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87-769: One of the languages of Arda in Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium , Adûnaic was spoken by the Men of Númenor during the Second Age . By the time of the War of the Ring at the end of the Third Age , it had developed into the common speech or Westron . Adûnaic was invented by the first Men as they awoke in Hildórien. It was the language of Númenor , and after its destruction in

174-591: A philologist of having to "translate" the ancient languages used in the manuscript. A frame story is a tale that encloses or frames the main story or set of stories. For example, in Mary Shelley 's 1818 novel Frankenstein , the main story is framed by a fictional correspondence between an explorer and his sister; in One Thousand and One Nights , compiled during the Islamic Golden Age ,

261-556: A credible mythology, needed to create a "credible book tradition". He went to "elaborate lengths" to achieve this, including many mentions of Bilbo's "diary" and "Translations from the Elvish", supposedly created during his years of retirement, complete with "the masses of notes and paper in his room at Rivendell". She observes that the simulated tradition is already in evidence, hidden in plain sight , in The Hobbit , whose dust jacket

348-441: A little over 13, he helped construct a sound substitution cypher known as Nevbosh , 'new nonsense', which grew to include some elements of actual invented language. Tolkien stated that this was not his first effort in invented languages. Shortly thereafter, he developed a true invented language called Naffarin. One of his early projects was the reconstruction of an unrecorded early Germanic language which might have been spoken by

435-520: A memoir of his adventures, which became The Red Book of Westmarch . This was continued by his relative Frodo Baggins , who carried the One Ring to Mount Doom , and then by Frodo's servant, Samwise Gamgee , who had accompanied him. The Lord of the Rings contains an appendix, " The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen ", which, being written by Men rather than Hobbits, has its own frame story. The legendarium,

522-516: A particular love for the Finnish language . He described the finding of a Finnish grammar book as "like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before". Finnish morphology, particularly its rich system of inflection , in part gave rise to Quenya. Another of Tolkien's favourites was Welsh , and features of Welsh phonology found their way into Sindarin. When writing The Lord of

609-511: A people", "king" or "prince". As with other descriptive names in his legendarium, Tolkien uses this name to create the impression that the text is "'historical' , 'real' or 'archaic'". Some samples of Khuzdul , the language of the Dwarves , are given in The Lord of the Rings . The explanation here is a little different from the "Mannish" languages: as Khuzdul was supposedly kept secret by

696-399: A poem called "Imram" from his legendarium. Eventually, Tolkien gave the book not just a frame story, but an elaborate editorial frame of prologue and appendices that together imply the survival of a manuscript through the thousands of years since the end of the Third Age , along with the editing and annotation of that manuscript by many hands. This placed Tolkien in the congenial role for

783-502: A product that resembles Italian in many respects, which was Tolkien's favourite modern Romance language. Quenya grammar is agglutinative and mostly suffixing , i.e. different word particles are joined by appending them. It has basic word classes of verbs , nouns and pronouns /determiners, adjectives and prepositions . Nouns are inflected for case and number. Verbs are inflected for tense and aspect, and for agreement with subject and object. In early Quenya, adjectives agree with

870-541: A record of the events of The Lord of the Rings , including the exploits of his kinsman Frodo Baggins and others. He leaves the material for Frodo to complete and organize. Frodo writes down the bulk of the final work, using Bilbo's diary and "many pages of loose notes". At the close of Tolkien's main narrative, the work is almost complete, and Frodo leaves the task to his gardener and close friend and heir Samwise Gamgee . The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Tolkien, seeking to present his Middle-earth writings as

957-400: A suffix. There are three numbers, singular, plural and dual. Dual is used mainly for "natural pairs", like eyes and shoes. There are three cases, Normal, Subjective and Objective. The Subjective case is used as the subject of a verb. The Objective case is used only in compound expressions and appears only in the singular. The Normal case is used in all other circumstances, such as the object of

