Tengwar · Cirth

The hand as well as the tongue

A skilled calligrapher, he invented the scripts too: the Tengwar, made in-story by Fëanor and descended from the earlier Sarati, designed for pen and brush; and the Cirth, the runes, built for scratching and incising, on the model of real runic alphabets.

The charter

Not the first to think so

A medieval Irish primer for poets holds that Irish was cut from the seventy-two tongues after Babel, and was then given a people and a descent-history to live in. Tolkien never read it and reached the same ordering anyway — and the book making that claim names, as its own cause of writing, the battle that drove Suibhne into the trees. That convergence is the argument of Language Precedes World, and it is why this room exists.

This is the movement the rest of the study hangs from. Every other room in this Scriptorium holds a matter — something read. This one holds the instrument, and Tolkien is the case that proves the instrument can become the work.

Movement III

The Plot Is the Languages' History

If the tongues came first, what is the story for?

The claim in movement II is checkable, and this is where it gets checked. If the languages really were the work, the stories should show it — not by carrying a lot of invented names, which proves nothing, but by containing events whose function is to account for how the languages ended up as they are.

Consider what a philologist does with a real language family. Given two related tongues he reconstructs the history that produced them: a migration here, a conquest there, a prestige dialect displacing a rural one, a ban, a border. Tolkien ran that operation in reverse. He had built two nearly complete Elvish languages and a dozen more in outline, descending from a common ancestor and standing to one another roughly as Latin stands to British Celtic — and a family of that shape requires a history of a particular shape in order to be plausible. 8

A good part of the Elder Days is that history. Read the legendarium this way and a set of famous plot events stop looking like mythology and start looking like the apparatus a comparative philologist needs.

The Sundering

Why the Elves had to be divided

Quenya and Sindarin have to have diverged, and languages diverge when their speakers separate. So the Elves are sundered: some complete the Great Journey into the West, and the Grey Elves remain behind in Beleriand, where their speech goes its own way from an earlier Common Telerin. The migration is the mechanism. 9

The Kinslaying

An edict that is a sound-change

The sharpest instance. On learning that the Noldor had slain the Teleri at Alqualondë, Thingol forbids the speaking of Quenya in his realm. The consequence is linguistic and exact: the exiled Noldor take Sindarin as their daily speech, and Quenya survives in Middle-earth as a tongue of lore and ceremony rather than of the street. A moral catastrophe in the story is, in the apparatus, the reason one language displaced another. 10

Khuzdul

A language with no relatives needs a second maker

Dwarvish is built on Semitic triconsonantal roots and belongs to no Elvish family. A language unrelated to everything around it requires an origin outside the ordinary descent — so in-story the Vala Aulë makes the Dwarves apart, and gives them a tongue of their own. The linguistic decision and the theological one are a single decision, taken twice. 11

The Downfall

How a lingua franca gets distributed

The Common Speech of the Third Age descends from Adûnaic, the tongue of Númenor. For one language to be understood from the Shire to Gondor, its speakers have to have been scattered across the map by something — and the drowning of Númenor scatters them. The Atlantis dream he called his own and the need for a common tongue are served by the same catastrophe. 12

Entish

A people who had to be taught that speech exists

The Ents, in-story, had no language at all until the Elves gave them the idea of one — and their names are long chains of description that tell the whole story of the thing named. A species is invented whose entire relation to the world is that it learned to speak late and never got over it. Treebeard, saying that real names tell you the story of the things they belong to, is stating the philologist's method from inside the story. 13

The limit

What this argument cannot claim

It cannot claim to describe the order in which he drafted. This is a reading of the finished legendarium, not a reconstruction of his desk, and Tolkien nowhere says he invented the Kinslaying in order to explain a sound-change — the cause almost certainly ran both ways, and the texts were revised across fifty years. What the argument does claim is narrower and still substantial: the plot is shaped like a language history, and the shape is not an accident in the work of a man who said the languages came first.

Once the pattern is visible it is hard to unsee. The Silmarillion is, among the other things it is, the historical background a family of invented languages needed in order to be credible — which is exactly what he said it was.

