Tolkien's Languages
Constructed Languages
Course 1 · Chapter 6 · Tolkien's Languages
Chapter 5 described languages built for a story that already existed. J. R. R. Tolkien worked the other way round. He was a professional philologist, a scholar of old languages, and he invented languages for pleasure from his youth. The stories of Middle-earth grew out of that work, to give the languages a world to live in. This chapter looks at the two best-known results, Quenya and Sindarin, at where their sounds came from, and at the most unusual part of the project: a language with an invented history.
A Language Inventor First
Tolkien began making languages as a young man, in the 1910s, long before The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. He later described the invention of languages as the foundation of his work, and the stories as something made to provide a world for the languages, rather than the other way round. (This is a view he expressed in his own letters; the exact wording is worth reading in a collection of them.) That makes him a different kind of designer from the screen designers of Chapter 5: the motive is the one called art and play in Chapter 1, and the audience was at first himself.
Two Elvish Languages
The two languages students meet first are Quenya and Sindarin. Tolkien deliberately gave each a different feel by building it on different real-language models:
| Quenya | Sindarin | |
|---|---|---|
| Role in the story | An old, formal "high" language of the Elves; used for lore, poems and names | The everyday language of the Elves of the stories' main lands |
| Main inspiration | Finnish for its sound and noun cases, with Latin as the base and some influence from Greek (Tolkien's own description) | Welsh |
| Sound and feel | Open, flowing, vowel-rich | More consonant clusters, mutations of initial sounds (as in Welsh) |
| Example phrase | Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo "A star shines on the hour of our meeting" | Mae govannen "well met" |
Neither language is a complete modern language: Tolkien wrote vocabulary, grammar notes and poems, but he never produced a finished, fixed system, and he revised the languages repeatedly. Students of them have to work from his published notes, which is why the study is a branch of scholarship in its own right.
A Language With a Family Tree
The truly unusual feature of Tolkien's work is that the languages are related within the story. They are not two unrelated codes: Tolkien imagined a common ancestor, and then derived both Quenya and Sindarin from it by an invented history of sound change, the way real languages like French, Spanish and Italian came from Latin. Different sound changes in different places explain why related words in the two languages look different but still resemble each other.
The method is easy to see with a toy example (invented for this chapter; it is not Tolkien's actual history):
A learner of the two daughters sees a pattern (one keeps final vowels, the other drops them) and can predict a word in one from a word in the other. That predictability is what gives Tolkien's languages their real-language feel, and it is why a later chapter on language change (Chapter 11) calls him a model for how to give a conlang depth. Chapter 8 returns to the sound systems that make the style possible.
Scripts and a World to Hold Them
Tolkien also made writing systems. In the stories the Elvish script Tengwar was invented by the Elf Fëanor, and an older angular alphabet, the Cirth, is used for inscriptions. Both are designed as scripts with systematic shapes: related sounds have related letter forms, which is a feature of real alphabets that conlang designers often borrow. The world around the languages (peoples, histories, geography) gave each language speakers, sayings and songs, and gave the language its reason to exist.
| Feature | Screen conlangs (Chapter 5) | Tolkien's languages |
|---|---|---|
| Which came first | The story and its brief | The languages |
| Audience at first | A film crew, actors, viewers | The designer himself |
| Completeness | Enough for the script, then grown by fans | Never finished; revised throughout his life |
| History inside the story | Limited | A family tree with sound changes and ancestors |
- "Tolkien made languages to decorate his novels." By his own account it was closer to the reverse.
- "You can hold a conversation in Quenya or Sindarin." Only in a limited way: the corpus is incomplete and some forms are guesses by later scholars and fans.
- "They are the same language with different words." No: they have different sounds, grammar and sources of inspiration.
Hands-On Exercises
Use the toy sound rules from this chapter. Starting from the ancestor words mina, paka and lala, write what each becomes in daughter 1 (final vowels kept) and in daughter 2 (final vowels lost; k becomes g between vowels). Then say which rule explains why paka becomes pag in daughter 2.
📄 View solutionFill a table comparing Quenya and Sindarin on four rows: role in the story, real-language inspiration, example phrase and feel. Then answer in one sentence: why would a designer give two languages in the same world different models?
📄 View solutionTolkien said the languages came first and the stories grew to hold them. Write a short plan for a language-first project: the language idea (one sentence), the people who speak it, and one story event your language would explain or require.
📄 View solutionChapter 6 Quick Reference
- Tolkien: a philologist who made languages from the 1910s; the stories grew to give them a world
- Quenya: formal "high" Elvish; Latin base with Finnish and Greek influence
- Sindarin: everyday Elvish; inspired by Welsh
- Both come from an invented common ancestor by invented sound changes
- Scripts: Tengwar (flowing) and Cirth (angular)
- The languages were never finished; studying them means working from his notes
- Examples: Mae govannen (Sindarin, "well met"); Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo (Quenya)