He intentionally chose words and names in his constructed Middle-earth languages to create feelings such as of beauty, longing, and strangeness. This was that the sound of words was directly connected to their meaning, and that certain sounds were inherently beautiful. He answers his own question by stating that Tolkien had a private theory of sound and language. Shippey asks rhetorically what any reader could be expected to make of that. Fimi further observes that in the late 19th century, nonsense poets such as Lewis Carroll with his Jabberwocky and Edward Lear sought to convey meaning using invented words. These included Italian Futurism, British Vorticism, and the Imagism of the poet Ezra Pound. The Tolkien scholar Dimitra Fimi notes that around 1900 there were multiple artistic and literary movements that stressed language and the sound of words, and the possibility of conveying meaning even with words that were apparently nonsense. To me a name comes first and the story follows." Human sub-creation, in Tolkien's view, to some extent mirrors divine creation as thought and sound together bring into being a new world. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. The invention of languages is the foundation. He remarked to the poet and The New York Times book reviewer Harvey Breit that "I am a philologist and all my work is philological" he explained to his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that this was meant to imply that his work was "all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. He was especially familiar with Old English and related languages.
Tolkien was a professional philologist, a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics. 3.3 Phonetic fitness of Tolkien's constructed languagesĪs well as writing high fantasy, J.The theory is individual, but it was in the context of literary and artistic movements such as Vorticism, and earlier nonsense verse, that stressed language and the sound of words, even when the words were apparently nonsense.
Tolkien constructed languages for the Elves to sound pleasant, and the Black Speech of the evil land of Mordor to sound harsh poetry suitable for various peoples of his invented world of Middle-earth and many place-names, chosen to convey the nature of each region.
Tolkien stated that he wrote his stories to provide a setting for his languages, rather than the other way around. Scholars believe he intentionally chose words and names in his constructed Middle-earth languages to create feelings such as of beauty, longing, and strangeness. He had a private theory that the sound of words was directly connected to their meaning, and that certain sounds were inherently beautiful. Tolkien was both a philologist and an author of high fantasy.