Czytaj książkę: «A Secret Vice»

INTRODUCTION
Myth-making and Language Invention

J.R.R. Tolkien spent a large portion of his life creating an extended and complex mythology set in a fully fledged secondary world. Many readers know this world and its legends primarily through The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–5), although Tolkien composed these works by drawing upon a vast backdrop of mythic narratives developed during a span of more than thirty years. An equally significant part of his life was devoted to the creation, development and refining of a series of invented languages, some fully formed, some partially sketched out, and others only mentioned. Many of these languages would become inextricably intertwined with his invented secondary world and its attendant races, cultures and mythology. From his earliest contribution to the code-like Nevbosh in 1907, to the last philologically focused work he wrote in 1972 on the name of the Elf Glorfindel shortly before his death, Tolkien never stopped working on the development of what he would characterize as his ‘nexus of languages’ (Letters, p. 143). That Tolkien saw language invention and myth-making as coeval and co-dependent creative acts is evident from several of his letters. For example, he stated that The Lord of the Rings was ‘fundamentally linguistic in inspiration’ and, for him at least, ‘largely an essay in “linguistic” aesthetic’ (Letters, pp. 219–20, emphasis in the original). Moreover, he wrote to his son, Christopher, that The Lord of the Rings was an attempt to ‘create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real’ (ibid., p. 264). Finally, in a draft of a letter from 1967, Tolkien summed up his language invention:

It must be emphasized that this process of invention was/is a private enterprise undertaken to give pleasure to myself by giving expression to my personal linguistic ‘aesthetic’ or taste and its fluctuations. (ibid., p. 380)

Tolkien’s linguistic invention was, therefore, a fundamental part of his artistic output, to the extent that later on in life he attributed the existence of his mythology to the desire to give his languages a ‘home’ and peoples to speak them (ibid., pp. 219, 264–5, 375). As other of Tolkien’s writings reveal, what is closer to the truth is that myth-making and linguistic invention began as separate strands of artistic expression in Tolkien’s youth, but very soon became indissolubly bound to, and inextricably dependent on, each other (see Letters, pp. 144, 345).

In the 1930s, Tolkien composed two essays in which he explored these two key elements of his sub-creative methodology: myth-making and language invention. In 1931, Tolkien delivered a paper for the Johnson Society, Pembroke College, Oxford, entitled ‘A Secret Vice’. He unveiled for the first time to a listening public the art which he had both himself encountered, and been involved with, since his earliest childhood: ‘the construction of imaginary languages in full or outline for amusement’ (see p. 11). He also proposed that: ‘the making of language and mythology are related functions’, in fact ‘coeval and congenital’ (see p. 24). Later that same decade, in March 1939, Tolkien was invited to present the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of Saint Andrews, and delivered a paper titled ‘On Fairy-stories’, in which – as Anderson and Flieger point out – ‘he declared his particular concept of what fantasy is and how it ought to work’ (TOFS, p. 9). Tolkien’s drafts for this lecture reiterate the centrality of myth and language in his legendarium: ‘Mythology is language and language is mythology. The mind, and the tongue, and the tale are coeval’ (ibid., p. 181).

This interdependence of invented languages and mythological narrative permeates the entire legendarium Tolkien would work on for over sixty years. The History of Middle-earth series (1983–96) has afforded readers unprecedented access to Tolkien’s creative process, from the first versions of the legendarium and related languages in the 1910s and 1920s, to his latest writings of the 1960s and 1970s, which include complex considerations of the interconnection of language and myth such as the masterful ‘The Shibboleth of Fëanor’ (Peoples, pp. 331–66). In addition, specialist publications such as Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar have made available Tolkien’s linguistic documents that were beyond the scope of The History of Middle-earth series (see also ‘Coda’). These linguistic works often reveal glimpses of stories that were never developed in full, thus once again confirming the ‘coeval and congenital’ nature of language and myth in Tolkien’s legendarium.

