Submitted by PianoCharged t3_11c604h in todayilearned
JRR Tolkien was primarily interested in linguistics - what a lot of people don't realize is that the entire world of the Lord of the Rings and the entire Tolkien canon originated as a setting for his invented languages. Elvish came first, the whole Tolkienverse came about as a setting for it.
Yeah he invented a language, but he also knew language can't exist without culture/history/mythology so he started working on that.
He realised that language is so closely related to those things he basically developed his own Norse/Celtic epic to carry his invented language!
It was the ONLY LOGICAL thing for him to have done really
And to make up for the fact there wasn’t much in the way of surviving Anglo myths since the saxons introduced themselves on the island.
That dingus went about it all backwards, what was he thinking?
"I need to do something SERIOUSLY escapist if I'm going to stay sane in the trenches of Flanders."
For a certain value of sane.
Granted, it took a certain pre-existing level of obsessive nerdiness to set out to create an elvish language from scratch in a bomb shelter.
Well, I think That's far from sane
Interesting to look at a map of Iceland and some of the place names look like they belong in his books. Tolkien was a big fan of Old Norse and Icelandic.
I mean pretty famously the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit are just straight up ripped from the poetic edda.
But do they beat Bagginswood?
No no, bagginswood was the actor who played frodo
Tolkien was also deeply interested in mythology and fairy tales, it's not just linguistics
He started working on the silmarillion as early as during WWI
The OG "World Builder". Dude literally invented a mythology just to satisfy his linguistic interests.
This is the first thing I've ever read that makes me want to read all his LOTR books now!! That's so cool!
*canon
whoops
The elephant is in the room
The truth is in your face when you hear the British canon go boom!
The Neal Stephenson book Reamde centers around a MMOG that was invented then had an entire 100% realistic planetary geology created. The players having realistic mining, water flows & mountain ranges were important to the development team.
Even the creation story of Tolkienverse is testament to that. Arda was sung into existence. Music was first, then song, and the song was given shape as the physical universe.
Philology not linguistics i think
>what a lot of people don't realize
I mean that's fairly well known.
Fairly well known among fans of Tolkien, but not so much among the general public
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments