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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), was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens.
The Elvish languages are a family of several related languages and dialects. In 1937, Tolkien drafted the Lhammas and The Etymologies, both edited and published in the 1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings. They depict a tree of languages analogous to that of the Indo-European languages that Tolkien knew as a philologist. [2] [6]
The languages were the first thing Tolkien created for his mythos, starting with what he originally called "Qenya", the first primitive form of Elvish. This was later called Quenya (High-elven) and is one of the two most complete of Tolkien's languages (the other being Sindarin , or Grey-elven).
Tolkien developed a complex internal history of characters to speak his Elvish languages in their own fictional universe. He felt that his languages changed and developed over time, as did the historical languages which he studied professionally—not in a vacuum, but as a result of the migrations and interactions of the peoples who spoke them.
Tolkien allows his characters to listen and appreciate "in highly Keatsian style", [20] enjoying the sound of language, as when the Hobbit Frodo Baggins, recently recovered from his near-fatal wound with the Nazgûl's Morgul-knife, sits dreamily in the safe Elvish haven of Rivendell: [20]
The central character of the Kalevala, Väinämöinen, too, is a wise immortal, like Tolkien's Gandalf. Deeper matches include the process of compiling and editing: Lönnrot gathered folk stories to create his work, while Tolkien wrote frame stories to give the impression that he was an editor of ancient texts describing the mythology of England.
Tolkien went on to create his first novel "The Hobbit" published in 1937. Almost twenty years later, the sequel "The Lord of the Rings" followed in three volumes, in 1954 and 1955.
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has been translated, with varying degrees of success, into dozens of languages from the original English. He was critical of some early versions, and made efforts to improve translation by providing a detailed "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings", alongside an appendix "On Translation" in the book itself.