Kitabı oku: «A Secret Vice», sayfa 2

The Languages of Middle-earth

Towards the end of ‘A Secret Vice’, Tolkien somewhat reluctantly moves from theorizing about language invention to unveiling some key examples of his own Qenya and Noldorin, which by that time had become central to his Middle-earth mythology. To illustrate Qenya, Tolkien gives three poems: Oilima Markirya (‘The Last Ark’), Nieninqe and Earendel (see pp. 27–31). For Noldorin, Tolkien offers an untitled poem which starts with the line ‘Dir avosaith a gwaew hinar’ (‘Like a wind dark through gloomy places’) (see p. 32) which incorporates characters from his legendarium as it had developed by that time, including the evil Orcs, Damrod the Hunter, and the Elf princess Lúthien Tinúviel. Tolkien states that he considers poetry to be the ‘final fruition’ of language development (see p. 26). Therefore, by delivering samples of his poetry in his talk, Tolkien was not only demonstrating the theories he outlined, but also showing that these two imaginary languages had themselves by late 1931 reached an advanced stage in conception and composition.

The earliest of these imaginary languages, in terms of conception, is Qenya. Tolkien started inventing Qenya in the spring of 1915 through two key linguistic documents: The Qenya Lexicon and The Qenya Phonology (published in PE 12). In the Qenya Lexicon, Tolkien invented a series of roots by which related Qenya words could be constructed. In the Qenya Phonology, a dense 28-page philological treatise, Tolkien laid out the basic phonetic principles of Qenya, including a series of sound combination rules, which gave Qenya a specific sound aesthetic. As Tolkien noted on several occasions, this sound aesthetic was heavily influenced by his early discovery and passion for the Finnish language (see Letters, p. 214). For example, in his development of the Qenya vowel, Tolkien focused on the use of open, long vowels, and his sound combination rules emphasized a softening of consonant stops; all elements of Finnish phonetics. The Qenya Lexicon and Phonology are the foundations from which Tolkien constructed names for people, places and items in the early poems of his nascent mythology. The earliest evidence of this work is in the July 1915 poem The Shores of Faery, which Tolkien described as the ‘First poem of my mythology’ (Lost Tales II, p. 271). This is the earliest known text in which Tolkien names several places that were emerging in his mythical geography by constructing invented names attested in the Qenya Lexicon and Qenya Phonology (e.g. Eldamar, Valinor, Taniquetil). Andrew Higgins (2015) has analysed the words Tolkien constructed from the roots in the Qenya Lexicon, and has argued that Tolkien was inventing the words needed to translate some of his own English poetry into Qenya, and to compose poetry in Qenya itself. Tolkien’s use of Qenya for original composition is attested in his early 1916 Qenya poem Narqelion (pp. 95–6).

After seeing active duty in the First World War, Tolkien revisited the Qenya Lexicon by compiling a list of selected Qenya words called The Poetic and Mythological Words of Eldarissa (PE 12, pp. 29–112) which developed, and to some extent modified, some of his earlier thoughts on Qenya words and their English translations. Qenya was evolving and Tolkien would soon use it extensively in The Book of Lost Tales, the earliest prose version of his mythology. He composed prose fragments and various name-lists related to his mythic narratives, while continuing to develop Qenya independently by creating verb conjugations, pronoun charts and noun declensions. While he was a Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds in the early 1920s, Tolkien made his first complete grammar of the Qenya language (published in PE 14, pp. 35–59, 71–86). It would be this work on the Qenya Grammar, as well as additional lists of invented vocabulary, that Tolkien would draw upon for his creative work in the 1920s, including the composition of the three Qenya poems he included in ‘A Secret Vice’.