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1044-539: A third son, Heorrenda , a great poet of half-Elven descent, who in the fiction would go on to write the Old English epic poem Beowulf . This weaves together a mythology for England , connecting England's geography, poetry and mythology with the Legendarium as a plausibly reconstructed (though probably untrue) prehistory. The first title for The Book of Lost Tales , begun in 1917, framed its stories as

1131-466: A title page" for his Red Book, showing Bilbo's "largely unsatisfactory tries" at finding an appropriate title. The final title is Frodo's: My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. And What Happened After. Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and the accounts of his friends. What we did in

1218-447: A transmitted collection: In the fiction, a series of named Elves told the "lost tales" to Eriol/Ælfwine. He transmitted them via Heorrenda's written book. As edited by Christopher Tolkien , the 1983 Book of Lost Tales, Volume 1 is inscribed: Tolkien attempted to write two time-travel novels , but never completed either of them. Both can be seen as frame stories for his legendarium, as the father-son pair of time travellers in each of

1305-547: A verb. Example declensions: This Adûnaic text, part of the tale of the Fall of Númenor , appears in The Notion Club Papers . It is fragmentary because it appeared in a dream to Tolkien's frame story character Lowdham, and is only partially translated by him because he did not know the language. Words in bold are not translated at the point in the text where the translation is first given, but their translation

1392-564: A very characteristic and in their different ways beautiful word-form". Part of the lecture was published in The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays ; in the part that was not, Tolkien gave the example of "Fonwegian", a language with "no connection whatever with any other known language". Being a skilled calligrapher , Tolkien invented scripts for his languages. The scripts included Sarati , Cirth , and Tengwar . Tolkien

1479-715: A visionary dream of Atlantis . Its grammar is sketched in the unfinished "Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language", included in Sauron Defeated . Tolkien remained undecided whether the language of the Men of Númenor should be derived from the original Mannish language (as in Adûnaic), or if it should be derived from "the Elvish Noldorin" (i.e. Quenya ) instead. In The Lost Road and Other Writings it

1566-511: A voice that cannot be Bilbo's. In The Lord of the Rings , on the other hand, Tolkien carefully embedded the frame story in the text, from the earliest drafts. He has Bilbo talk in the Council of Elrond about getting on with his book, saying that he was "just writing an ending for it", but realising that it now needed "several more chapters" because of Frodo's adventures on the way to Rivendell. She comments that Tolkien "went so far as to draw up

1653-458: A world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows. I should have preferred to write in 'Elvish'. But, of course, such a work as The Lord of the Rings has been edited and only as much 'language' has been left in as I thought would be stomached by readers. (I now find that many would have liked more.) ... It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in 'linguistic aesthetic', as I sometimes say to people who ask me 'what

1740-448: Is "surreptitiously" ornamented by Tolkien with ancient-looking runes , which read: The Hobbit or There and Back Again, being the record of a year's journey made by Bilbo Baggins of Hobbiton; compiled from his memoirs by JRR Tolkien, and published by George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Flieger notes that The Hobbit ' s frame story is rather fragile, since the book's narrator often speaks in

1827-507: Is absent or unconscious. Further, no other observer was present, especially at Mount Doom where Sam is the only person who sees Gollum fighting an invisible Frodo for the Ring . Flieger observes that on the stairs of the dangerous pass of Cirith Ungol , Frodo and Sam talk about what a story is. Sam says "We're in one, of course, but I mean put into words, you know ... read out of a great big book with red and black letters". Frodo answers "Why Sam ... to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if

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1914-916: Is given later in the story. Kadō and so zigūrun Sauron zabathān humbled unakkha he-came ... ... ēruhīnim Children of God Kadō zigūrun zabathān unakkha ... ēruhīnim {and so} Sauron humbled he-came ... { Children of God } dubdam fell ugru-dalad shadow-under ... ... ar-pharazōnun Ar-Pharazon azaggara was warring dubdam ugru-dalad ... ar-pharazōnun azaggara fell shadow-under ... Ar-Pharazon {was warring} avalōiyada against Powers ... ... bārim Lords an-adūn of-West yurahtam Languages of Arda The English philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien created several constructed languages , mostly related to his fictional world of Middle-earth . Inventing languages, something that he called glossopoeia (paralleling his idea of mythopoeia or myth-making),

