Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

CARL F. HOSTETTER

First Stage—Readers and Correspondents

T olkienian linguistics, defined broadly as the study of the languages

invented by J.R.R. Tolkien, began no doubt almost immediately
upon publication of The Fellowship of the Ring in July, 1954, at the mo-
ment that the first reader to notice the rows of tengwar (Quenya ‘letters’)
and cirth (Sindarin ‘runes’) that border the title page wondered, “what
does that say?” Which is indeed the way that most did and (at least until
recently) still do enter into Tolkienian linguistics.1 And thus it is, or at any
rate used to be, Tolkien himself who first introduces the reader to the
linguistics of Middle-earth, for the diligent or curious reader will sooner
or later discover Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, with its two promi-
nent charts of the tengwar and cirth, together with Tolkien’s own explana-
tions of the nature and values of these writing systems, with the aid of
which a linguistically-minded reader can soon decipher those enigmatic
characters.
It is noteworthy that Tolkien does not seek to make this decipher-
ment too easy: he does not, for instance, choose simply to tell the reader
what those border inscriptions say; nor in the case of the tengwar does he
even provide a simple glyph-to-roman-value chart as he does for the cirth.
This in part is due to the use of the tengwar in the book not only for the
English on the title-page, but also for the Black-speech inscription on the
One Ring and the Sindarin inscription on the West-gate of Moria, both
of which are reproduced in the book, and in both of which the tengwar
are adapted to different systems of values; so that, had Tolkien provided
a chart of roman values for the tengwar as they are applied to English on
the title-page, it would have confused the reader attempting to apply the
same values to the two inscriptions given in the text.2 It is however mostly
due to the inherently and deliberately non-alphabetic nature of the teng-
war, the arrangement and shapes of which were devised (by Tolkien, and
within the fiction as by Fëanor) to exhibit a systematic correspondence
with the chief physical points (labial, dental, etc.) and modes (voiceless,
voiced, etc.) of articulation, and the values of which were not fixed by
their creator (real or fictive), but were determined for each language to
which they were applied by the phonetic inventory of the language itself.
It was this nature that Tolkien was chiefly concerned to convey in his
notes accompanying the chart of the tengwar, and so it is that deciphering
the tengwar on the title-page requires first mastering some basic concepts
Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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 Carl F. Hostetter

of phonetics and articulation. Which is to say, that it requires familiarity

with and application of some linguistic knowledge, and provides what
will often be the first hint to the reader that there is something deeper
and wider beyond the glimpses of unknown tongues that Tolkien pro-
vides in The Lord of the Rings.
Throughout the story itself the reader encounters numerous ele-
ments from and examples of Tolkien’s invented languages. By far the
greatest such element is the extensive Elvish nomenclature, drawn chiefly
from Sindarin, but with a smaller presence of names in Quenya, these
two being the chief Elvish languages and by far the most fully developed
of Tolkien’s inventions. A smaller but to the linguistically-minded reader
perhaps more readily compelling element is the occurrence of actual
Elvish dialogue, chiefly in the form of poems, songs, spells, and formal
greetings and utterances in both Quenya and Sindarin: for example, and
earliest, Frodo’s Quenya greeting of Gildor and his company in Woody-
end; the Sindarin hymn to Elbereth that Frodo hears on the eve of the
Council of Elrond in Rivendell; the Sindarin inscription on the West-
gate of Moria and Gandalf ’s spell of opening in that language; Galadri-
el’s Quenya lament and farewell to Frodo at the Fellowship’s departure
from Lórien; Sam’s Sindarin invocation of Elbereth at Cirith Ungol; the
Quenya and Sindarin praises of Sam and Frodo on the field of Cormal-
len; and Aragorn’s Quenya coronation oath.
While Tolkien does address this invented-language element in The
Lord of the Rings directly in the appendices (particularly E and F), he does
so only by way of a general and greatly compressed historical sketch,
sufficient to establish, for example, that the Elvish languages are all re-
lated to one another, and to delineate the chief phonetic characteristics
of Quenya and Sindarin by which it is possible (usually) to distinguish
forms in one language from those of the other.3 Tolkien also provides, in
the text itself, translations for most (though not all) of the actual Elvish
dialogue encountered there, usually by way of a paraphrase of what has
just been said by one of the characters. The Elvish nomenclature is not
infrequently given in conjunction with an alternative English rendering
of the name, and Tolkien’s index gives here and there a translation for
some names. Thus, Tolkien put quite a lot of information concerning his
languages into the story and its appendices and index, but it is scattered
about and must be gathered up and correlated to make full use of it.
Further, Tolkien provided directly, in The Lord of the Rings itself, very little
by way of detail of phonological development and nothing concerning
morphology or the other departments of descriptive grammar. These
fundamental linguistic features instead must be inferred by analysis of
Elvish texts and forms according to such translations as Tolkien does pro-
vide, and by comparison of forms in related languages to determine what

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

systematic correspondences of sound and meaning can be deduced.

And so naturally, and even before the completion of the publica-
tion of The Lord of the Rings in 1955, as Tolkien’s published letters show,
the linguistically-minded of Tolkien’s readers set about to do just these
things. Already in September 1955 Richard Jeffery, writing to ask for
information concerning some elements of Quenya and Sindarin nomen-
clature,4 could use the tengwar (at least as applied to English) passably well
(Letters 223); and Tolkien’s remarks in April 1956 (Letters 248) show that
already many were asking him for more phonological and grammatical
detail on Elvish and specimens thereof, implying that there was already
a considerable effort being undertaken at correlating and analyzing the
information already given by Tolkien. In the first decade, however, this
effort appears for the most part to have been done privately, by individu-
als in isolation—although already by late 1958 Rhona Beare began to
write to Tolkien on behalf of a group of fellow enthusiasts with various
linguistic questions. It was not until after the explosion of popularity of
Tolkien in the mid–1960s, particularly in America, with the publication
of an inexpensive paperback version of The Lord of the Rings, and the
consequent formation of various Tolkien fan groups and societies,5 that
Tolkienian linguistics fully emerged as a shared endeavor with published
studies.
First Interlude—Decoders
Before following the development of Tolkienian linguistics, proper,
further, it should be noted that there was also another, pseudo-linguistic
response to the invented-language element in The Lord of the Rings that
seems unfortunately incorrigible and indeed persists to this day: name-
ly, treating the languages, particularly the nomenclature, as essentially
a code formed from and containing deliberate references to words and
elements from various real-world languages, the identification of which
the decoders believe provide “the key” to understanding what Tolkien’s
names “really mean,” who and what his characters and places “really
are,” and so (in the extreme application of this methodology) what his
story is “really about.”6 Thus, such decoders have variously claimed that
Tolkien’s languages are “really” composed from elements of Old Eng-
lish, Hebrew, Sumerian, and so forth.
Tolkien addressed and refuted such “decoding” of his nomenclature
directly in a long reply to a “Mr. Rang” (who attempted to “explain”
Tolkien’s Elvish and Black Speech nomenclature as composed of ele-
ments from Old English and Gaelic, respectively), which was published
in his selected letters in 1981 (Letters 379–87). Yet twenty-five years after
the publication of Tolkien’s own dismissal of such approaches as hav-
ing any bearing on his intentions or procedure, we still find the same

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 Carl F. Hostetter

approach employed, as for example in a recent essay that interprets a

number of Elvish names as being composed of Old English elements, so
that, for example, the Sindarin (hereafter S.) name Sauron is “explained”
as derived from O.E. sar ‘sickness, wound, affliction’ and Silvan Elvish
Legolas as containing O.E. lego ‘elder race, ancestor’ and a diminutive
ending las, læs;7 both decodings in complete disregard of Tolkien’s own
explanations of these name given in the very same letter to Mr. Rang:
Sauron being an masculine form of the Common Eldarin adjective *thaura
‘detestable’ (Letters 380), and Legolas ‘Greenleaves’ composed of leg ‘viridis,
fresh and green’ + go-las ‘collection of leaves, foliage’ (Letters 382).8
This is not to say that Tolkien did not “reuse” elements from real
languages in his own, or that names and characters from real-world his-
tory, myth, and legend are not found in Tolkien’s story: Tolkien himself
allowed as much to Mr. Rang, citing the example of Earendel; but as Tolk-
ien himself also explains in that letter, the incidence of this sort of reuse
is much, much less, and the nature and significance of it quite different,
than the decoders think. And so it is to say that Tolkien’s nomenclature,
and his languages in general, are not simply an echoic hodgepodge of ad-
opted and adapted words and names: rather, they are linguistic systems,
each element of which (e.g. constituent sounds, root meanings, deriva-
tion and inflectional markers, etc.) stands in abstract, systematic relation
to the other elements both within an individual language and across its
cognates in other languages; and thus it is further to say that each word
and name in Tolkien’s invented languages, by Tolkien’s own procedure
and intent, as illustrated by his own explanations, can (in principle) and
must be explained within those linguistic systems; that is, in terms of his
languages, not from outside.9
Second Stage—Journals and Books
It is beyond the scope of this essay to attempt to chronicle completely
the contributors and publications of the earliest days of Tolkienian lin-
guistics as a shared endeavor.10 In lieu of a more detailed history, we can
take as representative what stands as the fullest and most lasting record
and synthesis of the best results of those first efforts, the 1978 book An In-
troduction to Elvish, which Jim Allan edited from his own contributions and
those of other scholars, such as Christopher Gilson, Laurence J. Krieg,
Paula Marmor, and Bill Welden. These were drawn largely from the two
early journals: Parma Eldalamberon (Quenya, ‘Book of Elven-tongues’),
founded in 1971 by the Mythopoeic Linguistic Fellowship (itself a special
interest group of the Mythopoeic Society) and edited by Paula Marmor;
and Tolkien Language Notes, first issued by its editor, Jim Allan, in 1974.
It should be noted that although published in 1978, An Introduction
to Elvish was completed before the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion,