Movement IV

The Arthurian Work — and the Refusal

Why did the man who edited the tradition's finest poem build somewhere else?

This is the section that earns him a place adjacent to the Arthurian wing, and the most interesting single fact about Tolkien and Arthur is not that he worked on the matter of Britain. It is that he worked on it, seriously, and then deliberately declined to build on it.

He edited Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He lectured on it — the W. P. Ker lecture of 1953, on the three confessions and the pentangle. He translated it, with Pearl and Sir Orfeo. And in the 1930s he began The Fall of Arthur, an alliterative Arthuriad in modern English: the most serious attempt anyone has made to return the matter to its native English metre.

He broke it off unfinished, as Chrétien broke off Perceval. The rhyme is worth noticing.

c. 1930s / 2013

The Fall of Arthur

Unfinished, published forty years after his death in an edition by Christopher Tolkien, whose commentary places the poem in Arthurian tradition and considers its unwritten ending and its relation to The Silmarillion. Alliterative long lines carry Arthur's last campaign — the metre of Beowulf applied to the matter of Britain by a man equipped to do it. 14

1951

The letter to Milton Waldman

Writing to a prospective publisher, Tolkien set out his long regret that England had no mythology of its own to compare with those of the Greeks, Celts, Scandinavians and Finns — and his wish to make a body of connected legend he could dedicate to England.

The refusal

Why Arthur could not do it

The Arthurian world, on his account, was too little naturalised, bound to British soil rather than English, and — the part worth arguing with — too explicitly Christian to do what he wanted a myth to do. He wanted the religion absorbed, not stated.

1975

The translations

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, published posthumously. The other half of the editorial work: having fixed what the text says, he undertook to carry it across.

A reader coming from the Arthurian wing should sit with the refusal rather than skip it. He knew the tradition from the inside, at the level of manuscript readings, and concluded it could not carry the thing he needed. Whether he was right is a live question, and the Arthurian reading path is the place to argue it.

Movement V

The Celtic Contact

How Celtic was he, honestly?

Smaller than the Germanic, larger than usually credited, and — unusually for this topic — with one genuine Celtic-Christian work in it.

The temptation here runs both ways. Enthusiasts overclaim a Celtic Tolkien on the strength of Sindarin sounding a bit Welsh; sceptics dismiss the contact entirely because his centre of gravity was Germanic. The sources support neither. What they support is a real, specific, documented Welsh debt, a single Irish-derived poem, and a sharp public warning against exactly the loose usage the enthusiasts go in for.

1945–55

Imram

Tolkien's own poem on the death of St Brendan. Written c. 1945–46 inside the Notion Club Papers as "The Death of Saint Brendan," then pulled out, revised, and published on its own as "Imram" in Time and Tide, 3 December 1955. A direct descendant of the Navigatio sancti Brendani, by a man who could read the Latin, filed by him under the Irish word for the genre. The Celtic wing's immram material has a twentieth-century heir: the study is there. 7

1955

English and Welsh

The O'Donnell Lecture: what Welsh phonology did to him, stated by him, at length. Read alongside Sindarin it is the primary document for where that language's sound comes from.

Sindarin

Welsh, structurally

Sindarin was designed with a Welsh-like phonology and phonotactics, including a mutation system built on the same lenition of voiced stops after vowels. Tolkien himself compared the pair: Sindarin stands to Quenya roughly as British Celtic stands to Latin. 2

1955

The "Celtic" warning

In "English and Welsh" Tolkien objected that "Celtic" of any sort is a magic bag into which anything may be put and out of which almost anything may come. Coming from a Welsh-besotted philologist it is the sharpest one-line statement of the problem the Celtic wing exists to teach — and the current scholarly reading is that he was mocking romantic pseudo-Celticity, not denying real Celtic learning. It is routinely misattributed to a letter of 1937; see the corrections below. 6

Worth stating honestly rather than overclaiming: the Irish material he did not much love, he did not much love. The Welsh debt is real and documented; the Irish one is a single poem and a borrowed saint.