2001-663: Is implied that the Númenóreans spoke Quenya, and that Sauron , hating all things Elvish, taught the Númenóreans the old Mannish tongue they themselves had forgotten. Tolkien called the language of Rohan "Rohanese". He only gave a few actual Rohirric words: Only one proper name is given, Tûrac , an old word for King, the Rohirric for Théoden . That in turn is the Old English word þéoden , meaning "leader of

2088-468: Is implied that the Númenóreans spoke Quenya, and that Sauron , hating all things Elvish, taught the Númenóreans the old Mannish tongue they themselves had forgotten. The phonology is as follows: Adûnaic is fundamentally a three-vowel language, with a length distinction; the long eː and oː are derived from diphthongs aj and aw , as is the case in Hebrew and in most Arabic dialects , in line with

2175-466: Is intended as the language from which Westron (also called Adûni ) is derived. This added a depth of historical development to the Mannish languages. Adûnaic was intended to have a "faintly Semitic flavour". Its development began with his 1945 work The Notion Club Papers . It is there that the most extensive sample of the language is found, revealed to one of the (modern-day) protagonists, Lowdham, in

2262-522: Is it all about'. The Tolkien scholar and folklorist Dimitra Fimi questions this claim. In particular, his September 1914 The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star , based on the Old English poem Crist 1 , shows that he was starting to think about a mythology before he started to sketch his first invented Middle-earth language, Qenya, in March 1915. Further, the steps that led to his first attempt at

2349-624: Is mainly a fusional language with some analytic tendencies. It can be distinguished from Quenya by the rarity of vowel endings, and the use of voiced plosives b d g , rare in Quenya found only after nasals and liquids . Early Sindarin formed plurals by the addition of -ī , which vanished but affected the preceding vowels (as in Welsh and Old English ): S. Adan , pl. Edain , S. Orch , pl. Yrch . Sindarin forms plurals in multiple ways. Tolkien devised Adûnaic (or Númenórean),

2436-530: Is there that the most extensive sample of the language is found, revealed to one of the (modern-day) protagonists, Lowdham, of that story in a visionary dream of Atlantis . Its grammar is sketched in the unfinished "Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language". Tolkien remained undecided whether the language of the Men of Númenor should be derived from the original Mannish language (as in Adûnaic), or if it should be derived from "the Elvish Noldorin" (i.e. Quenya ) instead. In The Lost Road and Other Writings , it

2523-597: The History of Middle-earth books, and the Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon journals. Scholars such as Carl F. Hostetter , David Salo and Elizabeth Solopova have published grammars and studies of the languages. He created a large family of Elvish languages , the best-known and most developed being Quenya and Sindarin . In addition, he sketched in the Mannish languages of Adûnaic and Rohirric;

2610-718: The Lhammas , a linguistic treatise addressing the relationships of the languages spoken in Middle-earth during the First Age , principally the Elvish languages. The text purports to be a translation of an Elvish work , written by one Pengolodh, whose historical works are presented as being the main source of the narratives in The Silmarillion concerning the First Age. The Lhammas exists in three versions,

2697-568: The Akallabêth , the "native speech" of the people of Elendil in the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor in the west of Middle-earth, though they usually spoke the Elvish language Sindarin . By the time of the War of the Ring , it had developed into the common speech or Westron . Tolkien called Adûnaic "the language of the culturally and politically influential Númenóreans." Although Tolkien created very few original words in Adûnaic, mostly names,

Adûnaic - Misplaced Pages Continue

2784-762: The Celtic substratum in England, he used Old Welsh names to render the Dunlendish names of Buckland Hobbits (e.g., Meriadoc for Kalimac ). The whole device of linguistic mapping was essentially a fix for the problems Tolkien had created for himself by using real Norse names for the Dwarves in The Hobbit , rather than inventing new names in Khuzdul. This seemed a clever solution, as it allowed him to explain