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

and so does not take into account the wealth of new data that volume
provided. It was, however, able to make use of four additional primary
sources beyond The Lord of the Rings: first, Tolkien’s detailed glosses and
concise etymological and grammatical notes on three examples of Elvish
dialogue found in The Lord of the Rings—namely the long Quenya poem
known as “Galadriel’s Lament” (“Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen . . .”), the
Sindarin hymn to Elbereth sung on the eve of the Council of Elrond
(“A Elbereth Gilthoniel . . .”), and Sam’s Sindarin invocation of Elbereth at
Cirith Ungol—which were published together with Tolkien’s own teng-
war transcriptions of the Elvish as an appendix to Donald Swann’s 1967
songbook, The Road Goes Ever On.11 Second is a circa 1967 chart giving the
declension of two nouns in Classical (or Book) Quenya that Tolkien sent
in response to a query by Richard Plotz, then president of the nascent
Tolkien Society of America. Third is Tolkien’s own notes on nomencla-
ture, written as an aid for translators of his work, which were published
by Jared Lobdell as the “Guide to Names in The Lord of the Rings” in the
1975 collection A Tolkien Compass.12 And fourth, notes taken by Jim Al-
lan from the Tolkien manuscript archive at Marquette University, which
houses the complete manuscript, typescript, and galley versions of The
Lord of the Rings.
It is further noteworthy that none of these additional sources provide
any extensive or detailed phonological discussion of Quenya or Sindarin,
nor do they directly address the history and relationship of these two
chief Elvish languages. Thus even with this additional information, most
of the phonology, morphology, and other departments of the grammar
of Quenya and Sindarin had to be inferred by collecting and correlating
all the available data and comparing forms in each language both with
related forms in the same language and with (at least potential) cognate
forms in the other language, and determining from this what systematic
correspondences can be observed in the data. For example: by compar-
ing the Sindarin words adan ‘man,’ pl. edain, with the obviously cognate
Quenya word Atani ‘Men’ (all three forms attested in The Lord of the Rings),
it can be seen that intervocalic t in Quenya corresponds to intervocalic
d in Sindarin; and from this and many other such correspondences of
intervocalic sounds observable in the data, a phonological rule can be
inferred: that original voiceless stops (e.g. p, t, k) in intervocalic position
remain voiceless in Quenya but are voiced in Sindarin (to become b, d, g,
respectively). It was also deduced from this and from other such singular
versus plural comparisons in Sindarin and Quenya that the vowel varia-
tion seen in singular adan vs. plural edain is caused by an original plural
ending that was retained as final -i in Quenya, but which was lost in
Sindarin (as, it turns out, were all original final vowels), though not before
it caused a change in the vowels of the syllables that preceded it: namely,

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 Carl F. Hostetter

in this case, raising and fronting the first a to e, and diphthongizing the
second a to ai.13
It was also further observed by the contributors to An Introduction to
Elvish that the changes of consonants in intervocalic position identified
for Sindarin also occur in the initial consonant of words in certain gram-
matical situations: for example, the element per- ‘half,’ isolated by com-
parison of such words as perian ‘halfling, hobbit’ and Peredhil ‘Half-elven,’
occurs as ber- in the Sindarin phrase, “Daur a Berhael . . . . Eglerio!,” where
Daur and Berhael translate the names of Frodo and Samwise (that is, ‘half-
wise’) respectively; and therefore the initial p- of per- has been voiced to
b-, just as it would be in intervocalic position. It was recognized that this
and similar changes were strongly reminiscent of the similar phenom-
enon in Welsh that is often called lenition, by which initial consonants in
certain grammatical situations (e.g., as the direct object of a verb) un-
dergo the same change that the consonant underwent historically in in-
tervocalic position; and so it was further deduced (correctly, as it turned
out) that the patterns of initial consonant mutation were modeled after
(though not in all details precisely the same as) those of Welsh, both in
the phonology of the change and in the grammatical usages.14
By rigorously applying this empirical approach to the data, in con-
junction with the principles, methodologies, and scholarly practices of
descriptive and historical linguistics as developed by philologists in ana-
lyzing and describing the Indo-European languages and their histories,
the contributors to An Introduction to Elvish were able, despite what we now
view as a severely limited data set,15 to develop remarkably detailed and
accurate linguistic descriptions of Quenya and Sindarin. These encom-
passed not just complete lexicons of the two languages as they were then
evidenced, together with pronunciation, glosses, and etymological notes,
but also a detailed and still largely accurate inventory of the chief set of
systematic phonological changes by which each of these two languages
developed and diverged from the parent Common Eldarin tongue, to-
gether with a presentation that has yet to be superseded of the different
modes of the tengwar as applied to various languages. They also estab-
lished the essential scholarly practices of Tolkienian linguistics, adopted
from the historical linguistics of “real” languages: in particular, the cita-
tion in Tolkien’s writings of evidence and of phonological justifications
for proposed etymologies and reconstructions, and the maintenance of
a clear distinction between forms actually attested in Tolkien’s writings,
and proposed, reconstructed, or otherwise hypothetical forms, which
were and are still usually marked with a prefixed asterisk, in accordance
with a convention of historical linguistics.
A sketch of at least parts of the main grammatical categories of each
language was achieved. This includes, for both languages, a recognition

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

of the ultimate historical and phonological relatedness, and of the funda-

mental (prefix) + root + (suffix) structure that underlay them in the parent
Common Eldarin language. For Quenya, there is an inventory of the
rich set of derivational endings inherited from Common Eldarin; a large
set of case endings in the noun (e.g., nominative, old accusative, geni-
tive, instrumental), including a variety of adverbial cases (e.g., locative,
allative, ablative), in four numbers (singular, a remnant dual, and two
plurals), indicating the influence of Latin and Finnish on this highly-
inflected language. There is a list of adjectives showing number agree-
ment; an incomplete personal pronominal system (with well-attested first
singular and plural, the latter with both inclusive and exclusive forms,
but sketchy second and third persons), with both independent (emphatic)
and verb-suffixed forms, subject, object, and possessive (the verb-suffixed
pronouns contributing to the agglutinative aspect of Quenya), as well
as interrogative and deictic pronouns. There are verbs in two moods,
active and imperative, with at least four tenses (present, past, past per-
fect, and future). For Sindarin, there was considerable evidence show-
ing the influence of Welsh, particularly in its phonological development,
in its i-affection plural formations (e.g. adan ‘man,’ pl. edain; annon ‘gate,
door,’ pl. ennyn, etc.), and in the role of lenition not only in the forma-
tion of compounds and after certain grammatical forms of the definite
article, but also in the suspicion (if not then demonstrable from the mea-
ger evidence) of its playing a function in grammar. It was recognized
that Sindarin was also like Welsh in being considerably less inflected and
more prepositional that Quenya. The definite article exhibited distinct
singular and plural forms as well as case inflection. Nouns exhibited both
singular and i-affection plural forms, as well as group plurals with various
endings; adjectives also exhibited i-affection plural forms. The pronomi-
nal system was even more sketchy than that for Quenya, confined to first
singular (with various propositional forms, again à la Welsh), a second
singular form obviously borrowed from Quenya, and tentative (though in
the event correct) third plural demonstrative forms. The syntactic role of
word-order in genitival/possessive constructions (e.g. Ennyn Durin ‘Doors
[of] Durin,’ Aran Moria ‘Lord [of] Moria’) was recognized. Verbs were
evidenced in two moods, active and imperative, and three tenses, present,
past, and future, with participial forms in the present and past.
In addition to this strictly linguistic approach to studying and describ-
ing Tolkien’s languages, both An Introduction to Elvish and the journals of
the time featured occasional examples of what might be considered ap-
plied Tolkienian linguistics, by way of original translations into Quenya
and Sindarin—or, more accurately, and necessarily given the paucity of
actual data, into theoretical or outright speculative forms of those lan-
guages, supplemented in lexicon and grammar by extrapolation from

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 Carl F. Hostetter

attested forms and grammar. It is noteworthy and laudable that there

was then and is still a strong resistance to employing outright invention
of new roots and grammatical markers, and a strong expectation that the
elements of any coined forms must all have some discernible connection
with attested elements, however tenuous.16
Considering the severe paucity of data and information from which
its contributors had to draw, An Introduction to Elvish represents a truly
remarkable achievement, unrivalled in its originality and impact on the
field before or since, a testament to the scholarly rigor, practices, and
linguistic knowledge brought and applied by its contributors to the study
of Tolkien’s languages, and, because of this, still standing as the model of
and best introduction to the principles, methodologies, and sound schol-
arly practices of Tolkienian linguistics. While much more detail, scope
and refinement has since been added to our knowledge of Tolkien’s lan-
guages, this has mostly supplemented rather than supplanted the phono-
logical and grammatical categories and descriptions in the book, and this
new knowledge has all been added to the core theoretical, methodologi-
cal, historical and linguistic framework discerned and erected by all those
whose work contributed to the achievement of An Introduction to Elvish.
Second Interlude—The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth
Alas, nothing of the kind can be said of the book that appeared two
years later, in 1980, and that remains to date the far more well-known
and readily available of the two: Ruth S. Noel’s The Languages of Tolkien’s
Middle-earth. Unlike An Introduction to Elvish, Ms. Noel was able to make
use of the extensive additional information found in The Silmarillion, but
her book derives no benefit from this additional material, nor indeed
from most of the information provided by Tolkien in earlier published
works. There is in fact virtually no discernible linguistic methodology in
the book, and only the briefest mention of the phonological development
of the two main Elvish languages or of their phonological relationship
to each other. Ms. Noel was unable even to reliably distinguish between
Quenya and Sindarin words in the book’s “Tolkien Dictionary.” The
brief grammar of the two chief Elvish languages is facile and error-rid-
den: for example, in the treatment of the Quenya verb, present and per-
fect tenses are lumped together (despite obvious structural differences),
and an unattested imperative formation in -e is invented for the language,
while actual imperative forms are misidentified as present tense.
To give the book its due, it should be noted that Ms. Noel’s discussion
of the Old English element in Hobbit and Rohanese names is good, and
her discussion of the tengwar is serviceable (though not nearly as thorough
or complete as that in the earlier volume). Still, the best thing that can
be said about the book is that, being put out by a major publisher (unlike

