Lhammas

Tolkien's philology From his schooldays, J. R. R. Tolkien was in his biographer John Garth's words "effusive about philology"; his schoolfriend Rob Gilson called him "quite a great authority on etymology". Tolkien was a professional philologist, a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics. He was especially familiar with Old English and related languages. 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: The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that In other words, Flieger writes, Tolkien "did not keep his knowledge in compartments; his scholarly expertise informs his creative work." This expertise was founded, in her view, on the belief that one knows a text only by "properly understanding [its] words, their literal meaning and their historical development." Middle-earth Tolkien is best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, both set in Middle-earth. He created a family of invented languages for Elves, carefully designing the differences between them to reflect their distance from their imaginary common origin. He stated that his languages led him to create the invented mythology of The Silmarillion, to provide a world in which his languages could have existed. In that world, the splintering of the Elvish peoples mirrored the fragmentation of their languages. == Text ==

The was written in 1937. It exists in three versions. The two long versions, A and B, are closely similar, so Christopher Tolkien published B in The Lost Road and Other Writings, annotating it with A's minor variations on the text. The third, latest, and much the shortest version is the . • Oromëan, named after Oromë, who taught the first Elves to speak. All languages of Elves and most languages of Men are Oromëan. == Analysis ==

Frame story Tolkien later revised the internal history of the Elvish languages, stating that the Elves were capable of constructing their own languages, but did not update the to be coherent with this. The document as it stands in The Lost Road and Other Writings can be thus seen as an interpolated manuscript, badly translated by Men in the Fourth Age or even later: "For many thousands of years have passed since the fall of Gondolin." Realistic language family and part of Indo-European language trees as understood in Tolkien's time 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 . Changing views of Elvish linguistic history After he had written the contemporaneous and The Etymologies (also published in The Lost Road and Other Writings), Tolkien decided to make Sindarin the major language of the Elves in exile in Beleriand. As such, it largely replaced Noldorin; eventually Tolkien settled on the explanation that after the Noldor returned to Beleriand from Valinor, they adopted the language used by the Sindar ('Grey Elves') already settled there. The thus represents a stage in Tolkien's development of his Elvish languages (and of the Silmarillion legendarium), documented also in The Etymologies and an essay, "The Feanorian Alphabet". File:Elvish language evolution in the Lhammas.svg|Elvish language evolution as described in the Lhammas and assumed in The Etymologies, 1937 File:Elvish language evolution after Lhammas 01.svg|Elvish language evolution once Tolkien had The Lord of the Rings under development, 1938 onwards. Sindarin has replaced Noldorin. The 'new' Noldorin is just the Noldor's not very distinct dialect of Quenya. Bill Welden, writing in Arda Philology, comments that "the High-elven tongue of the Noldor", mentioned by the Tolkien figure Faramir in a draft of The Lord of the Rings, sounds, and looks from the "Tree of Tongues" in the , as if it must be Quenya "as we would expect". But, Welden writes, it's actually "almost exactly" Sindarin, which Tolkien derived from Welsh. Further, the version of The Lord of the Rings that he submitted to his publisher relied on "pretty much" the same conception of the Elvish language family, with Noldorin instead of Sindarin as the language of Gondor. Tolkien tried several schemes to make the change to Sindarin work in terms of rates of linguistic change. Because the Noldor's use of Sindarin was rather sudden, he settled on a radically new scheme: when the Noldor arrived back in Middle-earth from Valinor, they adopted the native language of Beleriand where they settled. The Elves of Beleriand were Sindar, Silvan Elves who had never gone to Valinor. The Noldor had been speaking Noldorin, a dialect of the ancient language of Quenya, and it had changed little, unlike Sindarin. The and The Etymologies had been describing Sindarin (but calling it Noldorin). Tolkien hastened to redraw the "Tree of Tongues", in a version recorded in Parma Eldalamberon 18, to accommodate this restructuring. == References ==