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Comment by awat | Hacker News Reader

There is so much to appreciate here. The bit about starting to create an elvish language really stands out to me in painting his passion for this world.

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I think the story is rather the opposite. Tolkien began work on the elvish languages (plural, yes) first, and then started creating a mythology to fit them. The Lord of the Rings later grew out of that mythology.

Is that based on other research you’ve done? The article says the language predates the books but doesn’t say specifically that the stories grew out of the language.

My sense is he did a lot of work in parallel and let the world find itself among many mediums.

Just everything that's ever been written about Tolkien and his life and work. Including at least 3 biographies that I know of, countless scholarly papers dedicated to his linguistic work as an academic and fantasy writer, literally volumes of material that have been published by his son, himself describing his creative process, etc.

It's a pretty well-known thing that he was a linguist first, wrote the hobbit to read his children as a story that fit in with the languages and mythology he'd already developed, and only ever considered publishing them because his friends (including C.S. Lewis) badgered him about it.

Not research I've done, just common knowledge. Have a look at the biography Humphrey Carpenter wrote.

its largely correct based on a lot of what I read. i think it may have been a more organic process of co-creation, where the language informed the world&story building, and vice-versa. But its definitely mistaken to think that he just created the languages to populate his world, as some kind of afterthought.

The fact that the elves have this one-way trip they can make over the sea to some sort of magical neverland, a central part of the plot for elves in the lord of the rings and in fact all of his stories, is pretty much only for the reason that it makes an interesting playground for linguistic evolution. He has the two main elvish languages evolve in different contexts, with one receiving influence from the other languages of middle earth and new generations of elves (think: the romance languages), and the other having more conservative influences (think: ecclesiastical latin) but sometimes influenced by middle earth elves making a one-way return trip over the sea. He explicitly talks about major parts of middle earth history being invented for the purpose of exploring the languages, not the other way around IIRC from the biographies.

Yes, go read a biography on Tolkien. I read multiple biographies as part of a school report many, many years ago. It's even alluded to in the original prologue to LotR, although not made clear enough for a general audience. IIRC he talks about how he generated fake historical accounts--timelines, genealogical trees, descriptions of wars, etc.--for his "hobby" (not as his hobby, but for his hobby, that hobby being what is now called "conlanging", specifically art-conlangs). He showed these histories (what would become The Silmarillion and other works) to friends to see if they thought anyone would be interested in reading them. He was emphatically told NO, and so he picked a story and told that as a story instead.

The world of the Lord of the Rings exists solely for the purpose of providing an explanation for the evolution of his made up elvish languages, which was the real interest of this professor of linguistics. That it was published at all was an accident of the fact that people liked the bedtime story he wrote for his son (The Hobbit) which drew inspiration from his linguistically-driven worldbuilding.

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