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

An Introduction to Elvish), it was in the pre-Internet era by far the most

readily accessible means by which new Tolkien-language enthusiasts and
scholars could learn that there were like-minded others out there, and so
nurture the interest. But no one should rely on this book for information
concerning the Elvish languages.
Third Stage—Conceptionists and Unifists
The years immediately following the publication of An Introduction to
Elvish were, at least so far as can be judged by publication of the prin-
ciple journals of Tolkienian linguistics, a time of pause and reflection.
Jim Allan’s Tolkien Language Notes ceased publication, having fulfilled its
purpose, and Parma Eldalamberon would not appear again until 1983. Ap-
parently, having made the seminal contribution to the scholarly study of
Tolkien’s languages, and established its theoretical framework, the group
of American scholars that brought it to fruition needed to take a break.
In Britain, however, the publication in rapid succession of both The
Silmarillion and An Introduction to Elvish sparked sufficient interest in lin-
guistically minded members of the Tolkien Society for them to found
their own Linguistic Fellowship, and inaugurate their own linguistic bul-
letin, Quettar (Quenya, ‘Words’), in 1980, originally edited by Susan Rule,
subsequently by others, including David Doughan, and most recently
by Julian Bradfield. In general, Quettar became for a time the de facto heir
of the first stage of Tolkienian linguistics that culminated in An Introduc-
tion to Elvish and of the scholarly practices established by it and Parma
Eldalamberon: namely, citation of evidence, attention to phonological de-
tail, justification of phonological and morphological claims by examples
from attested evidence, and so forth. A particular focus in the early years
on the tengwar, especially with regard to phonemic modes thereof, soon
won for it the honor of publishing the first known charts by Tolkien of
the tengwar numerals, which were transcribed and sent to the editor by
Christopher Tolkien.17 Also of note in the first years of Quettar is the ease
with which the new linguistic data and information provided by, first, The
Silmarillion, and then Unfinished Tales (1980) and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
(1981) were worked into the descriptive and methodological framework
that had been established. There was no grand revision or recapitulation
of An Introduction to Elvish, nor was one necessary, since the new informa-
tion in those volumes tended mostly to fit within the framework it had
established, and to support, refine, or expand upon the inferences drawn
from the earlier information, rather than to supplant them.
In part, this was due to the empirical and descriptive framework,
which of its nature included the flexibility to accommodate new informa-
tion and to refine previous theories; but it was also due to the fact that the
Elvish language element in these new publications was in or taken from

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 Carl F. Hostetter

writings post-dating the completion of The Lord of the Rings, and so was
apparently, or at any rate arguably, of a piece with the material in The
Lord of the Rings. Indeed, there had long since arisen and still persisted at
that time the implicit notion that Quenya and Sindarin were essentially
sprung fully-formed from Tolkien’s mind: that is, that the phonology,
grammar, and lexicon of Tolkien’s languages were fixed by him at what-
ever time they were first invented, and that the glimpses of them afforded
by his writings as then published showed the languages as they were at
their invention and had been ever since.18
But in fact, already by this time there had been several indications
that Tolkien’s languages were far from fixed, at any time, either before or
after the publication of The Lord of the Rings. For example, changes were
made by Tolkien to some of the Quenya speech in the revised edition
of The Lord of the Rings that appeared in 1965: thus, where in the first
edition Frodo’s greeting of Gildor in Woody-end reads: “Elen síla lúmenn’
omentielmo” (‘A star shines on the hour of our meeting’), in the second
edition the last word was revised to omentielvo. Tolkien offered a story-
internal explanation for this change as correcting a mistake on Frodo’s
part, who had failed to correctly observe the Elvish distinction in the first
person plural pronominal ending between “we” inclusive of the person
addressed, i.e., ‘you and I’ (-lve, here in genitive form -lvo ‘of our’) and
“we” exclusive of the person addressed, i.e., ‘these others and I’ (-lme,
gen. -lmo); a mistake that Tolkien further explained as “generally made by
mortals,” for whom Quenya was both a foreign and a dead tongue.19 But
as we now know, the external explanation lies in the fact that in the years
after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had continued to
change his languages, even in ways that conflicted with the published ex-
emplars of those languages. Thus, when the first edition was published,
-lme was indeed the first plural inclusive ending, and so was the correct
ending at that time (the corresponding exclusive ending at that time was
-mme). But in the course of Tolkien’s unceasing revisions of Quenya even
after publication, -lme eventually came to be first plural exclusive, and -lve
the inclusive form.
Other early indications of the mutability of Tolkien’s languages ap-
peared with the beginning of posthumous publications by and about
Tolkien. For example, the 1976 publication of a selection from Tolkien’s
Father Christmas Letters included a phrase in the “Arctic” language, which
was in fact an example of Quenya (or, as it was then spelled, Qenya) as
it stood in 1929; and Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 Biography of Tolkien
quotes four lines from what appears to be the very first Quenya poem
Tolkien wrote, “Narqelion” (‘Autumn’), dated 1915.20 At the time, however,
it was impossible to say with any certainty whether or how much of the
apparent strangeness of these earlier examples of Quenya was due to

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

changes in the language itself, or simply to the known-to-be-incomplete

state of knowledge of Quenya afforded by the limited nature of the pub-
lished evidence.
A seemingly even starker display of the degree to which later Quenya
differed from earlier Qenya came in 1983, with the publication of Tolk-
ien’s circa 1931 essay “A Secret Vice.” In this address Tolkien provided
numerous examples of poems in each of the two main Elvish languages
as they stood at that time, then called Qenya and Noldorin (though not
named as such in the essay). Most notably here, in his editorial notes
to the essay Christopher Tolkien provides two alternate versions of the
Qenya poem “Oilima Markirya” (‘The Last Ark’) that occurs in the body
of the essay. Thus, for the first time, Tolkienian linguists could compare
three distinct versions of a Q(u)enya poem, two dating from circa 1931,
and the third dating from much later, possibly as late as circa 1970, and
thus from roughly twenty years before and twenty years after the comple-
tion of The Lord of the Rings, respectively; and it was obvious that the later
version was indeed quite different from the two earlier versions.
Some thereupon took the view that the two earlier versions demon-
strated that earlier Qenya was essentially incompatible with later Que-
nya, and thus divided Quenya into two broad, distinct, and incompatible
conceptual eras. The later version of “Oilima Markirya” and all Quenya
material found in or written after The Lord of the Rings were grouped to-
gether as representing “Lord of the Rings-era Quenya,” and the two earlier
versions, together with all the other poems in the essay and all Qenya
material written before The Lord of the Rings, were assigned to “pre-Lord
of the Rings Quenya.” Implicit in this division was the stance that “Lord
of the Rings-era Quenya” was all of a piece, that Quenya had achieved a
fixed, final form by the time Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings and was
not thereafter subject to any substantial alteration; and the further stance
that “pre-Lord of the Rings Qenya” was still experimental and imperfect
by comparison, and had essentially no bearing on or importance to the
features or understanding of later Quenya.21 Others however, noting that
in matters of language difference does not necessarily equate to incom-
patibility, took the view that many of the differences among the three
versions of “Oilima Markirya” could (and in the case of differences be-
tween the two earlier versions should) be explained as due, for example,
to the differing narratorial perspectives (varying among present, past,
and future tenses), differing poetical modes and constraints, and differ-
ing choices from among at least potentially co-existent synonyms and
grammatical markers: in short, that the differences among these poems
were not necessarily any more indicative of linguistic incompatibility than
would be, say, variations among three different English translations or
retellings of The Iliad.