2871-400: The homonym Tolkien had in mind was between Sindarin and Old English, that is, translated or represented Rohirric. Foster comments that since it would be unlikely for a homonym also to exist between these two languages and actual Rohirric, and for the Old English and the Rohirric to be synonyms as well, Tolkien had made an error. The first published monograph dedicated to the Elvish languages

2958-457: The science fiction style frame story machinery that Lindsay had used – the back-rays and the crystal torpedo ship; he notes that in The Notion Club Papers , Tolkien makes one of the protagonists, Guildford, criticise those kinds of "contraptions". In The Lord of the Rings , Tolkien ultimately went much further than simply embedding a frame story in the text, though he did that too. Instead, he constructed an elaborate editorial frame, including

3045-493: The vowel harmony and consonant gradation present in Finnish, and accent is not always on the first syllable of a word. Typical Finnish elements like the front vowels ö , ä and y are lacking in Quenya, but phonological similarities include the absence of aspirated unvoiced stops or the development of the syllables ti > si in both languages. The combination of a Latin basis with Finnish phonological rules resulted in

3132-537: The "meta-textual frame [of The Lord of the Rings ] ... is duly harmonised in the text through the use of formal features; the appendixes are indeed full of scribal glosses, later notes, and editorial references that are meant to match the elaborate textual history detailed in the Note on the Shire Records." For example: Tolkien thought of his legendarium , the large body of documents of many kinds that lies behind

3219-453: The 1920 version of the Ælfwine story as "Tolkien's complicated penultimate version of the pseudo-historical and Anglo-Saxon frame-story", calling it important to any understanding of "Middle-earth's kernel mythology". Dale Nelson, in The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia , writes that Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis admired David Lindsay 's A Voyage to Arcturus , but that Tolkien "regretted"

3306-404: The Dwarves and never used in the presence of outsiders (not even Dwarvish given names), it was not "translated" by any real-life historical language, and such limited examples as there are in the text are given in the "original". Khuzdul was designed to resemble a Semitic language , with a system of triconsonantal roots and other parallels especially to Hebrew , just as some resemblances between

3393-582: The Dwarves and the Jews are intentional. The language of the Ents is briefly described in The Lord of the Rings . As the Ents were first taught to speak by Elves, Entish appears related to the Elvish languages. However, the Ents continued to develop their language. It is described as long and sonorous, a tonal language somewhat like a woodwind instrument. Only the Ents spoke Entish as no others could master it. Even

3480-712: The Dwarvish language of Khuzdul ; the Entish language; and the Black Speech , in the fiction a constructed language enforced on the Orcs by the Dark Lord Sauron . Tolkien supplemented his languages with several scripts . Tolkien was a professional philologist of ancient Germanic languages , specialising in Old English . Glossopoeia, the construction of languages, was Tolkien's hobby for most of his life. At

3567-519: The Elves, master linguists , could not learn Entish, nor did they attempt to record it because of its complex sound structure: ... slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity which even the loremasters of the Eldar had not attempted to represent in writing To illustrate these properties, Tolkien provides

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3654-582: The Lonely Isle was no longer equated with England, and Eriol became the Anglo-Saxon Ælfwine; this began the process of revising the legendarium that continued throughout his life. He notes that in 1945 and 1946, Tolkien added The Notion Club Papers , visiting ancient Númenor by travelling in time rather than by ship, but with a poem about St Brendan's Imram sea-voyages that he revised as the 1955 "Imram". The Tolkien scholar Jane Chance describes

3741-611: The Ring , Bilbo's There and Back Again provided the basis for the voiceover for the scene "Concerning Hobbits"; this was greatly extended in the Special Extended Edition. The memoirs' title became the working title for the third of Jackson's The Hobbit Films in August 2012, but in 2014 he changed it to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies . The Lord of the Rings contains a second frame story, for

3828-490: The Rings (1954–55), a sequel to The Hobbit (1937), Tolkien came up with the literary device of using real languages to "translate" fictional languages. He pretended to have translated the original language Westron (named Adûni in Westron) or Common Speech ( Sôval Phârë , in Westron) into English. This device of rendering an imaginary language with a real one was carried further by rendering: Furthermore, to parallel

