Elvish languages of Middle-earth


The Elvish languages of Middle-earth, constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien, include Quenya and Sindarin. These were the various languages spoken by the Elves of Middle-earth as they developed as a society throughout the Ages. In his pursuit for realism and in his love of language, Tolkien was especially fascinated with the development and evolution of language through time. Tolkien created two almost fully developed languages and a dozen more in various beginning stages as he studied and reproduced the way that language adapts and morphs. A philologist by profession, he spent much time on his constructed languages. In the collection of letters he had written, posthumously published by his son, Christopher Tolkien, he stated that he began stories set within this secondary world, the realm of Middle-earth, not with the characters or narrative as one would assume, but with a created set of languages. The stories and characters serve as conduits to make those languages come to life. Inventing language was always a crucial piece to Tolkien's mythology and world building. As Tolkien stated:
Tolkien created scripts for his Elvish languages, of which the best known are Sarati, Tengwar, and Cirth.

External history

Language construction

J. R. R. Tolkien began to construct his first Elvin tongue c. 1910–1911 while he was at the King Edward's School, Birmingham and which he later named Quenya. At that time, Tolkien was already familiar with Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and three ancient Germanic languages: Gothic, Old Norse, and Old English. He had invented several cryptographic codes such as Animalic, and two or three constructed languages including Naffarin. He then discovered Finnish, which he described many years later as "like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me."
Tolkien with his Quenya pursued a double aesthetic goal: "classical and inflected". This urge was the motivation for his creation of a 'mythology'. While the language developed, he needed speakers, history for the speakers and all real dynamics, like war and migration: "It was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues".
The Elvish languages underwent countless revisions in grammar, mostly in conjugation and the pronominal system. The Elven vocabulary was not subject to sudden or extreme change; except during the first conceptual stage c. 1910–c. 1920. Tolkien sometimes changed the "meaning" of an Elvish word, but he almost never disregarded it once invented, and he kept on refining its meaning, and countlessly forged new synonyms. Moreover, Elven etymology was in a constant flux. Tolkien delighted in inventing new etymons for his Elvish vocabulary.
From the outset, Tolkien used comparative philology and the tree model as his major tools in his constructed languages. He usually started with the phonological system of the proto-language and then proceeded in inventing for each daughter language the many mechanisms of sound change needed.
Tolkien stated that he intentionally designed Sindarin to be in relation to Quenya as medieval Welsh is to Latin. Nelson Goering analysed this claim, finding it broadly reasonable, if the relationships are allowed to be of different kinds.
Elvish languageFeaturesResemblancesEuropean language
Quenya
"snake", a name
leuka, Makalaure		High language, "Elven-Latin"
1) "Used for ceremony, and for high matters of lore and song"
2) Spelling system is Latin-like		Cultural parallels of Quenya and Latin:
ancient language, now in learned use		Latin
"fountain", "state"
fontana, civitat
Sindarin
changed more than Quenya
from ancient Eldarin
lŷg, Maglor		Colloquial language
1) Initial consonant mutations
2) General phonological structure
3) i-mutation to form noun plurals		Linguistic parallels of Sindarin and Welsh:
Sindarin was designed
"to resemble Welsh phonologically"		Welsh
borrowed and adapted words
from Latin
ffynnon, ciwdod

In the early 30s Tolkien decided that the proto-language of the Elves was Valarin, the tongue of the gods or Valar: "The language of the Elves derived in the beginning from the Valar, but they change it even in the learning, and moreover modified and enriched it constantly at all times by their own invention." In his Comparative Tables, Tolkien describes the mechanisms of sound change in the following daughter languages: Qenya, Lindarin, Telerin, Old Noldorin, Noldorin, Ilkorin, Danian of Ossiriand, East Danian, Taliska, West Lemberin, North Lemberin, and East Lemberin.
In his lifetime J.R.R. Tolkien never ceased to experiment on his constructed languages, and they were subjected to many revisions. They had many grammars with substantial differences between different stages of development. After the publication of The Lord of the Rings, the grammar rules of his major Elvish languages Quenya, Telerin and Sindarin went through very few changes.

Publication of Tolkien's linguistic papers

Two magazines are exclusively devoted to the editing and publishing of J.R.R. Tolkien's gigantic mass of previously unpublished linguistic papers, including those omitted by Christopher Tolkien from "The History of Middle-earth".