11
 Carl F. Hostetter

The first viewpoint came eventually to be called “Conceptionist,”

for its presumption that apparent differences of “pre-Lord of the Rings”
Qenya, Noldorin, and Goldogrin with what was known (or thought to
be known) of “Lord of the Rings-era” Quenya and Sindarin represented
a fundamental change in and revision of Tolkien’s conception of those
languages—in the extreme formulation, an irreconcilable conceptual rift
and discontinuity, such that the earlier material had been completely re-
jected by Tolkien and had essentially no bearing on “final-form” Quenya
and Sindarin of the later era. The second, contrary, viewpoint came to
be called “Unifist,” for its insistence that while Q(u)enya and Goldogrin/
Noldorin/Sindarin undoubtedly underwent changes over the nearly six-
ty years that Tolkien thought and wrote about them, nonetheless the pre-
sumption should be that earlier exemplars could at least theoretically be
unified with and thus have bearing on later exemplars, 22 in the absence
of compelling evidence of incompatibility.23
Also in 1983, on the eve of the publication of “A Secret Vice” and
so of the beginning of the “Conceptionist” vs. “Unifist” division in ap-
proach to Tolkien’s languages, Parma Eldalamberon resumed publication,
under the new editorship of Christopher Gilson, a member of the first
generation of Tolkienian linguists and a prominent contributor to An
Introduction to Elvish and to the preceding scholarship from which it drew.
Gilson soon established himself and eventually Parma Eldalamberon as the
chief proponent of the “Unifist” viewpoint, while Quettar and its con-
tributors tended to promote the “Conceptionist” viewpoint.
This division established and defined itself, and then deepened, be-
ginning with the publication of the first substantial materials from the
very earliest stages of Tolkien’s creation of the two chief Elvish languag-
es (then called Qenya and Goldogrin or Gnomish) in the two parts of The
Book of Lost Tales (1983, 1984); continuing and strengthening through the
publication of The Lost Road (1987), which featured Tolkien’s own exten-
sive Elvish Etymologies of circa 1937, and the three-and-a-half volumes of
the sub-series of “The History of The Lord of the Rings” (1988–90), which
contained variant versions of much of the Elvish language element in
The Lord of the Rings itself. So it was that in 1988, in respective issues of
Quettar and Parma Eldalamberon, a chief “Conceptionist” could declare the
grammar of Qenya as exhibited in the materials published in The Lost
Road to be impossible to reconcile with “Lord of the Rings-era” Quenya,
and that the best that could be done with Tolkien’s Etymologies was to mine
it for new vocabulary (Quettar 33, p. 12); while the chief “Unifist” offered
a poem composed of a deliberate and enthusiastic admixture of forms
from the Goldogrin of the “Gnomish Lexicon” of 1917, the Noldorin
of The Etymologies of circa 1937, and the Sindarin of The Lord of the Rings
and beyond, set into Sindarin grammar, imagined as representing what a

12
 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

Sindarin poet who had sojourned with speakers of both Goldogrin and
Noldorin might compose, and cast on the linguistic model of a Middle
English poem with native forms in admixture with Danish and French
borrowings (“Im Naitho,” Parma Eldalamberon 7, pp. 3–12, 31).24
The debate reached its peak in a series of exchanges in Quettar
through 1990, chiefly between Christopher Gilson and Tom Loback for
the “Unifists” and Craig Marnock for the “Conceptionists.” At this point,
Tolkienian linguistics (at least for a time) settled into the consensus atti-
tude that, while it was clear that Tolkien’s languages had indeed changed
over time, certainly in the details of their phonological development and
doubtless in their grammar, it was important not to decide hastily that ev-
ery (apparent) difference in grammar necessarily represented an incom-
patibility, nor to declare that every earlier form or feature not evidenced
in later writings had been rejected. It was recognized that grammatical
differences might in fact only be apparent, due to the inherently multi-
expressive nature of natural languages, and to the inherently limited and
selective nature of the grammar of the languages as derivable and infer-
able from the fundamentally literary works that contained the bulk of the
data for the later forms of the languages. In short, it was established that
the mere fact that a form or feature is not evidenced in later writings does
not in itself establish that it did not persist into later conceptual stages, if
only implicitly (the absence of evidence logically not being equivalent to
proof of absence).25
While this debate still raged, in 1988, the resumption of publication
of Parma Eldalamberon spurred Jorge Quiñónez, a newcomer to Tolkien-
ian linguistics, to propose to the Mythopoeic Society that its linguistic
special interest group be reconstituted, and the first, impromptu meeting
of the newly-minted Elvish Linguistic Fellowship was held at Mythcon
XIX in August of that year. The inaugural issue of Vinyar Tengwar (Que-
nya, ‘News Letters’), edited by Quiñónez, was published for the Elvish
Linguistic Fellowship the following month. Among the founding mem-
bers listed in that first issue (all eight of them) were: Arden Smith, an-
other newcomer, who brought a particular focus on the tengwar and the
cirth;26 Christopher Gilson and Bill Welden, both members of the first
generation of Tolkienian linguists and contributors to An Introduction to
Elvish; Tom Loback, whose particular interest lay in nomenclature;27 Pat-
rick Wynne, who had been contributing linguistic commentary to Myth-
lore and to Nancy Martsch’s Beyond Bree for five years; and Paul Nolan
Hyde, who was compiling a computer index and database of Elvish, and
had been writing a column on Middle-earth linguistics for Mythlore for
six years.

13
 Carl F. Hostetter

Third Interlude—Courses, Columns, and Lexicons

In March 1981 appeared the first issue of Beyond Bree, the monthly
newsletter of Mensa’s Tolkien Special Interest Group, founded, edited,
and published by Nancy Martsch. Martsch had at that time already
made a long study of Tolkien’s invented languages, and her interest in
this study was brought to the fore in Beyond Bree in the second issue (April,
1981), which features her own Sindarin translation, in tengwar translit-
eration and set to music, of Thomas Moore’s “Bendemeer’s Stream.”28
While remaining a generalist Tolkien newsletter, Beyond Bree would there-
after feature occasional articles on Tolkien’s languages, and became, due
to the hiatus in Parma Eldalamberon, the chief American publication to
offer a forum for discussion of Tolkienian linguistics, with contributions
not only from Martsch but from such other notables of the field as Pat-
rick Wynne, Taum Santoski, Tom Loback, and Christopher Gilson. The
most important legacy of Beyond Bree for Tolkienian linguistics, though,
is unquestionably Nancy Martsch’s own Basic Quenya, a graded course of
tutorial self-instruction in Quenya that began in the August, 1988 issue
of Beyond Bree and was serialized thereafter in 21 installments through
June, 1990 (and was later collected), and in conjunction with which the
aforementioned “Plotz Declension” was first officially published, in the
March, 1989 issue. The Quenya presented in this primer is, however,
very much, and admittedly, a selective and simplified version,29 a natural
result of Martsch’s policy of basing the grammar she presents solely on
the material Tolkien published in his lifetime. It is interesting to note that
Basic Quenya (by choice) and An Introduction to Elvish (by necessity) together
provide a solid summary of the forms and grammar of Quenya and
Sindarin that can be directly deduced or inferred solely from The Lord
of the Rings and the handful of contemporary publications: a perspective
that can in turn be compared with what has subsequently been deduced,
or at any rate claimed, about Quenya and Sindarin “of The Lord of the
Rings era” on the basis of posthumous publications.
Meanwhile, in Mythlore 33, published in the autumn of 1982, Paul
Nolan Hyde inaugurated Quenti Lambardillion (Quenya, apparently for
‘Tales of the Language Enthusiasts’), a column on Middle-earth linguis-
tics that ran through 1992. Hyde carried out this column in conjunction
with the compilation of a large, detailed database and index of all at-
tested Eldarin words in the corpus, which itself was begun in conjunc-
tion with his doctoral dissertation. Hyde continued this work through the
publication of The Return of the Shadow in 1988, thereby incorporating
within his database the whole lexical content of what were then the fullest
presentations of Tolkien’s own lexicons of his Elvish languages, from the
earliest Qenya and Gnomish Lexicons through the circa 1937 Etymologies,

14
 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

as presented by Christopher Tolkien in the two-part Book of Lost Tales

and The Lost Road and Other Writings in his History of Middle-earth series.
From this database was derived a massive, privately published series of
comprehensive glossaries and indices, including the seven-volume Work-
ing Tolkien Glossary (1989), and the startlingly useful Working Reverse Diction-
ary (also 1989).30 All of these works were especially valuable to scholars as
a means of navigating the vastly increased corpus of Tolkien’s languages
provided by the first half of The History of Middle-earth series, which
arose and was largely completed before widespread access to and use of
the World Wide Web as a means of compiling and sharing computer-
searchable wordlists of Tolkien’s languages.31
Hyde also put this database to use in the service of—at times highly
unlikely—explications of Tolkien’s invented lexicon and Elvish compo-
sitions, particularly of the published exemplars of Elvish poetry. This
database-driven analysis was based upon a highly idiosyncratic approach
that analyzed each Elvish word as a sequence of semantic units that were
not infrequently isolated without regard to actual morpheme boundaries
as determined by a word’s actual etymology, and in which sounds could
be freely added to or subtracted from to match other attested words and
morphemes, sometimes with the same sounds counted as simultaneously
belonging to two of these supposed morphemes. By searching for these
sequences with his database, Hyde would find and list the meanings as-
sociated in that database with these putative morphemes and then col-
lect and correlate these meanings together to form a putative “literal”
translation for the word (often having little or nothing in common with
Tolkien’s own glosses, where available). Thus, for example, Hyde ana-
lyzed the word omentie, glossed by Tolkien as ‘meeting,’ as containing the
morphemes om(a) ‘voice’ + (m)en ‘region’ + tie ‘road’—all indeed inde-
pendently attested as such in their unelided form, but clearly requiring
a linguistically absurd level of mutability and compaction to fit them
into Hyde’s scheme—and gave it the “literal” translation ‘region of the
voice-road’: a far cry from Tolkien’s own gloss.32 The word is in fact far
more readily and plausibly analyzable, in accordance with Tolkien’s own
translation and with attested morphemes, stem-structure, and patterns
of derivation in Quenya, as containing prefix o- ‘together’ + men- ‘go’ +
tie ‘path, road’; or even o- + ment- ‘go’ + gerundial/infinitival -ie ‘-ing’;
thus, ‘going together (of paths), meeting.’ Hyde defended this approach
with an appeal to polysemy, claiming that Tolkien’s words could and did
have multiple meanings, and were intended to convey those meanings
by juxtaposition and impressionistic agglomeration of sometimes quite
disparate units of sub-meaning; but both the frequently strained results
of this approach and its inherently subjective nature failed to convince
others of its validity.

