A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. Andrew Higgins

second example of an imaginary language that Tolkien gives is Noldorin. Noldorin was a later version of a language he had started inventing in 1917–18, originally called Gnomish, or Goldogrin. Tolkien had invented Gnomish as a language related to Qenya but designed to linguistically model what could happen to a language over many years of its speakers wandering and mixing with other peoples. Gnomish was associated with the Lost Tales narrative of the exiled Elves, the Gnomes or Noldoli, who left Valinor and wandered in the Great Lands. To phonetically reflect this sense of exile in Gnomish, Tolkien chose to have this language resemble the sounds of Welsh, a language spoken by an exiled people (the Cymry) who had been forced out of their lands by the Anglo-Saxons and made to live as the wealas (the Old English word for ‘foreigners’ and the origin of the name Welsh) in their own lands. Similar to Welsh and other Celtic languages (such as Irish, Manx, Scottish and Cornish), Tolkien invested Gnomish with a system of mutations, or lenitions, that affect words when they come into contact with other words. Indeed, in most cases the system of mutations in Gnomish is almost identical with that of Welsh. In The Grammar and Lexicon of the Gnomish Tongue (published in PE 11), Tolkien had invented a fairly complete and ingenious grammar for this language and offered a list of words in Gnomish which represented phonetic shifts to distinguish it from Qenya. As with Qenya, most of the evidence for Gnomish is found in the names of people, places and items in The Book of Lost Tales. An example of the difference in the phonetic make-up of Gnomish from Qenya can be seen in the name of the chief god of the Valar, whose name and title in Qenya is Manwë Sulimo and in Gnomish is Manweg Famfir. At roughly the same time of the invention of Gnomish, Tolkien had also gone back to his Qenya Phonology and revised sections of it to reflect the idea that both Qenya and Gnomish derived from a common source called Primitive Eldarin (PE 12, p. 2), thereby giving both Qenya and Gnomish a more complex sense of historical depth and coherence. Tolkien would summarize this in the new ‘Historical Sketch’ section, which introduced the revised version of The Qenya Phonology (PE 12, pp. 1–2).

      In the 1920s Tolkien would revise his work on Gnomish, which he would now call Noldorin (PE 13, pp. 119–32). While he kept the system of mutations and lenitions, one of the chief distinguishing developments from Gnomish to Noldorin was his re-conception of the plural of the noun form. While Gnomish noun plurals were formed by adding endings to the root, Tolkien decided that in Noldorin one of the ways the plural would be formed would be through the morphological device of vowel mutation (ibid., p. 119). Therefore, the plural of the word for mountain (‘amon’) was formed by a shift in the two vowels of the word to become ‘emyn’^fn1. This change in the expression of the plural made Noldorin even more similar to Welsh than Gnomish, as the plural of Welsh nouns often follows the same pattern (e.g. bachgen ‘boy’ becomes bechgyn ‘boys’, castell ‘castle’ becomes cestyll ‘castles’ and pabell ‘tent’ becomes pebyll ‘tents’). This characteristic would persist into the next conceptual development of Noldorin, now renamed Sindarin, and features often in The Lord of the Rings, with such place-names as ‘Amon Hen’ (‘Hill of Sight’) and ‘Emyn Muil’ (‘the drear hills’) (Fellowship, p. 393; Unfinished Tales, p. 434). In the untitled Noldorin poem Tolkien includes in ‘A Secret Vice’ this can be seen in his use of the plural form ‘yrch’ (Orcs) from the singular Noldorin form ‘orch’ (see p. 32 below and PE 13, p. 151). These new morphological developments would inform Tolkien’s composition of his Noldorin Word-Lists (PE 13, pp. 133–56) and the unfinished Noldorin Dictionary (ibid., pp. 157–65), from which are derived many of the words in the poem.