Movement VI

The Germanic Centre, Which Lies Off This Map

Where did he actually live?

Here. Not in Britain, not in Ireland — in the north: Old English, Old Norse, Gothic, and the long argument about what survives of the heathen imagination in Christian manuscripts.

This Scriptorium has no Germanic wing and will not invent one. A structure that cannot say what it excludes is not a structure; it is a claim. The Tetramorph is a choice of four matters, not a map of the world, and Tolkien is the figure who makes that choice visible by not fitting inside it. That is how he came to be kept here — though it is not, on the evidence of movement II, why he belongs here.

Nomenclature

The dwarves out of the Dvergatal

Most of the dwarf names — and the name Gandalf — come straight from the Dvergatal, the catalogue of dwarves embedded in Völuspá. Gandalfr is gandr (staff, wand, magical creature) plus álfr (elf). Tolkien first gave the name to the chief dwarf, later renamed Thorin.

Christopher Tolkien

Where the Mannish languages began

His son's editorial judgement, which is as close to authoritative as this gets: those borrowed dwarf-names provided the whole starting point for the Mannish languages of Middle-earth. A borrowing became a system.

Rohan

Mercia on horseback

The clearest cultural calque in the legendarium. The Mark is Old English Riddena-mearc; Rohirric is rendered throughout as Old English, in the Mercian dialect of the west-midland country he came from. The solution occurred to him in 1942, needing an explanation for the Norse dwarf-names he had already published in The Hobbit.

1982 · 2009 · 2014

The posthumous Germanic shelf

Finn and Hengest, edited by Alan Bliss; The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary with Sellic Spell, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Half a career of northern work reached print after Tolkien's death through more than one scholarly hand. 15

Even the name of the world is Old English: middangeard, the middle enclosure, the earth between — and it reached him in the same line of verse that gave him Éarendel, forty years before he needed either. He did not invent Middle-earth. He translated it.

Movement VII

The Catholicism — Placed Correctly

Where does the faith belong in this account, and where does it not?

He was a lifelong daily-communicant Catholic. His mother Mabel converted in 1900 and died in 1904, leaving him orphaned at twelve in the care of Father Francis Morgan; he understood her death as a death for the faith, and he did not move from it afterwards.

The faith belongs in the account. It belongs here rather than in the Western wing, and the distinction matters: his Catholicism is the disposition beneath the craft, not a body of patristic work. The wing that holds Augustine and Benedict is not the wing that holds a man because he went to Mass. Cross-link to Western; do not file him there.

1953

The letter to Fr Robert Murray

His most-cited statement on the subject: that The Lord of the Rings is "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work" — unconsciously so at first, consciously in the revision.

The consequence

Why there is almost no religion in it

The same letter gives the reason, and it is the opposite of the one usually assumed. He cut the explicit religious element out because the work was religious: absorbed into the story and the symbolism rather than stated on its surface. Compare the refusal of Arthur in movement IV — the same principle, applied twice.

On Fairy-Stories

Eucatastrophe

The word is his, coined in the 1939 lecture: the sudden joyous turn that averts doom. He tied it directly to the Gospel as the supreme instance. The essay also sets out sub-creation, Recovery, Escape and Consolation — his working theory of what a made world is for.

Wolvercote

Beren and Lúthien

He and Edith are buried together in the Catholic section of Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. The headstone carries the two names from his own legendarium beneath their own. The last piece of sub-creation he authorised was a grave marker.

The apparatus

Where the record is commonly wrong

Tolkien is quoted more often than he is read, and several of the most-repeated things "he said" are not quite his, not quite settled, or not quite checked. Each of these is flagged in the sources the study was written from. Correcting them is cheap; repeating them is what makes an account unusable to anyone who knows the field.

  1. Commonly said — 1

    "A mythology for England" — Tolkien's phrase for his project.