The second example of an imaginary language that Tolkien gives is Noldorin. Noldorin was a later version of a language he had started inventing in 1917–18, originally called Gnomish, or Goldogrin. Tolkien had invented Gnomish as a language related to Qenya but designed to linguistically model what could happen to a language over many years of its speakers wandering and mixing with other peoples. Gnomish was associated with the Lost Tales narrative of the exiled Elves, the Gnomes or Noldoli, who left Valinor and wandered in the Great Lands. To phonetically reflect this sense of exile in Gnomish, Tolkien chose to have this language resemble the sounds of Welsh, a language spoken by an exiled people (the Cymry) who had been forced out of their lands by the Anglo-Saxons and made to live as the wealas (the Old English word for ‘foreigners’ and the origin of the name Welsh) in their own lands. Similar to Welsh and other Celtic languages (such as Irish, Manx, Scottish and Cornish), Tolkien invested Gnomish with a system of mutations, or lenitions, that affect words when they come into contact with other words. Indeed, in most cases the system of mutations in Gnomish is almost identical with that of Welsh. In The Grammar and Lexicon of the Gnomish Tongue (published in PE 11), Tolkien had invented a fairly complete and ingenious grammar for this language and offered a list of words in Gnomish which represented phonetic shifts to distinguish it from Qenya. As with Qenya, most of the evidence for Gnomish is found in the names of people, places and items in The Book of Lost Tales. An example of the difference in the phonetic make-up of Gnomish from Qenya can be seen in the name of the chief god of the Valar, whose name and title in Qenya is Manwë Súlimo and in Gnomish is Manweg Famfir. At roughly the same time of the invention of Gnomish, Tolkien had also gone back to his Qenya Phonology and revised sections of it to reflect the idea that both Qenya and Gnomish derived from a common source called Primitive Eldarin (PE 12, p. 2), thereby giving both Qenya and Gnomish a more complex sense of historical depth and coherence. Tolkien would summarize this in the new ‘Historical Sketch’ section, which introduced the revised version of The Qenya Phonology (PE 12, pp. 1–2).

In the 1920s Tolkien would revise his work on Gnomish, which he would now call Noldorin (PE 13, pp. 119–32). While he kept the system of mutations and lenitions, one of the chief distinguishing developments from Gnomish to Noldorin was his re-conception of the plural of the noun form. While Gnomish noun plurals were formed by adding endings to the root, Tolkien decided that in Noldorin one of the ways the plural would be formed would be through the morphological device of vowel mutation (ibid., p. 119). Therefore, the plural of the word for mountain (‘amon’) was formed by a shift in the two vowels of the word to become ‘emyn’^fn1. This change in the expression of the plural made Noldorin even more similar to Welsh than Gnomish, as the plural of Welsh nouns often follows the same pattern (e.g. bachgen ‘boy’ becomes bechgyn ‘boys’, castell ‘castle’ becomes cestyll ‘castles’ and pabell ‘tent’ becomes pebyll ‘tents’). This characteristic would persist into the next conceptual development of Noldorin, now renamed Sindarin, and features often in The Lord of the Rings, with such place-names as ‘Amon Hen’ (‘Hill of Sight’) and ‘Emyn Muil’ (‘the drear hills’) (Fellowship, p. 393; Unfinished Tales, p. 434). In the untitled Noldorin poem Tolkien includes in ‘A Secret Vice’ this can be seen in his use of the plural form ‘yrch’ (Orcs) from the singular Noldorin form ‘orch’ (see p. 32 below and PE 13, p. 151). These new morphological developments would inform Tolkien’s composition of his Noldorin Word-Lists (PE 13, pp. 133–56) and the unfinished Noldorin Dictionary (ibid., pp. 157–65), from which are derived many of the words in the poem.

The different sound aesthetic of Qenya and Noldorin at the time Tolkien delivered ‘A Secret Vice’ can be appreciated by comparing the opening lines of the Qenya poem ‘Nieninqe’ and the untitled Noldorin poem Tolkien included in the lecture:

Nieninqe:	Noldorin Poem:
Norolinde pirukendea	Dir avosaith a gwaew hinar
elle tande Nielikkilis,	engluid eryd argenaid,
tanya wende nieninqea	dir Tumledin hin Nebrachar
yari vilya anta miqilis.	Yrch methail maethon magradhaid

For example, many of the words in the Qenya poem tend to end in open vowels (e.g. Norolinde, pirukendea, nieninqea); whereas in Noldorin words tend to end in consonants (hinar, Nebrachar, magradhaid) giving Noldorin a different sound aesthetic than Qenya.