      The different sound aesthetic of Qenya and Noldorin at the time Tolkien delivered ‘A Secret Vice’ can be appreciated by comparing the opening lines of the Qenya poem ‘Nieninqe’ and the untitled Noldorin poem Tolkien included in the lecture:

Nieninqe:	Noldorin Poem:
Norolinde pirukendea	Dir avosaith a gwaew hinar
elle tande Nielikkilis,	engluid eryd argenaid,
tanya wende nieninqea	dir Tumledin hin Nebrachar
yari vilya anta miqilis.	Yrch methail maethon magradhaid

      For example, many of the words in the Qenya poem tend to end in open vowels (e.g. Norolinde, pirukendea, nieninqea); whereas in Noldorin words tend to end in consonants (hinar, Nebrachar, magradhaid) giving Noldorin a different sound aesthetic than Qenya.

      As mentioned above, Tolkien outlines four key characteristics that imaginary languages should demonstrate and which are reflected in his own Elvish language invention. The first two of these are interdependent and make more sense when discussed together: the creation of word forms that sound aesthetically pleasing, and a sense of fitness between word form and meaning. Given his love and admiration for Finnish, which inspired the sound aesthetic of the Qenya language, it is not surprising that Tolkien mostly associates the Qenya language with his race of Elves. It is the Elves, after all, who represent the highest and purest of his imagined beings, and who are the primary agents of linguistic creativity in Middle-earth (see Fimi 2008 pp. 99–100). As illustrated in the poetic example above, Qenya words and names tend to contain more open vowels reflecting the Finnish sound aesthetic Tolkien admired. For example, the name for one of the Elvish towns on the ‘Lonely Isle’ of Tol Eressëa is Alalminórë (‘the land of the Elms’) and it is formed from a base root ALA meaning ‘to spread’ (PE 12, p. 29). The phonetic make-up of Qenya words in his early poem Narqelion (pp. 95–6) clearly shows Tolkien utilizing theories of sound symbolism, the notion that the sound of a word ‘fits’ its meaning (see below, pp. li–lix). For example, in the first line of the poem: ‘N ^. alalmino/eo lalantila ne súme lasser pínear’ (‘The elm-tree lets fall one by one its small leaves upon the wind’), the repetition of the clusters /al/ and /la/ suggests the use of ‘reduplication’, a term used in philology of Tolkien’s time to describe the phenomenon of repeated and inverted syllables to create a sound aesthetic and semantic effect. Moreover, the sense of leaves falling one by one is expressed with the verb form ‘la-lan-til-a’, which conveys a sense of downward motion in the phonetic make-up of its syllable pattern. In the Qenya Lexicon, there is a specific category of words that have a poetic, almost ‘song-like’, feel to them, which Tolkien builds from several base roots using the multiplicative prefix li-, lin·. From this prefix he constructs such aesthetically pleasing words as: lintyulussea or lintutyulussea, ‘having many poplars’; linta(ta)sarind(e)a, ‘with many willows’; limpa(pa)lassea(a), ‘much roaring’; lintuilindōrea, ‘when many swallows congregate and sing at dawn’ and lintitinwe, ‘having many stars’ (PE 12, p. 53). These examples prefigure the same type of polysyllabic poetic words that Tolkien would give to his ancient tree herders, the Ents, in The Lord of the Rings, whose word for ‘hill’ is ‘a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lindor-burúmë’ (Two Towers, p. 465). Tolkien’s focus on words that have an aesthetically pleasing sound as befitting to their sense would be contrasted with his invention of words that would seek to produce the opposite effect, even without the meaning of the word being known. His use of open vowels to construct the aesthetically pleasing words for the Elves is contrasted in the Qenya Lexicon with hard-sounding words having dense consonant clusters used for creatures of evil. For example, melkaraukir (PE 12, p. 60) is an early form of the name for the Balrog, the monster that Gandalf the Wizard would encounter in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s use of sound aesthetic to suggest the nature of creatures and things would become a hallmark of his name invention in his Middle-earth mythology. This use of different sounds for cultural contrast can be seen by comparing the first lines of the Elf Queen Galadriel’s lament, Namárië in