‘A Secret Vice’ is a defining, and rare, exploration by Tolkien of his own practice of language invention, the personal aesthetic it reflected, and its relation to his mythology, which had been evolving for over fifteen years by that time. The text of the lecture itself, and the attendant drafts and notes that this volume brings to light, focuses on some of the key elements that Tolkien thought were crucial in language invention.

Theorizing Language Invention

‘A Secret Vice’ opens with a preamble, a number of false starts or preludes, before Tolkien comes to his main topic. He begins with mention of a recent Esperanto Congress in Oxford (1930) and offers some evaluative comments on Esperanto as an International Auxiliary Language (IAL). Tolkien recalls a time during World War I while ensconced in a tent, overhearing a ‘little man’ who was composing a language sotto voce, ‘in secret’; but that man, Tolkien explains, remained unforthcoming about his task. Tolkien then references a ‘nursery’ language, Animalic (made up from names of animals, birds and fish), that he learnt as a child. He notes that in contrast to Esperanto, which was constructed as a utilitarian means of international communication, both of the other two examples cited associate language invention with pleasure. Following this somewhat prolonged introduction, Tolkien comes to his topic proper, hailing it a ‘New Game’ or ‘New Art’: ‘the construction of imaginary languages in full or outline for amusement’ (see p. 11).

Tolkien continues his lecture focusing on autobiographical examples, reflecting on his own progression from helping create crude childhood languages to the invention of more sophisticated and developed ones. He mentions Nevbosh (the ‘New Nonsense’), a language that he co-invented with his cousin, Marjorie Incledon, and which was influenced by English, French and Latin. Nevbosh moved away from the simple substitution of Animalic by phonetically distorting words from learnt languages, but it remained ostensibly a code and fairly transparent for speakers of its source languages. But there were exceptions: Tolkien offers the example of a word that was chosen not based on an English, French or Latin prototype, but because its sound seemed to ‘fit’ its meaning. This element, coupled with the fact that Nevbosh was shared by only two speakers and was not dominated by the need for communication, makes this childhood language an important step towards the imaginary languages of the older Tolkien.

The next example Tolkien mentions in this largely reflective essay is his first ever private language, created for his personal amusement only and not belonging to a community of speakers: Naffarin. In this language he was free to express his own taste for sounds and structure and chose Latin and Spanish as inspiration. Tolkien points out that the ‘refinement of the word-form’ (see p. 17) made this language a superior specimen compared to Nevbosh and he also talks about the gradual development of a personal ‘style’ and ‘mannerisms’ in language invention.

From Naffarin onwards Tolkien claims to have aspired to the highest standard of language creation: he attempted to fulfil the ‘instinct for “linguistic invention” – the fitting of notion to oral symbol, and pleasure in contemplating the new relation established’ (see pp. 15–16). At this point in his talk, Tolkien moves away from a reflective-autobiographical style and proceeds to theorize and evaluate the most important elements of his language invention:

a) the creation of word-forms that sound aesthetically pleasing;

b) a sense of ‘fitness’ between symbol (the word-form and its sound) and sense (its meaning);

c) the construction of an elaborate and ingenious grammar; and

d) the composition of a fictional historical background for an invented language, including a sense of its (hypothetical) change in time.

Alongside the detailed exploration of each of these elements, Tolkien includes comments on sound symbolism and whether there is such a thing as a personal ‘taste’ for language sounds; as well as on the interconnectedness of language and mythology. He also offers four poems as samples of those of his invented languages that he considers to have reached a worthy level of refinement and to express his personal ‘linguistic aesthetic’. Although he does not name them, Tolkien here gives three poems in Qenya, an earlier version of Quenya, and one in Noldorin, which was later reconceived as Sindarin.

Tolkien closes his talk with some thoughts on the merits of writing poetry in an invented language as an abstraction of the pleasures of poetic composition, and a comparison of this practice with the pleasure of reading poetry in an ancient language. Tolkien concludes by contemplating the power of language to send the imagination leaping.

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:

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).