As mentioned above, Tolkien outlines four key characteristics that imaginary languages should demonstrate and which are reflected in his own Elvish language invention. The first two of these are interdependent and make more sense when discussed together: the creation of word forms that sound aesthetically pleasing, and a sense of fitness between word form and meaning. Given his love and admiration for Finnish, which inspired the sound aesthetic of the Qenya language, it is not surprising that Tolkien mostly associates the Qenya language with his race of Elves. It is the Elves, after all, who represent the highest and purest of his imagined beings, and who are the primary agents of linguistic creativity in Middle-earth (see Fimi 2008 pp. 99–100). As illustrated in the poetic example above, Qenya words and names tend to contain more open vowels reflecting the Finnish sound aesthetic Tolkien admired. For example, the name for one of the Elvish towns on the ‘Lonely Isle’ of Tol Eressëa is Alalminórë (‘the land of the Elms’) and it is formed from a root ALA meaning ‘to spread’ (PE 12, p. 29). The phonetic make-up of Qenya words in his early poem Narqelion (pp. 95–6) clearly shows Tolkien utilizing theories of sound symbolism, the notion that the sound of a word ‘fits’ its meaning (see below, pp. li–lix). For example, in the first line of the poem: ‘N ^. alalmino/eo lalantila ne súme lasser pínear’ (‘The elm-tree lets fall one by one its small leaves upon the wind’), the repetition of the clusters /al/ and /la/ suggests the use of ‘reduplication’, a term used in philology of Tolkien’s time to describe the phenomenon of repeated and inverted syllables to create a sound aesthetic and semantic effect. Moreover, the sense of leaves falling one by one is expressed with the verb form ‘la-lan-til-a’, which conveys a sense of downward motion in the phonetic make-up of its syllable pattern. In the Qenya Lexicon, there is a specific category of words that have a poetic, almost ‘song-like’, feel to them, which Tolkien builds from several roots using the multiplicative prefix li-, lin·. From this prefix he constructs such aesthetically pleasing words as: lintyulussea or lintutyulussea, ‘having many poplars’; linta(ta)sarind(e)a, ‘with many willows’; limpa(pa)lassea(a), ‘much roaring’; lintuilindōrea, ‘when many swallows congregate and sing at dawn’ and lintitinwe, ‘having many stars’ (PE 12, p. 53). These examples prefigure the same type of polysyllabic poetic words that Tolkien would give to his ancient tree herders, the Ents, in The Lord of the Rings, whose word for ‘hill’ is ‘a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lindor-burúmë’ (Two Towers, p. 465). Tolkien’s focus on words that have an aesthetically pleasing sound as befitting to their sense would be contrasted with his invention of words that would seek to produce the opposite effect, even without the meaning of the word being known. His use of open vowels to construct the aesthetically pleasing words for the Elves is contrasted in the Qenya Lexicon with hard-sounding words having dense consonant clusters used for creatures of evil. For example, melkaraukir (PE 12, p. 60) is an early form of the name for the Balrog, the monster that Gandalf the Wizard would encounter in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s use of sound aesthetic to suggest the nature of creatures and things would become a hallmark of his name invention in his Middle-earth mythology. This use of different sounds for cultural contrast can be seen by comparing the first lines of the Elf Queen Galadriel’s lament, Namárië in The Lord of the Rings, with Gandalf’s reading of the inscription on the Ring of Power in the Black Speech (a language invented by the Dark Lord Sauron in mockery of the Elvish languages).

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,

yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron! (Fellowship, p. 377)

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,

ash nazg thrakatulûk

agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. (ibid., p. 254)

Tolkien was not only interested in inventing pleasing sounds and fitting meanings for individual words; he created groups of related words that displayed a shared sound aesthetic and related morphological meaning. An example of this can be seen in the Qenya root MORO, which itself through primary world word-association suggests a feeling of literal or metaphorical ‘darkness’ (e.g. by evoking words of Indo-European languages such as ‘murder’, ‘murky’, ‘morte’, etc.). Tolkien used this root to construct a series of words directly and indirectly related to concepts of darkness and, by extension, the night and hidden things.

mōri night

morinda of the night, nightly

mōriva nocturnal

morna, morqa black

moru hide, conceal

morwa unclear, secret (PE 12, p. 62)

This particular root would persist in his language invention and was used to form the names of two very dark places in The Lord of the Rings: Moria (‘Black Chasm’) and Mordor (‘Land of Darkness’). Tolkien was particularly proud of the ‘coherence and consistency’ of his word and name invention, which he felt was lacking in ‘other name-inventors’ (Letters, p. 26).