3915-593: The Rings by Old English because Tolkien chose to make the relationship between Rohirric and the Common Speech similar to that of Old English and Modern English . Tolkien stated in The Two Towers that the name Orthanc had "by design or chance" two meanings. In Sindarin it meant "Mount Fang", while in the language of Rohan he said it meant "Cunning Mind". The author Robert Foster notes that orþanc genuinely does mean "cunning" in Old English, so that

4002-715: The Rings ) was taken mainly from the Red Book of Westmarch , stating that this was begun as "Bilbo's private diary", continued by Frodo with an account of the War of the Ring, and extended by Sam. Near the end of the main text, Tolkien has Frodo give the Red Book to Sam. Flieger notes that, seeing it, Sam says "Why, you have nearly finished it, Mr. Frodo!", and describes Frodo's answer as "both definitive and revealing": " 'I have quite finished, Sam', said Frodo. 'The last pages are for you. ' " She comments that where Sam says "it", meaning

4089-570: The Semitic flavour that Tolkien intended for both Adûnaic and Khuzdul, which influenced it. Most information about Adûnaic grammar comes from an incomplete typescript Lowdham's Report on the Adûnaic Language , written by Tolkien to accompany The Notion Club Papers . The report discusses phonology and morphological processes in some detail, and starts to discuss nouns, but breaks off before saying much about verbs, other parts of speech or

4176-627: The War of the Ring. THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING (as seen by the Little People ; being the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire , supplemented by the accounts of their friends and the learning of the Wise.) Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo in Rivendell . Flieger writes that at the time of the release of

4263-649: The Westron or 'Common Speech' of the West-lands of Middle-earth in the Third Age. In the course of that age it had become the native language of nearly all the speaking-peoples (save the Elves) who dwelt within the bounds of the old kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor ... At the time of the War of the Ring at the end of the age these were still its bounds as a native tongue. (Appendix F) Rohirric is represented in The Lord of

4350-475: The appendix " The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen ". The tale describes how the hero Aragorn came to marry an immortal Elf-woman, Arwen . Tolkien stated that it was "really essential" to the work. Its frame story is that the tale was written by Faramir and Éowyn's grandson Barahir after Aragorn's death, and that an abbreviated version of the tale was included in a copy of the Thain's Book made by Findegil. This in turn

4437-669: The body of writing behind the posthumously-published The Silmarillion , has a frame story that evolved over Tolkien's long writing career. It centred on a character, Aelfwine the mariner , whose name, like those of several later reincarnations of the frame-characters, means "Elf-friend". He sails the seas and is shipwrecked on an island where the Elves narrate their tales to him. The legendarium contains two incomplete time-travel novels , The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers , which are framed by various "Elf-friend" characters who by dream or other means visit earlier ages, step by step all

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4524-523: The book's use of Modern English as representing Westron. Because of this, Tolkien did not need to work out the details of Westron grammar or vocabulary in any detail. He does give some examples of Westron words in Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings , where he summarizes Westron's origin and role as lingua franca in Middle-earth: The language represented in this history by English was

4611-480: The book, Frodo does not, leaving open whether he means the book or his life in Middle-earth as he has recorded in the book. She briefly considers what Sam might have been supposed to have added, if the suggestion is to be taken at all seriously. She points out that they could have been books 4 and 6 of The Lord of the Rings , where Frodo is never seen without Sam, but there are times when Sam is alert while Frodo

4698-558: The changing walls of faërie", where they hear and narrate legends including "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon"; Tolkien's Lost Tales II contains one of the legendarium's foundation-poems that similarly describes the "Wanderer" Earendel (forerunner of Tolkien's Eärendil ), who sails " West of the Moon, east of the Sun ". Tolkien's biographer John Garth , in the same volume, writes that in 1920, Tolkien revised his frame story so that