‘A Secret Vice’ and its Immediate Context

‘A Secret Vice’ was first published by Christopher Tolkien in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (Monsters, pp. 198–223), alongside six other essays by his father. Christopher notes that the paper:

exists in a single manuscript without date or indication of the occasion of its delivery; but … the Esperanto Congress in Oxford^fn2, referred to at the beginning of the essay as having taken place ‘a year or more ago’, was held in July 1930. Thus the date can be fixed as 1931. (Monsters, p. 3)

The ‘Secret Vice’ papers include other indications of an early 1930s date. For example, in the same folder there is a standard printed postcard from the Curators of the Examination Schools at Oxford, relating to the use of lecture rooms and dated Saturday 7th June (MS Tolkien 24, folio 53v), which indicates that the year is 1930 (Trinity Term). Also included is a list of marks for students at the University of Reading (MS Tolkien 24, folio 47r), some of whom graduated in 1932 and 1933 (University of Reading, 1973; Tolkien served as an external examiner for the University of Reading). A more secure terminus a quo can be found in the ‘Essay on Phonetic Symbolism’, in which Tolkien mentions Sir Richard Paget and his work on sound symbolism (see pp. 68, 83). Tolkien can only be referring to one of two of Paget’s books that explore this subject, and both were published in 1930: Human Speech: Some Observations, Experiments, and Conclusions as to the Nature, Origin, Purpose and Possible Improvement of Human Speech; or Babel, or The Past, Present, and Future of Human Speech.

Further research at a number of Oxford University archives has disclosed that Tolkien indeed delivered ‘A Secret Vice’ in 1931, as Christopher Tolkien had hypothesized. The minutes of the Johnson Society at Pembroke College reveal that Tolkien read ‘A Secret Vice’ to the Society on 29th November 1931, at 9pm. The Society was founded in 1871 in memory of Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), author and lexicographer. Although originally a literary society, by the early twentieth century it had become ‘practically the J.C.R.^fn3 meeting for an (alleged) literary purpose’ (Pembroke College Archives Catalogue). Indeed, the contemporary records (1927 and 1932) of the Johnson Society at the time Tolkien delivered ‘A Secret Vice’ show that topics were wide and varied, including early modern literature, as well as contemporary British, European and American writers.

Tolkien’s association with the Johnson Society goes beyond the delivery of ‘A Secret Vice’. Tolkien became a Fellow of Pembroke College as part of his role as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, to which he was appointed in 1925. The Society attempted on more than one occasion to invite Tolkien as a guest to one of their formal dinners in the late 1920s. In the minutes for 19 June 1927, it is recorded that Messrs R.G. Collingwood and John Masefield were unable to attend the Society dinner, and therefore ‘it was decided that the following two gentlemen be invited, Messrs. Ralph Straus and J.R. Tolkien [sic]’ (Johnson Society Minute Book, PMB/R/6/1/6 1927–9). In the event, neither attended the Dinner, which was held on 23 June. The following year, the minutes of 13 May 1928 show that both R.G. Collingwood and Tolkien were suggested as guests for the dinner of 20 June, but ‘the society voted in favour of Mr. Collingwood’ (Collingwood by that time had given two papers to the society on Jane Austen, both of which were greeted with enthusiastic reports in the minutes). However, Collingwood was unable to attend and Tolkien was duly invited instead. According to the minutes: ‘the society listened to various speeches, which, with the exception of that of Professor Tolkien, were remarkable for their singular lack of wit. Professor Tolkien then entertained the society with a series of amusing stories’ (Johnson Society Minute Book, PMB/R/6/1/6 1927–9).

The minutes for the meeting of 29th November 1931 record that:

In Public Business Professor Tolkien read one of the most ingenious papers that the Society has ever heard. The “Secret Vice”, which gave the paper its title, turned out to be the study & invention of obscure living languages, or codes. After a peculiar conversational opening, in which he touched on such elementary new languages as those produced by adaptation of already-existing languages, – he cited an example one in which the names of animals were used to denote certain words or phrases, & a whole new language built up on this principle, – Professor Tolkien went on to discuss those languages which were composed of words entirely their own, whether derived phonetically, or from some other (probably dead) language. The most interesting example of the phonetic type of language is that spoken in the island of Fonway, which apparently has no connection whatever with any other known language, nor is it spoken or understood elsewhere than in this one small island. Professor Tolkien finally regaled the Society with works of his own, written in an original phonetic language. He had, he said, on one occasion been surprised & rather dismayed to overhear two navvies conversing in a language which till then he had believed understood only by himself, its originator. The works which he now read, however, he believed to be entirely his own & to be unknown to anyone else.