A third characteristic of Tolkien’s language invention is his construction of elaborate grammars, an element that very few previous inventors of fictional languages engaged with in such detail. The earliest notes and doodles found in Tolkien’s undergraduate essay books reveal that he was fascinated with the structure of languages and the development and change of words over time. He would imaginatively reflect this in the make-up of his own phonologies and grammars, which contain dense and intricate philological notes demonstrating the depth of his knowledge. The sheer pleasure (a word he uses several times in ‘A Secret Vice’) he derived came in the invention of the intricate nature of these grammars and the complex and detailed philological ideas they explored. Tolkien’s grammars reflect a similar structure to the historic and comparative grammars he read in his own academic studies, such as C.N.E. Eliot’s A Finnish Grammar (1890) and Joseph Wright’s A Primer of the Gothic Language (1892). Arden Smith describes Tolkien’s work on his own invented grammars as starting with ‘very detailed material on historic phonology, after which he would move on to the morphology section, before the end of which the manuscript would generally degenerate into a mass of incomplete notes in a virtually illegible scrawl’ (Smith 2014, p. 204). However, it was through this very work on invented grammars, phonologies and attendant documents that Tolkien expanded his Elvish languages and, given their intertwined nature, developed new elements of his mythology. It has been said that Tolkien developed the narrative of his mythology through successive small changes to his texts rather than large ones (Scull 2000). Given the evidence of much of Tolkien’s early Elvish language invention, it would seem the same was true here; a process of constant ‘niggling’.

A good example of Tolkien’s linguistic niggling and changing ideas about grammar can be seen in his work on inventing and refining the pronominal system of Qenya, and its later revision in The Lord of the Rings as Quenya, the language of the High-elves (see Return, p. 1127). In its earliest phase of development (c.1917–18), Qenya pronouns were conceived as immediately preceding a verb and joined by a hyphen. Therefore, ‘I come’ would be expressed as ‘ni·tule’ (PE 14, pp. 52–3). In an example from a form of Qenya Tolkien used in his ‘Father Christmas letter’ of 1929, called Arktik, this hyphenated form had, by now, split from the verb and become a separate element: ‘ni vela’ ‘I see’ (Father Christmas, p. 30). By the early 1930s, however, Tolkien started to change his mind once more, and in a document known as Qenya Conjugations (PE 16, pp. 116–28) he started to express pronouns using suffixes added to the end of the verb form. Tolkien would continue to develop this idea in the Quenya of The Lord of the Rings. For example, the penultimate line in Galadriel’s lament, Namárië, is ‘Nai hiruvalyë Valimar’ ‘Maybe thou shalt find Valimar’ (Fellowship, p. 378, emphasis added), where the form -lyë (‘thou’) is added to the end of the verb form hiruva (‘shalt find’). Given the several detailed notes Tolkien made on this specific passage in the Namárië poem, it is clear that by the time he wrote this section of The Lord of the Rings he firmly believed that the Quenya pronoun should now be a suffix added to the verb form and only be used as a standalone word form for purposes of emphasis (see example in PE 17, pp. 75–6). These series of changes represent a complete re-conception of the placement of the pronoun in the earliest version of Qenya.

The fourth characteristic of Tolkien’s language invention is his intertwining of myth and language to create ‘an illusion of historicity’ (Letters, p. 143) through which he could imaginatively reflect how languages change over (hypothetical) time and through the cross-migration of peoples. Tolkien’s thoughts here were evidently influenced by two key elements. First, the fact that languages do not exist in a void, but belong to their speakers, who share many cultural characteristics which feed into the uses, conventions and historical developments of language. Therefore, if Tolkien was to achieve progression from the simpler childhood concept of inventing languages for social interaction, to more private and artistic linguistic inventions, then he would need to invent those peoples, cultures and attendant mythologies that would allow these languages to develop and prosper. Secondly, as Tom Shippey has shown, the linguistic paradigm that Tolkien adhered to both as student and as teacher was comparative philology: a discipline which came out of Germany in the nineteenth century and was based on the idea that languages change over time, not randomly, but through the operation of regular sound shifts (Shippey 2005, pp. 32–4). As Tolkien’s language invention skills grew, his own invention moved from the creation of isolated, static languages, devoid of historical context or internal development, to families of related languages, each designed to appear to have undergone characteristic internal development and all emerging from a common ancient source language through long years of gradual and systematic changes of sound over time.