4785-404: The character who becomes Ælfwine the mariner is named Ottor Wǽfre (called Eriol by the Elves), and his tale serves as frame story for the tales of the Elves. He sets out from what is today Heligoland on a voyage with a small crew, but is the lone survivor after his ship crashes upon the rocks near an island. The island is inhabited by an old man who gives him directions to Eressëa. After he finds

4872-430: The early 2000s from among the 3000 pages of linguistic material held by the team of editors including Carl F. Hostetter , Tolkien's constructed languages have become much more accessible. David Salo 's 2007 A Gateway to Sindarin presents Sindarin's grammar concisely. Elizabeth Solopova 's 2009 Languages, Myth and History gives an overview of the linguistic traits of the various languages invented by Tolkien and

4959-610: The end of the given story it becomes clear that Alwin Lowdham himself is a reincarnation of sorts of Elendil . Tolkien selected the names of these characters (in both novels) to indicate their affinity: Alwin is another form of the Old English name "Aelfwine", meaning "Elf-friend", while the Quenya name Elendil can carry the same meaning. Anna Vaninskaya , in Blackwell's 2014 A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien , notes that Tolkien

5046-399: The events described in the book. Bilbo thinks of calling his work There and Back Again, A Hobbit's Holiday . Tolkien's full name for the novel is indeed The Hobbit or There and Back Again . In the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings , Bilbo's There and Back Again tale is said to be written in his red leather-bound diary . While living in Rivendell , Bilbo expands his memoirs into

5133-458: The family from around 1910, working on it up to his death in 1973. He constructed the grammar and vocabulary of at least fifteen languages and dialects in roughly three periods: Tolkien worked out much of the etymological background of his Elvish languages during the 1930s, resulting in The Etymologies . Tolkien based Quenya pronunciation more on Latin than on Finnish , though it has elements derived from both languages. Thus, Quenya lacks

5220-434: The fiction, the Black Speech was created by the Dark Lord Sauron to be the official language of all the lands and peoples under his control: it was thus both in reality and in the fiction a constructed language. The Orcs are said never to have accepted it willingly; the language mutated into many mutually unintelligible Orkish dialects, so that Orcs communicated with each other mainly in a debased Westron. Tolkien developed

5307-436: The first edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1954, Tolkien had not yet included that text in the Red Book; its prologue spoke of The Hobbit as containing "a selection from the Red Book of Westmarch ". Tolkien went on developing the frame story, and in the second edition he added a "Note on the Shire Records" to the prologue. It explains, in the voice of the fictional editor , that the "account" (the main text of The Lord of

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5394-486: The grammar as a whole. It appears that Tolkien abandoned work on the language after writing this portion of the Report, and never returned to it. Most Adûnaic nouns are triconsonantal, but there are a number of biconsonantal nouns as well. Nouns can be divided into three declensions, called Strong I, Strong II and Weak. The two strong declensions form their various cases by modifying the last vowel, similarly to English man/men . The weak declension forms its cases by appending

5481-721: The history of their creation. A few fanzines were dedicated to the subject, like Tyalië Tyelelliéva published by Lisa Star, and Quettar , the Bulletin of the Linguistic Fellowship of The Tolkien Society , published by Julian C. Bradfield. Tengwestië is an online publication of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship . Internet mailing lists and forums that have been dedicated to Tolkien's constructed languages include Tolklang, Elfling and Lambengolmor. Since 2005, there has been an International Conference on J.R.R. Tolkien's Invented Languages. Tolkien%27s frame stories J. R. R. Tolkien used frame stories throughout his Middle-earth writings, especially his legendarium , to make

5568-460: The island, the Elves host him in the Cottage of Lost Play and narrate their tales to him. He afterwards learns from them that the old man he met was actually " Ylmir ". He is taught most of the tales by the old Elf Rúmil, Eressëa's lore master. In these early versions, Tol Eressea is seen as the island of Britain. He earned the name Ælfwine from the Elves; his first wife, Cwén, was the mother of Hengest and Horsa ; his second wife, Naimi, bore him