After a discussion started by the President, in which the conversation drifted down such byways of language study as are formed by the eccentricities of James Joyce & Gertrude Stein, the meeting was declared informal, but continued until after midnight.

(Johnson Society Minute Book, PMB/R/6/1/7 1929–37)

Remarkably, the minutes record the name of only one invented language, but not one associated with Tolkien’s legendarium, and which was also omitted from the first publication of ‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. What is also intriguing is that the discussion that followed Tolkien’s paper made mention of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, both of whom are referenced in Tolkien’s accompanying notes (see pp. 91, 100).

In his edition of ‘A Secret Vice’ Christopher Tolkien speculates on a possible second delivery of this paper:

The manuscript was later hurriedly revised here and there, apparently for a second delivery of the paper long after – the words ‘more than 20 years’ were changed to ‘almost 40 years’. (Monsters, p. 3)

The manuscript does indeed contain a number of emendations, but many of them seem to be contemporary with the first delivery (see pp. 43, 44, 45). There are however three pieces of internal evidence that point to a possible second delivery, approximately 15–20 years from the first one: in addition to the emendation mentioned by Christopher Tolkien in the quotation above, Tolkien changed the words ‘this society’ to ‘this or any other society of philologists’ and the words ‘for a literary society’ to ‘for a learned society’ (see pp. 11, 12). Bearing in mind that the Johnson Society was – at least nominally – a literary society, it is possible that ‘A Secret Vice’ was delivered again to a Society with a philological agenda, c.1945–50. The date is intriguing, as during 1945–6 Tolkien was in the process of composing The Notion Club Papers (Sauron Defeated, pp. 145–327), a novel that was left unfinished, but which explores fascinating ideas on language and myth (see Fimi 2008, pp. 82–3). This novel also introduced a new invented language, Adûnaic. However, we have not been able to locate any concrete evidence for a second delivery of the paper. It may be that Tolkien prepared it – or began preparing it – but this second delivery did not happen. If it did occur, it may be that a record exists which will be located in the future. However, it is worth noting that Tolkien became relatively well-known after the publication of The Hobbit. It would, therefore, be curious that a second delivery has not been recorded in any of the Oxford periodicals.

The Tolkien who first delivered ‘A Secret Vice’ on 29 November 1931 was a man actively engaged in social, academic and creative interests, all of which very much informed each other. In terms of his academic career, Tolkien had been Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College for a little over five years. During this time, he had a full schedule of teaching, tutorials, attending faculty meetings, supervising students’ theses, and, to make some additional money, external examining. Since arriving from Leeds, he had been developing a growing body of his own academic work and research. While at the University of Leeds, Tolkien had co-edited a new edition of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight with his colleague E.V. Gordon (1925). Between 1924 and 1927 Tolkien had been a regular reviewer of philological books and publications (‘Philology: General Works’) in The Year’s Work in English Studies. In 1925, he published several articles in The Review of English Studies, including ‘Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography’ and ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’, both of which explored various philological cruxes of Old and Middle English. For example, in ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’ Tolkien argued that a specific early English word ‘eaueres’ is not, in fact, a survival of the Old-English word ‘eofor’ (boar) but a word that had developed in early Middle English, ‘aver’, which can be translated as ‘“property, estate” but also “a cart-horse”’ (Solopova 2014, p. 232). Also in 1925, Tolkien contributed a translation to Rhys Robert’s article ‘Gerald of Wales and the Survival of Welsh’ in which he offered a reconstructed version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s prophecy on the survival of the Welsh language using a late twelfth-century version of South Midlands English (see Anderson 2005, pp. 230–4). In 1928, Tolkien published a six-page ‘Foreword’ to Walter Edward Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, a dialect that preserved evidence of influence from the Norse invasions in the eighth and ninth centuries on English word-forms (see Croft 2007, pp. 184–8). In 1929, Tolkien published his landmark analysis, ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association. In this highly detailed article, he demonstrated that two groups of disparate devotional works from the West Midlands of the twelfth century shared close similarities in phonology, grammar and spelling. Tolkien coined the term ‘AB language’ (bringing together labels used to designate the two groups of manuscripts) to suggest that, when taken together, these documents reflected the preservation of a local English scribal tradition, descended from late literary Old English, and which still persisted in the late twelfth century (see ESMEA and AW). On 16 May 1931, Tolkien delivered a paper to the Philological Society in Oxford on Chaucer’s use of Northern dialects in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ of The Canterbury Tales. Tolkien described Chaucer’s representation of Northern English dialect in the speech of the scheming clerks of ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ as Chaucer’s ‘linguistic joke’ (Reeve’s Tale, p. 2). A characteristic that much of the above academic work shares is a focus on the uses and intricacies of language. In all his academic exploration, Tolkien employed the philological or comparative method to uncover, reconstruct and fill in the gaps in the meanings of lost words, names and their attendant stories.