Tolkien’s narrative of the Elves clearly reflects, and mythically re-imagines, the paradigm that eighteenth- and nineteenth century philologists explored of the existence of a ‘proto-language’ spoken by a hypothetical common people, the Indo-Europeans, which through time and migration had become splintered into different language groups and dialects. In Tolkien’s basic story, which he developed and refined throughout the evolution of his legendarium, the Elves awake in the East and are invited by the Valar to journey to the West. Some groups of Elves decide to accept this invitation and take part in a great march to the West, while others stay in the Great Lands. This first division is followed by a splintering of their languages. Some of the Elves who march to the West relinquish the journey along the way and form their own social and linguistic communities, while others make the entire journey to the home of the Valar in the West. In a later part of the history of the Elves, a group who come to the West, the Noldoli, are determined to return to the Great Lands and, in so doing, also develop another form of Elvish. In each step of this process of migration and diffusion, different versions of Elvish languages and related dialects are created, whilst these groups also come into contact with other peoples, such as Men and Dwarves, whose own languages are in turn influenced by their contact with the Elves. In c.1937, Tolkien would use the model of the ‘Proto-Indo-European’ tree of languages to create his own ‘Tree of Tongues’, which explored how the (now eleven) Elvish languages related to each other as well as to the languages of other peoples in Middle-earth (Lost Road, pp. 196–7; see also PE 18, pp. 28–9). It would be this expansion of his ‘nexus’ of languages for Middle-earth that Tolkien would take with him into his writing of The Lord of the Rings, and into the work he did on his mythology after its release in his attempt to prepare the ‘Silmarillion’ for publication. Tolkien’s work on establishing both the history and the interconnections of his invented languages would inform his use of these languages in The Lord of the Rings and would be the source for the paratextual information Tolkien would give readers in Appendices E and F, which focus on the languages. Tolkien’s constant ‘niggling’ and re-conception of his languages can be further seen in the major change he made in the early 1950s, while working on these appendices. He re-conceived Noldorin, together with its attendant history, redeveloping it into the language that is known by readers of The Lord of the Rings as Sindarin (see Peoples, pp. 61–2). With the publication of his seminal work, Tolkien’s own language invention would not only continue as a private pleasure but would gradually fascinate his readers, many of whom would write to the author eager for more information about his now not-so-private language invention (see also ‘Coda’).

‘A Secret Vice’ was, therefore, an important linguistic exposition that allowed Tolkien to reflect on his own language invention thus far, as well as develop his theoretical ideas on imaginary languages. The positive reception of his Elvish languages (albeit by a small audience; see pp. xxxii-xxxiii below) and the self-reflection that writing this paper afforded him may have also encouraged Tolkien to continue practising and perfecting his ‘secret vice’. The period immediately following the delivery of the lecture represents the next major phase in the development of the Elvish languages that would first appear in The Lord of the Rings. In this phase, Tolkien not only continued to consolidate, develop and refine the two major Elvish languages, Qenya and Noldorin, but also, in line with his developing mythic narrative of the Elves, expand his nexus of Elvish languages to include other variant dialects (some only sketched in a few words or names, and others merely mentioned).

Firstly, Tolkien developed other elements of Qenya, such as the c.1936 ‘Bodleian Declensions’, which added five fully declined noun classes to Qenya (VT 28, pp. 9–30). Other examples of Qenya would appear in the untitled song of Firiel from Tolkien’s time-travel story, The Lost Road (Lost Road, p. 72). A little later, Tolkien also composed the ‘Koivienéni Manuscript’, two Qenya prose sentences, one concerning the awakening of the Elves and the other the planting of the Two Trees of Valinor (VT 14, pp. 5–20). An inscription in Noldorin would also appear on an early version of Thror’s map in The Hobbit (Artist, p. 92).

Secondly, in c.1937 Tolkien wrote The Lhammas (Noldorin for ‘Account of the Tongues’), in which he sketched out a narrative and internal history of the descent of all the Elvish tongues from (at this conceptual stage) the language of the Valar, the Gods of his invented mythology (Lost Road, pp. 166–98). Along with this work Tolkien also visually outlined the aforementioned ‘Tree of Tongues’, which demonstrated how each of his imaginary languages related to each other and to languages of other races, such as Men and Dwarves (ibid., pp. 196–7). Tolkien’s ‘Tree of Tongues’ was clearly reproducing the Indo-European genealogical tree model (see Fimi 2008, pp. 101–2) and put into practice the idea that imaginary languages should have a ‘pseudo-historical background’ (p. 25). Tolkien’s work during this period culminated in The Etymologies, a document from c.1937–8, which revisited his earliest concept of developing words from roots. It presented a series of Eldarin roots, out of which he constructed related words in the twelve Elvish languages or dialects he had devised: Danian, Doriathrin, Eldarin, Exilic Noldorin, Ilkorin, Lindarin, Noldorin, Old Noldorin, Ossiriandeb, Qenya, Primitive Quendian and Telerin (Lost Road, pp. 347–400).