    Not a Tolkien quotation. The phrase originates in Humphrey Carpenter's authorised biography and passed from there into general use. What Tolkien actually wrote, to Milton Waldman in 1951, was that he regretted England's want of a mythology of its own and had a mind to make a body of connected legend he could dedicate to England. The sense is close; the words are Carpenter's. 3

    Authority: Carpenter, Biography, p. 89; Letters, to Milton Waldman, 1951

  2. Commonly said — 2

    The One Ring owes nothing to Wagner — Tolkien said so.

    He did say so: both rings are round, and there the resemblance ceases. But the remark reportedly arose from irritation at a Swedish translator's preface, and it is defensive rather than descriptive. Tolkien drew on the same Norse material Wagner drew on — the Völsung legend above all — while holding Wagner's handling of it in contempt. Shared sources and genuine dislike are both true at once.

    Authority: Widely quoted; context and scholarly dissent noted in the research brief

  3. Commonly said — 3

    The "Celtic is a magic bag" line comes from a letter of 1937.

    It does not. The line is from "English and Welsh," the O'Donnell Lecture of 1955, printed in The Monsters and the Critics — a public lecture, not private correspondence, which changes how much weight it carries. Two further tangles usually travel with it. Tolkien Gateway's "Letter 19" is Carpenter's Letters no. 26, to Stanley Unwin; and that 1937 letter is a real but different document, in which he records a distaste for Celtic things while claiming to know many of them in the original. This page previously carried the 1937 attribution and the error is corrected here rather than quietly removed. 6

    Authority: Fimi, "‘Mad’ Elves and ‘Elusive Beauty’" (2006); "English and Welsh," in The Monsters and the Critics

  4. Commonly said — 4

    "Imram" was published in Sauron Defeated.

    Two poems, two books. Sauron Defeated (1992) prints "The Death of Saint Brendan," the earlier version, in its Notion Club Papers setting, where it is read aloud by the fictional Philip Frankley. "Imram" is the revised standalone text Tolkien published himself, in Time and Tide on 3 December 1955 with a Gibbings wood engraving. The revision matters as well as the date: it strips out the frame that made the poem legible as Middle-earth. This page carried the conflation until the Celtic wing took up the poem, and the entry is corrected here rather than quietly removed. 7

    Authority: Sauron Defeated, pp. 261–264; the Time and Tide bibliographic record. Set out in full on the Celtic wing's study of the poem.

  5. Commonly said — 5

    Tolkien was "twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford."

    Loose phrasing that appears in some summaries. He held two different Oxford chairs: Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945, then Merton Professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959. Only the first was a chair of Anglo-Saxon. 1

    Authority: Tolkien Society and Tolkien Estate biographies, read together

  6. Commonly said — 6

    The Dead Marshes are the Somme.

    He allowed the debt and then immediately qualified it: the Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to northern France after the Somme, but owe more, he said, to William Morris. He served on the Western Front and lost all but one close friend by 1918, so the temptation to read the legendarium as war memoir is strong — and the extent of that influence remains an open scholarly argument rather than a settled fact.

    Authority: Letters; second-edition preface to The Lord of the Rings; Garth, Tolkien and the Great War

  7. Commonly said — 7

    "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" is a 1936 essay.

    A small one, but the study is about small ones. The lecture was delivered to the British Academy in 1936 and published as a booklet in 1936–37; sources differ on which year to cite, and at least one gives 1937 for the lecture itself. Cite the lecture as 1936 and the publication separately.

    Authority: Source discrepancy flagged across the Society, Estate and bibliography

The shelf

Reading list

Primary — the scholarship

Start with the lecture. Everything else in this study follows from it.

  • "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," "On Fairy-Stories," and "English and Welsh," in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (1983)
  • Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925; 2nd ed. rev. Davis, 1967)
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, trans. Tolkien (1975)
  • Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell (2014)
  • Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode (1982)
  • A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Language Invention, ed. Fimi and Higgins

Primary — the making

Chosen for what they show about method, not for the story.