5655-412: The king's thane, full of grand stories, mindful of songs, who remembered much, a great many of the old tales, found other words truly bound together; he began again to recite with skill the adventure of Beowulf, adeptly tell an apt tale, and weave his words. Peter Jackson chose to continue the use of the frame story of Bilbo's memoirs in his film adaptations. In his 2001 The Fellowship of

5742-402: The language serves his concept as the ancestor of a lingua franca for Middle-earth , Westron, a shared language for many different peoples . Tolkien devised Adûnaic (or Númenórean), the language spoken in Númenor , shortly after World War II, and thus at about the time he completed The Lord of the Rings , but before he wrote the linguistic background information of the Appendices. Adûnaic

5829-490: The language spoken in Númenor , shortly after World War II, and thus at about the time he completed The Lord of the Rings , but before he wrote the linguistic background of the Appendices. Adûnaic is intended as the language from which Westron (also called Adûni ) is derived. This added a depth of historical development to the Mannish languages. Adûnaic was intended to have a "faintly Semitic flavour". Its development began with The Notion Club Papers (written in 1945). It

5916-448: The main text to amplify its effect, making it more believable. Several of these contribute to his frame stories, which place him not as author but as the last of a line of philological editors of ancient documents originally written by characters such as the Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins . These paratexts thus support a found manuscript conceit, which in turn supports the frame story. The Tolkien scholar Giuseppe Pezzini writes that

6003-427: The many stories are framed by a tale that Scheherazade keeps the king from executing her by telling him a story every night, each time not completing the story by daybreak so that he spares her life for just one more day. In the last chapter of The Hobbit , Tolkien writes of the protagonist and titular character Bilbo Baggins returning from the journey to the Lonely Mountain and composing his memoirs, to record

6090-409: The mythology, the 1917 draft of The Book of Lost Tales , involving the character of Earendel in its first story, did not involve his invented languages. Tolkien was, rather, in Fimi's view, emphasizing that language and myth "began to flow together when I was an undergraduate [at Oxford, 1911–1915]" (as Tolkien wrote in 1954), and stayed that way for the rest of his life. In 1937, Tolkien wrote

6177-448: The noun they modify in case and number; in later Quenya, this agreement disappears. The basic word order is subject–verb–object . A Elbereth Gilthoniel silivren penna míriel o menel aglar elenath! Tolkien wrote that he gave Sindarin "a linguistic character very like (though not identical with) British-Welsh ... because it seems to fit the rather 'Celtic' type of legends and stories told of its speakers". Unlike Quenya, Sindarin

6264-479: The novels successively approach the ancient period of the downfall of Númenor . He began The Lost Road in 1937, writing four chapters before setting it aside. He returned to the theme with The Notion Club Papers , which he began and abandoned between 1944 and 1946. In its frame story, a Mr. Green finds documents in sacks of waste paper at Oxford in 2012. These documents, the Notion Club Papers of

6351-518: The people of Beowulf in the Germanic Heroic Age . In 1931, Tolkien gave a lecture about his passion for constructed languages, titled A Secret Vice . Here he contrasts his project of artistic languages constructed for aesthetic pleasure with the pragmatism of international auxiliary languages . The lecture also discusses Tolkien's views on phonaesthetics , citing Greek, Finnish , and Welsh as examples of "languages which have

6438-595: The poem sings of a poet singing about Beowulf. In her view, Sam's "put into words, you know" is a deliberate echo of Beowulf ' s "glorying in words".         ...     Hwīlum cyninges þegn, guma gilphlæden,     gidda gemyndig, se ðe ealfela     ealdgesegena worn gemunde     —word oþer fand soðe gebunden—     secg eft ongan sið Bēowulfes     snyttrum styrian, ond on sped wrecan     spel gerade, wordum wrixlan;     ...          At times

6525-601: The shortest one being called the Lammasathen . The main linguistic thesis in this text is that the languages of Middle-earth are all descended from the language of the Valar (the "gods"), Valarin , and divided into three branches: Internally, in the fiction, the Elvish language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language. Externally, in Tolkien's life, he constructed

