The Tolkienæum (Τόλκιναῖον) continues a discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium that now spans five volumes. The topics in this volume range from Tolkien’s probable literary sources, to his historical allusions; from his philological jests, to his serious linguistics. The essays take a linguistic perspective that begins with a name or a word, and looks for its story in the real world with which Tolkien was familiar. That is the essence of Tolkiennymy.
The opening essay explores the similarities between the plot elements in Jules Verne’s classic A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) and those in The Hobbit (1937). Taken individually, the parallels might be attributed to coincidence, but considered as a whole, there are so many of them that they could hardly have arisen by chance.
The Battle of Agincourt (1415) and the role that archers played in it are a part of the English mental legacy. An echo of Agincourt is hidden in a brief instant of Hobbit history that at first appears to be merely a throwaway detail in Tolkien’s fictional world, but which, when considered in the context of real-world history, comes into focus as an echo of first-world events.
The cultural significance of a pocket-handkerchief in nineteenth-century England comes to the fore in one essay, while the natural history of the thrush is considered in another. The legal import of the period of a year and a day is discussed in a third. The puns in the names Smallburrow and Tuckborough are considered in yet two others.
In the run-up to the release of The Hobbit movie (2012), it was very popular to look for a source for the word Hobbit. At the invitation of Beyond Bree I wrote a number of essays that were serialized there. The results were essentially a case of ‘the absence of information is information.’ Despite my best efforts to prove otherwise, I take Tolkien at his word that he imagined Hobbits into being from “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” (L.215) There is nothing I can find that has enough points of tangency to triangulate a source for Hobbit in something Tolkien read or heard.
The linguistic essays in this volume apply an etymological analysis to Tolkien’s invented nomenclature, comparing it with the Classic languages (Latin and Greek), the Germanic languages, the Celtic languages, Finnish, and the Slavic languages, as well as Proto-Indo-European roots to determine the likely first-world history and context of the forms that Tolkien used to create his own languages. The focus is on sources that were current at the time in which Tolkien lived and wrote. Modern theories may have supplanted the theories of Tolkien’s time, but that is irrelevant. This volume explores the question of what Tolkien thought, not what we think we know now.
In a letter, Tolkien commented that his Legendarium was “fundamentally linguistic in inspiration.” In Tolkien’s creative process, a name came first and the story of the name followed. His literary world was created to provide a place where his names could be at home. (L.219) Tolkien also noted that he liked history and was moved by it, especially such history as “throws light on words and names.” (L.264) The linguistic essays, therefore, look for the stories behind the names as well as for the semantics, and morphology. Tolkien would certainly have wanted the story to be told in addition to the gloss.
Tolkien further explained that the process behind the creation of Middle-earth was an idiosyncratic enterprise undertaken to satisfy his own private linguistic taste. He was, therefore, not surprised that most analyses of his work went awry because “linguistic invention” is a “comparatively rare” art form, and most analysts have little understanding “of how a philologist would go about it.” Their analyses “appear to be unauthentic embroideries on my work,” said Tolkien, “throwing light only on the state of mind of [their] contrivers, not on me or on my actual intention and procedure.” (L.380)
Reader are asked to bear in mind that Tolkien is the man who ‘rediscovered’ the etymology for the game of golf, ‘a game invented by the Hobbits.’ It was created when Bandobras Took knocked Golfimbul’s head off with a wooden club at the Battle of Greenfields, and sent it flying a hundred yards through the air into a rabbit hole. (H.30) The man who could do that is not playing by the Marquess of Queensberry rules for linguistics. Any consideration of Tolkien’s creative linguistic process needs to include room for the element of fun. The joke below, for example, stretches the rules of linguistics out of shape, but that is what makes it funny.
Question: When is a door not a door?
Answer: When it’s ajar. J
Tolkien knew the rules well enough that he knew when and how to bend them as well.
What makes this series of books different from others about Tolkien is that its author is a linguist who shares Tolkien’s appreciation of the histories of words and names, and who plays at the same kind of linguistic invention himself. When, for example, I was learning Polish, I began to gleefully read the “Walk | Don’t Walk” pedestrian crossing signals as if they were Polish, which made them mean “Fight | Don’t Fight” in my imagination, despite the fact that the English and the Polish forms are not identical. It helped me remember the meaning of the Polish walka (fight), walczyć (to fight), and walcz (imperative) with a smile.
Though the essays about Tolkien’s linguistic creations in The Tolkienæum are by a linguist, they were written with the non-linguist in mind in an effort to make the topic accessible to a larger audience. The unavoidable jargon of the field is explained in a glossary, and the narrative constructs a methodical and transparent overview of how Tolkien’s synthetic languages fit into the big picture of linguistics.
A special feature of the second half of this volume is Tolkien’s understanding and use of Proto-Indo-European asterisk forms. The essay on the Tolkiennym for wolf, for example, reveals a PIE root that has lurked unrecognized in The Etymologies. Highlighting it, and explaining its meaning make it possible to comprehend not only the trick that Tolkien is playing, but also the linguistic skill required to do it.