  • The Fall of Arthur (2013), edited with commentary by Christopher Tolkien
  • The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009)
  • "The Death of Saint Brendan," in Sauron Defeated (The History of Middle-earth IX) — the earlier version, in its Notion Club Papers setting
  • "Imram," Time and Tide, 3 December 1955 — the revised standalone version; now most easily found in The Collected Poems
  • The Silmarillion (1977)
  • The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, rev. ed. (2023) — the single most useful volume for this study

Secondary

Shippey first. He reads Tolkien as a philologist reading a philologist, which is the reading this study is built on.

  • Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth; J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
  • Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light; Interrupted Music
  • Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography
  • John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War
  • Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, eds., Tolkien's Legendarium
  • Sørina Higgins, ed., The Inklings and King Arthur (2017)
  • Tolkien Studies (WVU Press); Journal of Tolkien Research (open access)

The practice

Lectio "The Monsters and the Critics," entire, in one sitting — it is short, and it does not survive being read in pieces. Then Beowulf lines 1–52 in Tolkien's prose translation, set beside any verse translation you like. The gap between the two is the whole discipline.

Scriptio One page in the commonplace book on this: Tolkien read Gawain well enough to edit it, and still concluded the matter of Britain could not do what he needed. What did he need that it could not give him — and do you agree with him?

Doors outward

If you came here for Tolkien, these are the rooms he opens onto. The Arthurian path is the one to argue his refusal with; the Celtic wing is where Imram and "English and Welsh" belong, and the poem now has its own study there; and the personal register tells how this library began.

Related

  • Imram — Tolkien’s Brendan — Celtic wing — the one poem he made out of Irish material, read closely: two versions, three images, and the case for calling him a bard
  • Language Precedes World — The Word-Hoard’s charter — the medieval half of the argument, and why this study is here at all
  • Christopher Tolkien, the Editor — Companion study — what became of an unfinished world, and where the editor said he overstepped
  • The Matter of Britain — The Arthurian reading path — thirty-six units, and the place to argue with the refusal in movement IV
  • Celtic wing — Wilderness hinge — Imram, "English and Welsh," and what "Celtic" can and cannot mean
  • Beowulf — Texts Outside the Four — the Germanic control case, entered through translation
  • The Tongues — The languages of access, and an honest account of which have actually been begun
  • Becoming Anchorman — Personal register — the 1981 convergence that untangled into this library
  • Word-Hoard — The linguistic foundation of the library — charter, tongues, and makers

Notes

Claim-level notes identify the source and locator for consequential factual claims on this page.

  1. 1. Tolkien Society, “J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch” , academic career chronology; The Tolkien Estate, “Biography” , academic career ↩
  2. 2. Carl Hostetter, “Tolkien’s Invented Languages” , language design and influences ↩
  3. 3. Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography , p. 89; The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien , letter to Milton Waldman, 1951 ↩
  4. 4. Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1966) ; Carl Hostetter, “Tolkien’s Invented Languages” ↩
  5. 5. Christ I (the Advent Lyrics), lines 104–5 , lines 104–5 ↩
  6. 6. Tolkien, “English and Welsh” (1955) ; Fimi, “‘Mad’ Elves and ‘Elusive Beauty’” (2006) — Paraphrased. The line belongs to the 1955 lecture, not to the 1937 letter to Stanley Unwin with which it is usually confused. ↩
  7. 7. Tolkien, Sauron Defeated (HoME IX) , pp. 261–264; Time and Tide, 3 December 1955 — Two versions, two printings, thirty-seven years apart. This page previously gave the 1955 title to the 1992 printing; the entry is corrected rather than quietly removed. ↩
  8. 8. Elvish languages of Middle-earth ↩
  9. 9. Sindarin ↩
  10. 10. Quenya , Exilic Quenya — The ban and its linguistic consequence are recorded in the legendarium. Reading the episode as the apparatus a language history requires is this study’s inference, not a statement of Tolkien’s. ↩
  11. 11. Tolkien Gateway, “Khuzdul” ↩
  12. 12. Westron ↩
  13. 13. Tolkien Gateway, “Entish” ↩
  14. 14. Tolkien Estate, “Selected further reading” , posthumous scholarly works ↩
  15. 15. Shippey, “Translations and scholarly editions of medieval texts” , posthumous Old English editions; Tolkien Estate, “Selected further reading” , posthumous scholarly works — Alan Bliss edited Finn and Hengest; Christopher Tolkien edited the later Norse and Beowulf volumes named here. ↩

References

What this study is built on, and where the record is thinner than the confidence usually placed in it.