15
 Carl F. Hostetter

Despite this methodology, many of Hyde’s analyses were nonethe-

less sound, and the column served as an additional forum for the discus-
sion of Tolkien’s languages, eliciting comments from a number of other
scholars of the day. Hyde also published therein, for the first time, the
complete text of the earliest extant Qenya poem, “Narqelion” (Mythlore
56, Winter 1988),33 and (in facsimile) an early chart of the “Gondolinic
Runes” (Mythlore 69, Summer 1992), both provided to him by Christo-
pher Tolkien.
Fourth Interlude—VT, Myself, and I
When Jorge Quiñónez launched the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship and
Vinyar Tengwar, and when I (effectively) took over as editor with issue 8
(November 1989), Tolkienian linguistics, at least as represented in pub-
lished writings, was largely divided among two groups, distributed both
geographically and according to “side” in the Conceptionist/Unifist de-
bate. In America, the Unifist cause was firmly represented by Christo-
pher Gilson as editor of Parma Eldalamberon, and in correspondence to
Quettar, together with prominent contributors Tom Loback, Bill Welden,
and Patrick Wynne. In Britain, Quettar, under the new editorship of Ju-
lian Bradfield, who took over the reins from David Doughan with issue
38 (December 1989), presided over the final grappling and resolution of
that debate, with Craig Marnock carrying the Conceptionist banner.
Vinyar Tengwar, and thus in short order I, entered into this situation
rather tangentially, initially because Vinyar Tengwar began chiefly as a soci-
ety newsletter (hence its name) rather than as a journal, and then because
I had not myself participated in the debate, and so was quite content to
let the matter play out elsewhere.34 For my own part, both before becom-
ing editor, and increasingly after, my interest in Tolkien’s languages was
primarily analytical. It lay chiefly in the phonological development of and
relationships among the languages, and in the etymology of individual
forms, so far as those could be determined or inferred from Tolkien’s own
writings; as well as in exploring the possible fictive relationships Tolkien
intended the words and grammatical devices of his languages of Mid-
dle-earth to exhibit or suggest with those of primary-world (particularly
Indo-European) languages.35 I have also attempted to present detailed
etymological and grammatical analyses of Tolkien’s own compositions
in his languages,36 as they appeared in successive volumes of The History
of Middle-earth and then in Parma Eldalamberon and in Vinyar Tengwar itself
as my colleagues and I began to present new, previously unpublished
linguistic writings collected from the various Tolkien archives.37 I (and
thus Vinyar Tengwar) became more concerned with simply analyzing and
describing Tolkien’s languages, through all the stages of their internal
and external development, and far less concerned with attempts to use

16
 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

them in writing, and not at all concerned to unify or systematize them;

and so remained largely unconcerned with the matters at the heart of the
“Conceptionist” vs. “Unifist” debate.
Fifth Interlude—Elves in Cyberspace
In November 1990, Tolkienian linguistics (broadly speaking) made
its first substantial foray into the then-still-fledgling Internet, with the
launch by Quettar editor Julian Bradfield of TolkLang, the first e-mail list
devoted to the discussion of Tolkien’s languages. For nearly eight years
TolkLang would remain by far the most active on-line forum for discus-
sion of Tolkien’s languages, serving as an important adjunct to Quettar
and the other print journals, as a forum for commentary on the ongoing
publication of The History of Middle-earth, and as a vehicle for publication
of original scholarship in its own right. Particularly in its earlier years,
TolkLang continued the sorts of linguistic discussions that had been fea-
tured in Quettar, tending towards focused discussions of particular points
of phonology and grammar, and tending to continue the essential schol-
arly practices of Tolkienian linguistics that had been established over the
previous decades.
As an e-mail based forum, TolkLang offered an immediacy of discus-
sion that print publications could never hope to provide; and as the reach
and availability of the Internet expanded exponentially, it served increas-
ingly as the chief means by which people around the world discovered
and joined the larger community of fellow scholars and enthusiasts of
Tolkien’s languages. Indeed, the immediacy and widening accessibility
of TolkLang as a discussion forum, and the consequent attraction of
much activity to itself, appears to account for the fact that Quettar began
to appear less frequently, as its readers and contributors came more and
more to focus their activity on TolkLang, until, following the publication
of issue 49 in March 1995, Quettar went into a suspension that persists
today.38
Fourth Stage—Scholars and Speakers; or, Elvish and Neo-Elvish
TolkLang also served as the staging ground, in February 1992, for the
first comprehensive attempt, made by Anthony Appleyard, to system-
atize Quenya grammar in light of the new information published in The
History of Middle-earth, particularly The Etymologies, in his article “Quenya
Grammar Reexamined.” This work is chiefly a summation of the pub-
lished evidence for Quenya grammar (at various conceptual stages) up
to that time, and a presentation of the various grammatical categories in
Quenya as Appleyard delineated them, in the form of paradigms assem-
bled both from forms taken from sometimes widely separated conceptual

17
 Carl F. Hostetter

stages of Quenya and from his own hypothetical constructions, together

with not a few attempts to explain attested forms not fitting into these
paradigms as errors on Tolkien’s part.
This work is now chiefly noteworthy as an early exemplification and
useful summation of a set of attitudes and approaches to Tolkien’s lan-
guages arising at that time and in many ways still dominating the discus-
sion of Tolkien’s languages in various Internet forums. First, there is a
concern to assign a label and (single) function to all attested (or supposed)
grammatical inflections (resulting, e.g., in such names as “respective” and
“dedative” being applied, and still today, to noun cases nowhere so named
by Tolkien himself). Second, there is a concomitant concern to “fill in
gaps” in the grammar (real or supposed, and often arising ultimately
from expectations due to English or Latin grammar, not Elvish). Third
is a preoccupation with avoiding (supposed) “clashes” and “ambiguities”
in forms and functions.39 Fourth is a ready willingness to reject or even
ascribe to authorial error forms not fitting with preconceived notions
of phonology and grammar, or with personal judgments as to linguistic
logic and parsimony. Fifth is a promotion of the “completion,” “exten-
sion,” and use of Tolkien’s languages through the creation of new forms
from existing materials; combined with, sixth, ready rejection, as “obso-
lete,” of words and formations attested only in earlier writings, in favor
of different forms in later writings having the same or similar meanings.
This is accompanied nonetheless by, seventh, a marked conflativeness,
that is, the ready incorporation of forms, from whatever conceptual stage
(though very frequently from the 1930s), deemed “needed” or “useful.”
The impetus behind all these attitudes and approaches is the desire to
be able to “speak Elvish,” that is, to so define and “complete” Tolkien’s
invented Elvish languages as to make them usable in translations and in
conversation. The application of these approaches, however, results in
synthesized forms of Quenya and Sindarin not actually found anywhere
in Tolkien’s own writings, and defined ultimately not by Tolkien’s own
linguistic and aesthetic views, but rather by the synthesizer’s own selec-
tion from across the decades of Tolkien’s linguistic writings and concep-
tions, and so ultimately by his own—not Tolkien’s—notions of linguistic
expedience, completeness, compatibility, clarity, and utility.
These synthetic, conflative, utilitarian, and idiosyncratic attitudes
and approaches to Tolkien’s languages would achieve their fullest and
most influential expression later and elsewhere on the Internet, in the
work of two other prominent members of TolkLang, Helge Fauskanger
and David Salo, beginning with the launch of Fauskanger’s web site, Ar-
dalambion (‘Of the Tongues of Arda’), in May 1997.40 The stated intent of
Ardalambion was to provide “updated standard descriptions of Tolkien’s
languages,” particularly of Quenya and Sindarin. The great obstacle to

18
 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

this intent is that Tolkien himself never settled upon a single, “standard”
form of any of his languages, least of all of Quenya and Sindarin, both
of which he continued to alter remarkably freely long after the publica-
tion of The Lord of the Rings. Moreover, the amount of data attested for
Quenya and Sindarin, proper, even when joining that found in The Lord
of the Rings with that found in all of Tolkien’s subsequent writings, pales in
comparison with that attested for Qenya and Noldorin of The Etymologies
from nearly two decades earlier (circa 1937). Entire formation classes,
even of such basic categories as verb tenses, found in Qenya and Noldo-
rin are barely, and sometimes not at all, attested in those later writings,
and to a lesser extent vice versa.
A descriptive linguistic approach to this situation would be to provide
a separate account and linguistic description of each of the various con-
ceptual stages of the languages, derived only from the evidence attested
for each stage: so, for example, a linguistic description of Goldogrin as
attested in the “Gnomish Lexicon” (circa 1917), and one of Noldorin as
attested in The Etymologies (circa 1937), and one of Sindarin as attested in
The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), and another still of Sindarin as attested
in, say, the essay “Quendi and Eldar” (circa 1960). Such descriptions
would make use of and account for all of the evidence attested at each
stage (and only that evidence), and would provide a sound basis for explo-
ration of both the similarities and the differences among all these stages,
providing insight both into what features of the language, and thus of
Tolkien’s particular aesthetic in that language, stayed more or less con-
stant, and which reflect changes in Tolkien’s aesthetic over time.
Fauskanger and Salo, however, opted instead for a continuation of the
synthetic and conflative approach to Quenya and Sindarin, which quite
apart from producing descriptions of Quenya and Sindarin as Tolkien
himself conceived of them at any point, instead seeks to cobble togeth-
er a single, synthetic version of each of those languages from materials
spanning more than thirty years of conceptual shifts in the languages.
To the extent they achieve this on Ardalambion, they do so only by im-
posing consistency on those materials through selecting, renaming, and
even silently altering large numbers of forms and grammatical devices
attested only in the earlier conceptual stages (chiefly in the Qenya and
Noldorin of The Etymologies), and combining these with similar selections
of materials from the later stages that Tolkien himself called Quenya
and Sindarin, while ignoring, or even dismissing as erroneous, words and
grammatical devices attested in those same stages that do not agree with
their “standard descriptions” of Quenya and Sindarin. They even invent
for their “standard descriptions” large numbers of forms and even entire
formation classes that are not actually attested in Tolkien’s own writings,
and in some cases contradict what Tolkien actually did write.