Sir John Rhys— the Professor of Celtic Languages at Oxford when Tolkien was a student there—observes that based on the examples of the language spoken by the Fairies of Dyved provided by a man who “spent a portion of his youth underground among” them, the language of the Fairies resembled “Welsh with a touch of Irish and Greek.”[1] Tolkien’s Elvish languages match the description well enough. Welsh with a touch of Irish is more than evident. Greek—and Latin, too—are well represented in Tolkien’s nomenclature, by such words as Astron, the Hobbitish name for April; and peleg, the Tolkiennym for axe. Latin is represented by such Tolkiennyms as the Quenya pilin (arrow), and the Quenya cassa (helmet).
Tolkien’s extensive knowledge of mytho-linguistic issues is explored in an essay that compares Tolkien’s linguistic creations with the concept of animate-inanimate doublets developed by the prominent French linguist Antoine Meillet (1866-1936), who observed that the earlier forms of the Indo-European languages had doublet, animate-inanimate names for things like fire and water.[2] Though there is no mention of Meillet in Tolkien’s writings, there are Tolkiennyms that clearly replicate Meillet’s linguistic model of doublets.
There are separate essays that focus specifically on Tolkien’s use of Slavic and Finnish roots in his nomenclature. The Slavic essay demonstrates Tolkien’s skill at linguistic legerdemain by calquing the Slavic etymology for the word wolf onto a Germanic root. The Finnish essay uncovers two of Tolkien’s philological jests by explaining why the gloss for the Quenya halatir is Kingfisher, and by answering the age-old question of how many Kalavalar can dance on the head of a pin.
Though there are essays on Tolkiennyms that are based on Welsh roots, there is no separate, specifically Welsh essay. That was the topic of the previous volume in this series: Tolkien and Welsh (Tolkien a Chymraeg). One of the new essays looks at Tolkiennyms based on the Welsh word for fire. Another presents an etymology for the surname Gamgee. Tolkien did say, after all, that “many ‘English’ surnames, ranging from the rarest to the most familiar, are linguistically derived from Welsh (or British), from place-names, patronymics, personal names, or nick-names; or are in part so derived, even when that origin is no longer obvious.” (MC 167) This is one of those cases.
An Irish layer in Tolkien’s Celtic linguistic creations should come as no surprise. Tolkien’s familiarity with Welsh and Irish is demonstrated by the ‘P-Celtic’ and ‘Q-Celtic‘ distinction found in Celtic linguistics that is preserved in his Elvish languages. This linguistic feature is based on the way that the Proto-Celtic *kw evolved in Welsh and Irish. Sindarin and Welsh are ‘P’ languages, and Irish and Quenya are ‘Q’ languages. Even though Tolkien remarked on his failure to grasp Old Irish or its modern descendent (L.134), he was not unfamiliar with it. In a letter, he states that he knows many Celtic things in their original languages of Irish and Welsh. (L.26)
While Tolkien modeled his nomenclature on first-world languages, the forms and meanings were not intended to be identical. There are occasionally words and names in Tolkien’s nomenclature that are in fact identical. Most often, they are found in the early drafts of his manuscripts published as The History of Middle-earth (HoMe). In these cases, the degree of certainty of the story told about the word is high. As the forms and meanings become less similar, we enter the realm of uncertainty that is typical of most linguistic studies of names. Reaney highlights this characteristic of linguistics in The Origin of English Place Names, lamenting the fact that “we are often concerned with possibilities or probabilities rather than with definite etymologies.”[3] That is part and parcel of this particular branch of study.
Language is full of ambiguities, which is what makes it such an interesting topic. The number of linguistic jests, puns, and bilingual diplosemes[4] in Tolkien’s work suggest that he never met an ambiguity that he didn’t like. The ambiguities, therefore, are a part of this study, and are often the key to understanding the story behind the name.
Linguistic invention is a product of the mind, and is, therefore, not governed by the fixed and immutable rules of the sciences. As Albert Einstein once said, imagination is greater than knowledge. Since Tolkien is no longer with us, no “proof”—in the scientific sense—of the analyses presented in this volume is possible. The facts, therefore, must speak for themselves when no corroboration is possible from the horse’s mouth.
This book combines both previously published and unpublished essays, to bring together the author’s work in one convenient volume. Many of the previously published essays have been especially revised and expanded for this project.
Notes:1 - John Rhys, Studies in the Arthurian Legend, Clarendon Press, 1891, p. 74n.
2 - Antoine Meillet, Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indo-européennes, Paris: Hachette (1903), and in his “La catégorie du genre et les conceptions indo-européennes,” Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, Paris: Campion (1926).
3 - P.H. Reaney, The Origin of English Place Names, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960, p, 72.
4 - The honor of the coinage of diploseme and diplosemy belongs to James Dunning.
Bilingual Diplosemy – the ability of a word to change its meaning, depending on which language is used to read it. It is derived from the Greek διπλόος (diploos = double) + σήμα (sêma = sign). A single word that displays this quality is called a diploseme.
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