6612-399: The story were already written". Flieger writes that this is "the most self-referential and post-modern moment in the entire book", since it constitutes the book itself looking both back at its own creation, and forward to the printed book that the reader is holding. She compares this with a passage that Tolkien certainly knew , lines 867–874 of Beowulf , where the scop who is reciting

6699-580: The text of the 1977 book The Silmarillion , as a presented collection, with a frame story that changed over the years, first with an Ælfwine-type character who translates the "Golden Book" of the sages Rumil or Pengoloð; later, having the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins collect the stories into the Red Book of Westmarch , translating mythological Elvish documents in Rivendell . In The Book of Lost Tales , begun early in Tolkien's writing career,

6786-646: The title, are the incomplete notes of meetings of the Notion Club; these meetings are said to have occurred in the 1980s. During these meetings, Alwin Arundel Lowdham discusses his lucid dreams about Númenor, a lost civilisation connected with Atlantis and with Tolkien's Middle-earth . Through these dreams, he "discovers" much about the Númenor story and the languages of Middle-earth (notably Quenya , Sindarin , and Adûnaic ). While not finished, at

6873-554: The way back to the ancient, Atlantis -like lost civilisation of Númenor . Tolkien was influenced by William Morris 's use of a frame story in his 1868–1870 epic poem The Earthly Paradise , in which mariners of Norway set sail for the mythical place, where they hear and narrate tales, one of them of a wanderer much like Eärendil . Tolkien was familiar, too, with the Celtic Imram sea-voyage legends such as those of St Brendan , who returned to tell many stories, and published

6960-538: The word a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lindor-burúme , meaning hill . He described it as a "probably very inaccurate" sampling of the language. Tolkien devised little of the Black Speech beyond the Rhyme of the Rings . He intentionally made it sound harsh but with a proper grammar. He stated that it was an agglutinative language ; it has been likened to the extinct Hurrian language of northern Mesopotamia . In

7047-436: The works resemble a genuine mythology written and edited by many hands over a long period of time. He described in detail how his fictional characters wrote their books and transmitted them to others, and showed how later in-universe editors annotated the material. The frame story for both Tolkien's novels published in his lifetime, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , is that the eponymous Hobbit Bilbo Baggins wrote

7134-439: Was An Introduction to Elvish (1978) edited by Jim Allan (published by Bran's Head Books). It is composed of articles written before the publication of The Silmarillion . Ruth Noel wrote a book on Middle-earth's languages in 1980. With the publication of much linguistic material during the 1990s, especially in the History of Middle-earth series, and the Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon material published during

7221-454: Was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens. Tolkien's glossopoeia has two temporal dimensions: the internal (fictional) timeline of events in Middle-earth described in The Silmarillion and other writings, and the external timeline of Tolkien's own life during which he often revised and refined his languages and their fictional history. Tolkien scholars have published a substantial volume of Tolkien's linguistic material in

7308-536: Was annotated, corrected, and extended in Minas Tirith . The narrative voice and the story's point of view are examined by the scholar Christine Barkley, who considers the main part of the tale to have been narrated by Aragorn. Tolkien included a mass of paratexts – prefaces, notes, and appendices of all kinds – in The Lord of the Rings , and some in The Hobbit . The Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft comments that these "resonat[e]" or "collaborat[e]" with

7395-424: Was at the core of the development of Tolkien's legendarium . Tolkien wrote in one of his letters: what I think is a primary 'fact' about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. ... It is not a 'hobby', in the sense of something quite different from one's work, taken up as a relief-outlet. The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide

7482-480: Was directly influenced by William Morris . She suggests that the legendarium's frame story, starting from the travels of Ælfwine the mariner, was modelled on Morris's 1868–1870 epic poem The Earthly Paradise , whose frame story is that "mariners of Norway, having ... heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it". She notes that Morris's "wanderers" reach "A nameless city in a distant sea / White as

7569-403: Was of the opinion that the invention of an artistic language in order to be convincing and pleasing must include not only the language's historical development , but also the history of its speakers, and especially the mythology associated with both the language and the speakers. It was this idea that an "Elvish language" must be associated with a complex history and mythology of the Elves that

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