19
 Carl F. Hostetter

Indeed, one of the striking characteristics of Ardalambion is the large

proportion of forms it gives, as supposed examples of various gram-
matical categories, that are in fact unattested in Tolkien’s own writings.
Thus, for example, the account on Ardalambion of the Sindarin past tense
verb41—which in fact rests almost entirely on Noldorin evidence, there
being only four past-tense verbs as yet attested for Sindarin proper—not
only makes no mention of fully one fourth of the actual Noldorin past-
tense forms given in The Etymologies, but provides two lists of “Sindarin”
past-tense verb forms42 in which there is only one actually attested form
listed, the rest being entirely unattested, hypothetical forms constructed
by Fauskanger or Salo.
As another example, Ardalambion also at this writing still gives a form
mudant as the past tense of the “Sindarin” verb-stem muda- ‘labor, toil.’
Now, one will not in fact find any verb-stem muda- in the attested evi-
dence for Sindarin proper; instead, this form is, once again, taken from
Etymologies, from the actually attested Noldorin form mudo. What is par-
ticularly noteworthy here, though, is that when looking at that entry in
Etymologies, one sees that the past tense form of this verb is not in fact
given as mudant, but instead as mudas; that is, with a past-tense marked by
final -s instead of final -nt. Both Fauskanger and Salo originally justified
this alteration by asserting that mudas was an obvious error (authorial or
editorial), since there were no other attested past-tense verbs in -s,43 and
moreover that if there were any such past-tense ending it would “obvi-
ously” cause “significant confusion” with the ending -s used (in part) to
derive nouns from verb stems.44 However, the publication of a complete
“Addenda and Corrigenda to The Etymologies”45 has since confirmed the
reading mudas and provided several other examples of Noldorin past-
tense verbs in -s, demonstrating not only that mudas was no error, but that
Tolkien himself did not think such an ending caused “significant confu-
sion” with the abstract noun formation.
Fauskanger’s and Salo’s presentations of Quenya and Sindarin on
Ardalambion thus do not derive solely from attempts to formulate theo-
retical descriptions that account for the entirety of existing data sets;
rather, the evidence that they admit (or construct) for their “Quenya”
and “Sindarin” is selected, altered, rejected, and even invented, in ac-
cordance with their preconceptions of “mature” Quenya and Sindarin
and their notions of linguistic utility and acceptability. The controlling
concern of Ardalambion (as of Appleyard’s work before it) is thus not sim-
ply to describe Tolkien’s languages, either at each conceptual stage or at
any particular stage, nor to do so only as exemplified in Tolkien’s own
writings: rather, it is to synthesize and provide single, “standard” versions
of Quenya and Sindarin for use in writing and speaking. It is thus above
all in pursuit of utilitarian, not descriptive, goals, and this overarching

20
 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

concern for utility, coupled with the noted tendency to explain away or
otherwise discount (seemingly) unusual forms, has resulted in presenta-
tions of Quenya and Sindarin on Ardalambion that make Tolkien’s lan-
guages appear to be more regular, more rigid in forcing a one-to-one
relation of form and function, less rich and complex in character and
(apparent) history, in short, more artificial, than Tolkien ever constructed
his languages to be.
To be sure, Ardalambion is, despite these methodological shortcom-
ings, a remarkable and impressive work, reflecting immense learning, la-
bor, and passion for Tolkien’s languages. In its scope, detail, and presen-
tation it is without question and by far the best and most comprehensive
single introduction to Tolkien’s languages available today, in any form.
But given its shortcomings, it must only be used as an introduction, not
as a substitute for study and citation of Tolkien’s own writings, which in
many places it fails to reflect accurately.46
The rise of such methodological practices as these, particularly in
such works of deliberately scholarly form and presentation as Ardalambion,
represented a marked departure from previous standards of scholarly
practice in Tolkienian linguistics. Although it had not been uncommon to
treat Qenya and Noldorin of The Etymologies as evidence for Quenya and
Sindarin without remark on their actual status,47 it had not before been
accepted practice to employ such wholesale (and all-too-often silent) in-
vention of forms and entire paradigms and present them as though they
were actual evidence for a linguistic description of Quenya and Sindarin.
To be sure, some hypothesizing of forms had occurred, as for example in
the discussion of Quenya pronouns in An Introduction to Elvish; but these
were limited to a small number and to individual forms (not extending to
the invention of entire formation classes), and carefully marked as hypo-
thetical forms not actually attested. Such is not the case with Ardalambion,
where it is often impossible for a reader not already intimately acquaint-
ed with the actual evidence in Tolkien’s writings to distinguish between
attested forms and those supplied instead by Fauskanger and Salo. Prior
practice had distinguished between Tolkien’s own creations and those of
the theorist, and cited the sources for forms under discussion so that the
reader could check them, and thus kept the reader in close contact with
Tolkien’s own writings and linguistic views. Ardalambion however has had
the effect of insinuating the views of its authors between Tolkien and the
reader, as can readily be seen from the various Internet-based courses
and forums that now routinely cite Ardalambion, rather than Tolkien’s own
works, as their source and basis of evidence.
Furthermore, Ardalambion appeared at a time when the publication
of new, primary materials from Tolkien’s linguistic papers in Parma El-
dalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar, including his own linguistic descriptions of

21
 Carl F. Hostetter

the various successive conceptual stages of his languages, had begun in

earnest. With this it has become—and will continue to become—increas-
ingly untenable to regard what Fauskanger has referred to as “mature”
Quenya and “mature” Sindarin “of the Lord of the Rings era” either as
fixed and monolithic, or as quite so completely equatable with Qenya
and Noldorin of The Etymologies, as is assumed in the conflative stance,
methodology and presentation adopted by Ardalambion. It has also be-
come untenable to regard still earlier forms of Qenya, Goldogrin, and
Noldorin as either inherently inferior, incomplete, or linguistically less so-
phisticated or interesting, or as having no relevance to the elucidation of
the later conceptual stages—attitudes nonetheless (and still at this writ-
ing) quite strongly in evidence on Ardalambion and in numerous Internet
forums following its lead.
Thus it was that, with the increasing amount of utilitarian and “stan-
dardizing” activity on the Internet, particularly on TolkLang and the
Ardalambion web site, in conjunction with (and increasingly in contradis-
tinction to) the ongoing publication of new primary materials in and on
Tolkien’s languages from numerous conceptual stages, there emerged a
division among Tolkien language scholars and enthusiasts on even more
fundamental “problems” presented by Tolkien’s languages than had con-
cerned the “Conceptionists” and “Unifists”: namely, what are they, and
what are we to do with them? That is, what is the nature of Tolkien’s lin-
guistic invention, as a whole and in all its parts, and what is the purpose
and end of studying it at all?
This division was (and still is) framed by two related yet fundamen-
tally different responses to these questions. On the one hand, there is the
primarily descriptive and analytical response which views all of Tolkien’s
languages, through all their conceptual versions and at each successive
stage of their internal and external developments, as objects worthy of
study and analysis in their own right, being each a product and exemplar
of Tolkien’s own linguistic views, creativity, and shifting aesthetic; and
maintains that the purpose of their study is to examine, understand, and
explain, as fully as possible, just what it is that Tolkien created in his lan-
guages, the linguistic views and aesthetic that each stage represents, and
the processes by which he created them, throughout and in consideration
of the whole of both their primary- and secondary-world histories, and
in relation to one another. On the other hand, there is the primarily
utilitarian and synthetic response that the purpose is to take what Tolkien
wrote and synthesize from all these more or less disparate materials—but
with particular focus and emphasis on the later writings, as representing
Tolkien’s “mature,” “final,” or “perfected” vision of his languages—a
single, consistent, and “completed” form of (at least) the two chief Elv-
ish tongues, so that it might one day be possible to use (these versions of)