Internal history

At the time of the ''Lhammas'' and ''The Etymologies'', 1937

The Elvish languages are a family of several related languages and dialects. In 1937, Tolkien drafted the Lhammas and Etymologies |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.
File:Middle-earth vs Indo-European language trees.svg|thumb|center|upright=2|Elvish and Indo-European language trees compared. Tolkien, a philologist, was intensely interested in the evolution of language families, and modelled his fictional languages and their evolution on real ones. The language names and evolution shown for Middle-earth are as used in the 1937.
This was internally consistent, but for one thing, the history of the Noldor, central to the story. Their language, Noldorin, evolved very slowly in the changeless atmosphere of Valinor. Tolkien had developed its linguistics in some detail. With their return to Beleriand, the language was evidently sharply distinct from Qenya, implying rapid change. As Tolkien worked on The Lord of the Rings, starting soon after The Hobbit was published in 1937, the matter troubled him. He came up with a radical solution: the Noldor adopted the local language, Sindarin, as spoken by the Sindar or Grey-Elves, when they settled in Beleriand. That allowed Noldorin to be, more plausibly, a scarcely-altered dialect of Quenya; and it freed up his linguistically-developed material to be rebadged as Sindarin, which would have had a long time to evolve in Middle-earth. This was to some extent an awkward solution, as Sindarin had quite different origins, and could have developed rather differently. Tolkien reshaped his "Tree of Tongues" accordingly.
The Etymologies is Tolkien's etymological dictionary of the Elvish languages, contemporaneous with the. It is a list of roots of the Proto-Elvish language, from which he built his many Elvish languages, especially Quenya, Noldorin and Ilkorin. The Etymologies, never meant to be published, does not form a unified whole, but incorporates layer upon layer of changes. In his introduction to The Etymologies, Christopher Tolkien wrote that his father was "more interested in the processes of change than he was in displaying the structure and use of the languages at any given time."
File:Glamdring etymologies.svg|thumb|upright=2|center|Etymology of 'Glamdring' in Tolkien's Elvish languages, as described in the 1937 Etymologies. Noldorin is in the place soon to be occupied by Sindarin.

With ''The Lord of the Rings''

The story of the Elvish languages as conceived by Tolkien from when he began working on The Lord of the Rings is that they all originated from Primitive Quendian or Quenderin, the proto-language of all the Elves who awoke together in the far east of Middle-earth, Cuiviénen, and began "naturally" to make a language. With the sundering of the Elves, all the Elvish languages are presumed to be descendants of this common ancestor, including the two languages that Tolkien developed most fully, Quenya and Sindarin, as shown in the tree diagram.
In detail, Tolkien invented two subfamilies of the Elvish languages. "The language of the Quendelie was thus very early sundered into the branches Eldarin and Avarin". These further subdivided as follows:
  • Avarin is the language of various Elves of the Second and Third Clans, who refused to come to Valinor. It developed into at least six Avarin languages.
  • Common Eldarin is the language of the three clans of the Eldar during the Great March to Valinor. It developed into:
  • * Quenya, the language of the Elves in Valinor beyond the Sea; it divided into:
  • ** Vanyarin Quenya or Quendya, colloquial speech of the Vanyar, the Elves of the First Clan;
  • ** Noldorin Quenya, colloquial speech of the Noldor, the Elves of the Second Clan.
  • * Common Telerin, the early language of all the Teleri
  • ** Telerin, the language of the Teleri, Elves of the Third Clan, living in Tol Eressëa and Alqualondë in Valinor.
  • ** Nandorin, the language of the Nandor, a branch of the Third Clan. It developed into various Nandorin and Silvan languages.
  • ** Sindarin is the language of the Sindar, a branch of the Third Clan, who dwelt in Beleriand. Its dialects include Doriathrin, in Doriath; Falathrin, in the Falas of Beleriand; North Sindarin, in Dorthonion and Hithlum; Noldorin Sindarin, spoken by the Exiled Noldor.
File:Elvish Languages Mapped to Kindreds and Migrations.svg|thumb|center |upright=2.5 |Elvish Languages mapped to the Sundering of the Elves: Languages are shown in Boldface Blue; examples are the words for "Elves" in those languages, shown in Italic Black. These are overlaid on a map of Arda, with Aman on the left, Middle-earth on the right, the arrows and Green labels showing the migrations of the Elvish kindreds. The lowest Elves, the Avari, fragmented into many kindreds with different languages. Locations are diagrammatic.

Fictional philology

A tradition of philological study of Elvish languages exists within the fiction of Tolkien's frame stories:
Elven philologists are called the Lambengolmor; in Quenya, lambe means "spoken language" or "verbal communication." Known members of the Lambengolmor were Rúmil, who invented the first Elvish script, Fëanor who later enhanced and further developed this script into his Tengwar, which later was spread to Middle-earth by the Exiled Noldor and remained in use ever after, and Pengolodh, who is credited with many works, including the Osanwe-kenta and the Lhammas or "The 'Account of Tongues' which Pengolodh of Gondolin wrote in later days in Tol-eressëa".

Elvish scripts

Tolkien wrote out most samples of Elvish languages with the Latin alphabet, but within the fiction he imagined many writing systems for his Elves. The best-known are the "Tengwar of Fëanor", but the first system he created, c. 1919, is the "Tengwar of Rúmil", also called the sarati. In chronological order, Tolkien's scripts are:
  1. Tengwar of Rúmil or Sarati
  2. Gondolinic runes
  3. Valmaric script
  4. Andyoqenya
  5. Qenyatic
  6. Tengwar of Fëanor
  7. The Cirth of Daeron

    Primary

Secondary

Books

A small fraction of Tolkien's accounts of Elvish languages was published in his novels and scholarly works during his lifetime.
Posthumously:
Many of Tolkien's writings on his invented languages have been annotated and published by Carl F. Hostetter in the journals Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon, as follows:
See also Douglas A. Anderson, Carl F. Hostetter: A Checklist, Tolkien Studies 4.