Another aspect of academic endeavour with which Tolkien was actively engaged at this time was his work to reform the Oxford English School syllabus, in particular the reunification of the teaching of philology (‘lang’) with literature (‘lit’). In his application for the position of Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Tolkien wrote that one of his aims would be ‘to advance … the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary studies, which can never be enemies except by misunderstanding or without loss to both’ (Letters, p. 13), and when he took the Chair at Pembroke he duly sought to achieve his aim. In an essay published in The Oxford Magazine for 29 May 1930, Tolkien called for a reform of the syllabus that would put a stop to the artificial separation of the study of language from literature and called for the study of philology which combined both areas and which ‘is essential to the critical apparatus of student and scholar’ (Oxford Magazine, p. 778). Shortly thereafter, in 1931, Tolkien’s reformed syllabus was accepted and would remain in place for many years. His commitment to the harmonious co-existence of ‘lit’ and ‘lang’ evokes his dictum about the ‘coeval and congenital’ nature of mythology and language in his creative writing.

J.R.R. Tolkien had, by this time, found a great friend and ally in his pursuit of syllabus reform, in the Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis. Tolkien first met Lewis at an English Faculty meeting at Merton College on 11 May 1926. Lewis would record his first impressions of Tolkien in his diary: ‘a smooth, pale, fluent little chap … No harm in him: only needs a smack or so’ (cited in Biography, p. 143). Initially, Lewis, being in the ‘literature’ camp, was not a great supporter of Tolkien’s proposed ‘lit and ‘lang’ reforms. However, by 1927, Tolkien had got Lewis involved in his newly formed informal club to read Old Norse sagas in the original, ‘The Coalbiters’ (from the Old Norse kolbítar, meaning those who stay so close to the fire in the winter that they virtually bite the coal), and they became great friends and supporters of each other’s academic and, to greater and lesser extents, creative work. Lewis would also introduce Tolkien to his colleague Owen Barfield (1898–1997), whose theories on the original unity of language and myth, expressed in such works as his Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928), would be a considerable influence on Tolkien’s thoughts about language (see below, pp. lvii–lix). In the early 1930s Lewis, Barfield and Tolkien would be joined by other colleagues to form a new informal literary club, the Inklings, which has been celebrated as one of the most important literary groups of the twentieth century (see Carpenter 1978; Glyer 2007).

Although Tolkien had a busy academic schedule this did not preclude him from progressing creatively. In addition to exploring projects in both prose and poetry, he was developing new versions of his expanding mythology that intertwined neatly with his language invention. From the summer of 1925 to c.1931 Tolkien revisited his earliest version of the tale of Beren and Lúthien (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ in The Book of Lost Tales) and turned it into a long poem in octosyllabic couplets: ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’ or ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (Lays, pp. 150–329). Before the end of 1929, Tolkien gave Lewis ‘The Lay of Leithian’ to read. In a letter to Tolkien, Lewis wrote that he stayed up all night reading it and praised the work for its reality and mythical value (Lays, p. 151). Lewis also provided Tolkien with a list of suggested changes, somewhat parodying academic commentary on real medieval manuscripts (see Lays, pp. 315–29).