22
 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

Quenya and Sindarin, or extensions of them, in something like casual

and diurnal writing and speech.48 In short, those who concern themselves
with Tolkien’s languages have come to fall into two main groups that can
be characterized succinctly as scholars and speakers.
One of the first practical effects of this division was the separation
from TolkLang of such prominent would-be speakers of Quenya and
Sindarin as Helge Fauskanger and David Salo, and others of like mind,
to form their own Internet mailing list forum, Elfling, in September of
1998. Although the stated purpose of Elfling is scholarly and technical,49
and although it has indeed presented scholarly and technical posts at
times, it has from the start been concerned greatly with promoting and
facilitating the use of “mature” Quenya and Sindarin in writing and
speech, specifically on the basis of the synthetic forms of Quenya and
Sindarin presented on Ardalambion, which in the course of the debate
have eventually come to be called “Neo-Quenya” and “Neo-Sindarin”
(collectively, “Neo-Elvish”) in an effort to convey their status as deliber-
ate post-Tolkien creations and to distinguish them from Tolkien’s own
particular conceptions of those languages as actually attested. Indeed,
historically Elfling has come increasingly to be dominated by would-be
speakers and their attempts at translating into “Neo-Quenya” and “Neo-
Sindarin,”50 particularly as the forum grew dramatically in membership
and activity with the attention attracted to it by David Salo’s association
with the Peter Jackson films.
This is not however to say that the membership of the two groups,
scholars and speakers, is or must be mutually exclusive. There has al-
ways been, and no doubt always will be, a very strong desire to “speak
Elvish” among most of those who take more than a passing interest in
the languages, and naturally so: both the scholarly and the utilitarian
responses ultimately spring from the same motivation, namely, a sincere
appreciation of Tolkien’s languages as both aesthetic and intellectual
achievements; and so both responses ultimately entail both aesthetic and
intellectual appreciation (if not in the same proportions). Certainly most
of those who prefer to pursue a rigorously descriptive and analytical ap-
proach to Tolkien’s languages have at times offered their own translations
into Elvish that inevitably rely on synthesis of and additions to Tolkien’s
own conceptions and constructions;51 and certainly, the chief proponents
of making “standard” and “usable” versions of Quenya and Sindarin
are adept in historical and comparative linguistics, and (necessarily) build
upon the results of the scholarship of Tolkien’s languages, to which they
have themselves made contributions. Nonetheless, it is a fact that Tolk-
ien himself was not concerned to make Quenya and Sindarin into either
“complete” or “final” languages, or thus to make them usable by anyone
other than himself for his own artistic purposes;52 and so any desire to

23
 Carl F. Hostetter

“complete” or to “speak Elvish” is certainly neither an intended nor a

necessary response to Tolkien’s languages; nor is there any compelling
reason to think that either “completion” or “usability” of these languages
is even achievable.53
Nor is this to say that there is anything wrong, per se, with selecting
and favoring one stage or another of Tolkien’s languages, or even mul-
tiple stages, as the basis for synthesizing “complete” or “usable” versions
of Quenya and Sindarin. Anyone wishing to create such “post-Tolkien”
versions of his languages is obviously free to decide what materials to use
and how to use them in this effort. But I also hasten to note that such an
endeavor, while (necessarily) not entirely disconnected from the scholar-
ship on Tolkien’s languages, and while not without potential interest for
the scholar, is nonetheless not itself part of scholarship, strictly speak-
ing, any more than attempts to create a “complete” and “usable” form
of, say, Gothic (or any other poorly-attested, dead language), would be
counted as scholarship of that language, strictly speaking, for the simple
reason that such exercises, no matter how clever or informed or elabo-
rate, do not add to the body of knowledge of the language. The endeavor
is entertaining, yes, and intellectually stimulating, certainly, and can even
serve as an instructive exercise for students of the languages proper, if
done with full care and consideration not to confuse the construct with
the actually attested evidence and to keep in mind the limitations of
translation into any poorly-attested, dead language.54 But it is not, strictly
speaking, scholarship.
The purpose of Tolkienian linguistics, proper, as a scholarly endeav-
or is, or at any rate in my mind should be, to understand and describe
Tolkien’s languages, and his writings in and about those languages, in
their own terms and as they actually are: namely, a large collection of suc-
cessive historical grammars, lexicons, essays, and compositions present-
ing Tolkien’s own linguistic views and descriptions of the long series of
conceptually differing yet contiguous and, throughout, thematically uni-
fied languages he produced, each stage of which represents a unique and
individual language (and internal language history) as worthy of study as
any other stage; and yet each of which grew from, maintains, and exhib-
its a continuity of form, theme, and context with preceding stages that
far outweighs the differences among them, 55 and that, considered in rela-
tion to the whole history of these conceptual shifts, and particularly when
considered in chronological sequence, exhibits areas of both remarkable
stability and remarkable dynamics within and across the various flavors
of Tolkien’s linguistic aesthetic, throughout his life.
Unfortunately, the desire to “speak Elvish” has historically gone
hand-in-hand with several attitudes that seek to diminish, blur, neglect, or
even dismiss the individual character, nature, and worthiness for study of

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

more than half of the records of Tolkien’s linguistic inventions,56 namely

that preceding the publication of The Lord of the Rings.57 First is the at-
titude that anything written before the circa 1937 Etymologies is inherently
inferior and essentially if not entirely alien to and has no bearing on
what is labeled as “mature,” “perfected,” and/or “final form” Quenya
and Sindarin “of the Lord of the Rings era,” and that anything in those
materials, including not only the phonologies and grammatical devices
but also the lexicons, that disagrees (or appears to disagree) with what
is known (or thought to be known) of “mature” Quenya and Sindarin
was simply rejected by Tolkien: that is, the extreme formulation of the
“Conceptionist” view. Second is the attitude that the Qenya and Noldo-
rin attested in The Etymologies are, save for a renaming and some minor
tweaks here and there of phonology, for all practical purposes identical
with “mature” Quenya and Sindarin, and can summarily be cited and
referred to as Quenya and Sindarin: that is, that the (inferred) phonol-
ogy and (attested) vocabulary and grammar of Qenya and Noldorin of
the circa 1937 Etymologies can safely be regarded as essentially identical
to, and silently conflated with, Quenya and Sindarin as conceived of by
Tolkien some twenty years later in The Lord of the Rings and beyond. Third
is the corollary attitude that Tolkien’s own writings on his languages, and
even his own particular statements about their phonology and grammar,
are worthy of consideration and evidentiary status only to the extent that
they accord with what is already “known” about “mature” Quenya and
Sindarin, or to the extent that they can be appropriated from, with any
necessary (and all too often silent) manipulation or alteration, to supply
or supplement the lexicon and grammar of “Neo-Quenya” and “Neo-
Sindarin”—again, echoing some aspects of the extreme form of the
“Conceptionist” view. In other words, Quenya and Sindarin, as thought
of by would-be speakers, have become separate constructs, abstracted
from Tolkien’s own constructions, intentions, and statements, to which
can be added whatever parts of Tolkien’s numerous conceptualizations
of those language flavors are deemed useful and/or can be manipulated
to be made “compatible” with this new, separate, “post-Tolkien” con-
struct.
In response to this encouraged neglect of the earlier stages of Tolkien’s
own languages in favor of discussion and promotion of “Neo-Elvish,”
and in an effort to encourage a return to more descriptive and analyti-
cal discussion of Tolkien’s languages, at all their stages, on the Internet,
I launched a new e-mail discussion group, called Lambengolmor (Quenya,
‘Loremasters of Tongues’) at the end of May, 2002. Lambengolmor is by
design and moderation strictly scholarly and much more rigorous, con-
sidered, and technical than Elfling, but nonetheless has at this writing
attracted a membership of over 900 and logged nearly 1000 posts, virtu-

25
 Carl F. Hostetter

ally every one of which is focused on some descriptive or analytical point

or problem of Tolkienian linguistics, strictly as exemplified in Tolkien’s
own writings.
Encouraged by the success of Lambengolmor, and in recognition of the
need for an adjunct forum of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship in which
longer analytical works unsuited to the e-mail format of Lambengolmor
could be published (such as had formerly appeared in Parma Eldalamberon
and Vinyar Tengwar, which had of necessity become reserved for the pub-
lication of new, primary materials from Tolkien’s manuscripts), and in or-
der to further encourage the scholarly and linguistic discussion of Tolk-
ien’s languages at all their conceptual stages, in December 2003 Patrick
Wynne and I launched Tengwestië (Quenya, ‘Language’) as a new, online
journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship. Tengwestië has seen the pub-
lication of considerable descriptive work on aspects of both Goldogrin
and of the Noldorin of The Etymologies that had previously been either
wholly neglected (in the case of Goldogrin) or (in the case of Noldorin)
presented only partially and in forms assimilated to and represented as
Sindarin; and it has encouraged similarly precise, scholarly, and more
purely descriptive approaches to Tolkien’s languages elsewhere on the
Internet,58 resulting even in a widening recognition of the true nature of
Tolkien’s languages in forums previously focused solely on “Neo-Elvish”
and engaging Elvish only through the mediation of Ardalambion.
Sixth Interlude—A Gateway to Sindarin
Late in 2004, David Salo published his long-expected book, A Gate-
way to Sindarin. As with his previous work on Sindarin presented in Ar-
dalambion, Salo’s Gateway clearly reflects long study and immense labor,
all presented in an even more impressively technical and scholarly form,
in the tradition of detailed historical grammars: an opening historical
sketch, followed by a lengthy and seemingly exhaustive historical pho-
nology, giving Salo’s sequenced account of each and every systematic
sound change over the course of the development of Sindarin from its
Common Eldarin source, and then his discussion of the morphology and
derivation of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, compounds, etc., fol-
lowed by a syntax of the (all too few) attested sentence types of Sindarin,
an analysis of the grammar of the extant Sindarin texts, and extensive
etymological glossaries of the forms encountered in the text.
Unfortunately, while Gateway thus certainly has the appearance of a
strictly scholarly and descriptive grammar of Tolkien’s Sindarin (and is
described as such in the opening sentence of the book), to anyone with
an intimate acquaintance with Tolkien’s own linguistic writings, it quick-
ly becomes obvious—again, as with Salo’s previous work in Ardalambi-
on—that this appearance is deceiving. As expected, Salo’s presentation