  1. The Tolkien Society — “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch” (David Doughan). The dates, chairs, Inklings, and lifetime bibliography.
  2. The Tolkien Estate — Biography. Corroborates the academic career and family record.
  3. Carl Hostetter, “Tolkien’s Invented Languages” (Tolkien Estate) — the Estate’s account of the languages and their priority over the legendarium.
  4. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien — including the Waldman and Murray letters and letters nos. 26, 107, 165, and 257. Quotations from the Letters are paraphrased on this site until their wording is collated against a printed edition.
  5. J. R. R. Tolkien, foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1966) — the Silmarillion material as primarily linguistic in inspiration, begun in order to provide the necessary background of “history” for Elvish tongues. The 1954 first-edition foreword is a different and shorter text and does not carry this statement.
  6. Christ I, the anonymous Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book, lines 104–5: Eala Earendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended. Only Christ II is Cynewulf’s; these lines are not.
  7. J. R. R. Tolkien, “English and Welsh,” the O’Donnell Lecture of 21 October 1955, in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays — what Welsh phonology did to him, and the source of the “magic bag” warning about the word “Celtic.” Page locators for the “magic bag” passage have not been collated against a named printing.
  8. Dimitra Fimi, “‘Mad’ Elves and ‘Elusive Beauty’: Some Celtic Strands of Tolkien’s Mythology,” Folklore 117 (2006) — establishes that the “magic bag” line belongs to “English and Welsh” rather than to the 1937 letter, and reads it as aimed at romantic pseudo-Celticity rather than at Celtic learning.
  9. Wikipedia, “Elvish languages of Middle-earth” — Tolkien built two nearly complete Elvish languages and around a dozen more in outline, descending from a common ancestral speech, because he was interested in how languages diversify over time.
  10. Wikipedia, “Sindarin” — the tongue of the Grey Elves who remained behind on the Great Journey, descending from an earlier Common Telerin.
  11. Wikipedia, “Quenya” — Thingol forbade the use of Quenya in his realm on learning of the slaying of the Teleri; the Noldor thereafter took Sindarin as their native speech, and Quenya in Middle-earth survives as Exilic Quenya, a tongue of lore rather than of daily use.
  12. Wikipedia, “Westron” — the Common Speech of the Third Age, descended from Adûnaic, the tongue of Númenor, and represented throughout the novels by modern English.
  13. Tolkien Gateway, “Khuzdul” — in-story the Vala Aulë devised the tongue for the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves, so that unlike most languages of Middle-earth it is unrelated in origin to the Elvish tongues.
  14. Tolkien Gateway, “Entish” — in-story the Ents had no language of their own until contact with the Elves gave them the idea of speech; Entish names are long chains of description telling the story of the thing named.
  15. Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography — the source of “a mythology for England,” a phrase routinely misattributed to Tolkien himself.
  16. Tolkien Estate, “Selected further reading” — distinguishes Christopher Tolkien’s posthumous editions, including The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, The Fall of Arthur, and Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.
  17. Tom Shippey, “Translations and scholarly editions of medieval texts” (Tolkien Estate) — identifies Finn and Hengest as Alan Bliss’s 1982 edition of Tolkien’s lecture notes and writings.
  18. “Imram,” Time and Tide, 3 December 1955, p. 1561, with a wood engraving by Robert Gibbings — the revised standalone version of the Brendan poem, published in Tolkien’s lifetime.
  19. J. R. R. Tolkien, Sauron Defeated, ed. Christopher Tolkien (The History of Middle-earth IX, 1992), pp. 261–264 — “The Death of Saint Brendan,” the earlier version, printed with the Notion Club Papers.