As for the rest of Tolkien’s mythology, it was expanding from a ‘Sketch of the mythology’ in 1926 (which itself was a re-conceived version of the earlier ‘Book of Lost Tales’) to the ‘Quenta Noldorinwa’ (Shaping, pp. 76–218), which would establish the main narrative of the mythology before he started work on The Lord of the Rings. Associated with the ‘Quenta’ is Tolkien’s first ‘Silmarillion’ map, which geographically represented the secondary world Tolkien had created by this time and included place-names in Qenya and Noldorin (Shaping, pp. 219–34). In the early 1930s Tolkien also started to express his mythology using a historical-chronicle form, similar to works such as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Tolkien worked on ‘The Earliest Annals of Valinor’ and ‘The Earliest Annals of Beleriand’, partially translating both from English into Anglo-Saxon (Shaping, pp. 262–341).

In addition to the emerging ‘Silmarillion’ mythology, Tolkien also worked on several other creative projects in prose and poetry. In 1927, he published two poems under the general title: ‘Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, being The Freaks of Fisiologus’ in The Stapeldon Magazine, a publication of Exeter College, which Tolkien attended as an undergraduate. In these poems, Tolkien parodies the medieval bestiary by juxtaposing different semi-mythical creatures in playful verse. In 1930, Tolkien also completed work on his Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, a poem modelled on a medieval Breton lay.

In the early 1930s, both just before and very soon after the delivery of ‘A Secret Vice’, Tolkien was also occupied by two other key literary compositions. First, drawing on his own lectures on the Old Norse Eddas and Sagas^fn4, Tolkien composed two original poems: ‘Völsungakviða en nýja’ (The New Lay of the Völsungs) and ‘Guðrúnarkviða en nýja’ (The New Lay of Gudrún)^fn5. His aim was to attempt a reconstruction of the story of the Volsungs, to include new material covering that which was missing in the Norse Sagas (see Sigurd, pp. 5–12). Second, Tolkien composed an alliterative Arthurian poem. As Christopher Tolkien’s 2013 edition of The Fall of Arthur illustrates, Tolkien attempted to link the departure of Arthur and Lancelot to the West with his own ‘Silmarillion’ mythology (see Fall of Arthur, pp. 123–68).

Tolkien also wrote poems for his children during that period. By 1931, a doll owned by his children had inspired him to start writing poems and, interestingly, construct a small piece of prose, about the whimsical character Tom Bombadil (see Bombadil). Another of his children’s toys inspired Roverandom, a tale he eventually wrote down in 1927. It was also during this period that Tolkien also started sending his children letters from ‘Father Christmas’ each December. In 1928, Tolkien composed a cycle of poems incorporating fantasy and satire called the ‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’ (see Anderson 2003, pp. 309–11). During this period, Tolkien also wrote Farmer Giles of Ham, a comic tale about a dragon and his bumbling adversary set in the medieval villages around Oxford. Yet another dragon tale emerges sometime around, or shortly after, the summer of 1930 (see Rateliff 2007, p. xiii); a tale that Tolkien told his children, and with which they were so enraptured, that in the early 1930s he was compelled to put on to paper. The Hobbit was published in 1937. It gave the reading public the smallest glimpse of the, by now quite vast, mythology that Tolkien had been developing up to this time.

‘A Secret Vice’ is, therefore, a key text, from a key period, that not only brings together Tolkien’s academic and creative work on language, but is probably the first occasion at which Tolkien spoke publicly, if a little cryptically, about his entirely private mythology and secondary world. It could be argued that at 9 pm on 29 November 1931, Tolkien revealed to the world the ‘coeval and congenital’ arts of world-building and language invention – the crux of his creative endeavours and literary success.