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

of Sindarin relies heavily on materials taken and sometimes altered in

form from their true source in the Noldorin of The Etymologies, but Salo
makes the fact of this plain in the introduction, so (arguably at least) fair
enough from a theoretical standpoint. What was not expected in such
a deliberately scholarly work is the degree to which Salo alters—most
often completely silently—Tolkien’s own glosses and explanations of the
Noldorin and Sindarin forms Salo cites,59 and even the forms and grammar of
the actual Sindarin exemplars he quotes from Tolkien’s writings.
A particularly telling example occurs in Salo’s analysis of Tolkien’s
partial translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Sindarin (proper).60 Where
Tolkien’s text reads: caro den i innas lin bo Ceven (translating ‘thy will be
done on Earth’), Salo gives (p. 231): caro den i innas lín bo Geven; that is, Salo
has altered the word Ceven to Geven. Nor is this alteration simply an in-
nocent typographical error: Salo writes (231) that his bo Geven ‘on Earth’
“actually seems to be written bo Ceven in the text, but since the preposition
[bo ‘on’] seems to have originally ended in a vowel . . . a soft mutation c >
g is to be expected here.”61 What is so remarkable here is Salo’s plain will-
ingness to alter what Tolkien actually wrote, i.e., the actual data for Sindarin,
solely in order to make it fit his theories. A work of purely descriptive
linguistic scholarship, such as Salo presents his Gateway as being, could
(and would) note, first, that Ceven is a concrete noun (‘earth’) capitalized
as a proper name (‘Earth’); and second, that elsewhere in the same text,
indeed in the same line, we have another example of a concrete noun (menel
‘the heavens’) likewise capitalized as a proper name (‘Heaven’) and fol-
lowing a preposition ending in a vowel, that also does not show lenition:
sui vi Menel ‘as it is in Heaven.’ This should immediately suggest that even
if it is true as theorized that, in general, objects immediately following
prepositions ending in vowels show lenition, it may well be that such con-
crete nouns used as proper names resist this mutation, and further that
the resulting markedness of such concrete nouns in this syntactic position
may have been selected and maintained in the historical development of
Sindarin precisely because it marked them as proper names.62
Salo’s Gateway to Sindarin, however, despite its appearance and his as-
surances, is not such a work, and this is not an isolated example: through-
out, Salo repeatedly demonstrates a willingness to set the theoretical cart
before the evidentiary horse, even to the extent of altering the data to fit
his theories. As such, A Gateway to Sindarin is thoroughly unreliable, and ef-
fectively unusable, either as a work of scholarship or of reference, which
probably accounts for the almost complete lack of citation of the work,
even in such Internet forums as Elfling and works like Ardalambion already
heavily inclined towards the synthetic approach to Tolkien’s languages.63

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 Carl F. Hostetter

Conclusion—Fifty Years On and Onward

In Stockholm in August 2005 was held Omentielva Minya (Quenya,
‘Our First Meeting’), the first of a new biennial series of International
Conferences on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Invented Languages, inaugurated by
Bill Welden and Anders Stenström. It was a most fitting means of mark-
ing the conclusion of the first fifty years of Tolkienian linguistics, which
had over the course of those five decades grown from an endeavor en-
gaged in privately or in small correspondence to one that now attracts
thousands of readers to numerous journals, publications, and discussion
forums, both in print and online, in languages and with participants from
around the globe. It had weathered and yet thrived through two major
divisions of attitude and approach in response to continuing publication
of new primary materials that challenged long and deeply held views
of what Tolkien’s languages are, what he intended for them, and what
our response to them should be. And it had been given the privilege of
publishing still more new primary materials from Tolkien’s manuscript
archives in its journals. Much of this history and activity was reflected
in the programme of Omentielva Minya and in the discussions among its
participants.
With the promise of further Omentielvar, continued publication of
several journals, numerous active Internet discussion forums and web-
sites, and the ongoing publication Tolkien’s linguistic writings, interest in
the study of Tolkien’s languages and opportunities to contribute to our
knowledge of them abound. There is a huge amount of material already
available that has yet to be analyzed or described systematically. The
phonology, morphology, and grammar evidenced in and inferable from
Tolkien’s two earliest lexicons, of Qenya and Goldogrin, which are also
by far the largest lexicons of any of his invented languages at any stage,
have only just begun to be described, having for years been subject to en-
couraged neglect. And even the much-regarded Etymologies have yet to be
fully analyzed and described on their own terms (rather than as sources
for materials to be fitted into “Neo-Quenya” and “Neo-Sindarin”). But
already such work as has been done with these materials in a manner
that respects their integrity and individual status—for example, Patrick
Wynne’s formal classifications of the “Goldogrin Past Tense,” my own of
“The Past-Tense Verb in the Noldorin of the Etymologies,” Bertrand Bel-
let’s of “Noldorin Plurals in the Etymologies” and Thorsten Renk’s analysis
of “Instensifying Prefixes in the Etymologies” (all published in Tengwestië)—
has not only added to our knowledge of those languages, but has shed
new light even on later stages—for example, resulting in modifications to
the “standard view” of the Sindarin verb, which had arisen on and been
widely adopted from Ardalambion.64 And this just scratches the surface of

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

material already available, some of it for nearly two decades now.

In short, there is already a great deal of very interesting work to be
done with already available materials—interesting, that is, to the linguis-
tically minded. For my own part, I mean to continue to do what I can to
encourage and facilitate such work, even as my fellow editors of Tolkien’s
linguistic papers and I continue our work, creating ever more opportuni-
ties for study, exploration, and new scholarship on the nature, history,
and conceptual development of all of Tolkien’s languages.
NOTES
1 The recent movies now provide this entrée for many who saw the mov-
ie before reading the book—if in fact they read the book at all.
2 Worse, some printings of the immensely popular Ballantine paper-
back edition of The Lord of the Rings gave the Ring-inscription upside-
down. My colleague Nancy Martsch had one of these when she first
attempted to decipher the tengwar. It is a testament to her ingenuity
and tenacity that she actually worked out a system for inverted tengwar
that corresponded to the Black-speech on the Ring.
3 This compression was necessitated, of course, first and foremost by
the practical matter of available space in an already massive, three-
volume book that threatened considerable financial loss to the pub-
lisher; and second, by the press of time, as the completion of the ap-
pendices was among the very last tasks undertaken by Tolkien prior
to publication; and third, by the question of just how much linguistic
detail a reader could be expected to be interested in.
4 Though Mr. Jeffery would not have known those names of the two
chief Elvish languages, since they do not appear in the story at all,
but occur only in the appendices, which were not published until Oc-
tober of that year. It may also be noticed that Mr. Jeffery deciphered
the title-page tengwar without the aid of Appendix E.
5 In particular, the founding in 1967 of the Mythopoeic Society, which
so far as I have been able to determine was the first society to foster
and support a distinct group of scholars especially devoted to the
study of Tolkien’s invented languages: namely, the Mythopoeic Lin-
guistic Fellowship, and its journal, Parma Eldalamberon, founded in
1971. The Mythopoeic Linguistic Fellowship has since been reconsti-
tuted as the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, which continues to publish
Parma Eldalamberon now 35 years later.
6 The worst practitioners of this pseudo-etymological approach to
date, by far, being Robert Giddings and Elizabeth Holland, who in

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 Carl F. Hostetter

their book, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Shores of Middle-earth (London: Junction

Books, 1981), proudly exhibit such classics of the form as (p. 159):
Ash nazg, the One Ring . . . is Ashpenaz, the Babylonian mas-
ter of the eunuchs, in the Book of Daniel, a fine comment on
the Ring-wraiths, who appear to have lost their virility along
with their will-power. Gorgoroth is the Greek gorgos, horrible,
terrible, as in Gorgon; Ered Gorgoroth is translated in The
Silmarillion as ‘The Mountains of Terror,’ than which noth-
ing could be simpler (Ered coming from the German erde,
earth, as also does the early name for Middle-earth, Arda, cf.
Dutch aarde). Tolkien is not even trying to pretend—except
as a game, a joke—that these are invented words.
To be noticed here is a complete reliance on surface forms of words
in which any chance similarity—and no matter how much the cri-
teria of similarity must be stretched to make the connection fit—is
sufficient to establish a connection; that is, this is a form of folk-ety-
mology, and like it is practiced in complete ignorance of and/or dis-
regard for the actual history of words.
Thus for the claimed connection between Black Speech ash nazg
‘one ring’ and Ashpenaz, Giddings and Holland feel no compunction
in jettisoning one third of the name claimed as a source and split-
ting it into two words, or in justifying the suitability of the meaning
with a wholly invented claim about Nazgûl virility. Nor indeed do
they explain how, if the phrase ash nazg ‘one ring’ owes its origin to
this name, which has no connection with rings, the same element
nazg also occurs with the meaning ‘ring’ in the name Nazgûl ‘Ring-
wraith.’ Giddings and Holland are probably right to connect Gor-
goroth ‘Terror’ with Greek gorgos, though if so the connection entered
Tolkien’s languages not at the level of this Sindarin mountain-name,
but instead at the very root level of the common Eldarin parent
language, in which indeed the selection of basic root forms do of-
ten seem to echo various elements of (particularly) Indo-European
languages. Nor is this surprising, since Tolkien selected what he re-
garded as suitable pairings of root forms with meanings in accor-
dance with his linguistic aesthetic, which was very much influenced
by many Indo-European languages, in particular Greek, Latin, and
the early Germanic languages. In fact, though, S. gorgoroth ‘terror’ is
descended from the Common Eldarin base ÑGOROTH- ‘horror,’
which is itself a strengthened and extended form of two related bas-
es, GOR- ‘violence, impetus, haste’ and GOS-, GOTH- ‘dread.’ The
connection with Greek gorgos, if indeed that is the source of Tolkien’s
aesthetic pairing of form and meaning in this case, thus lies behind

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

and beneath the surface form Gorgoroth, and is distributed among a

set of roots the forms and meanings of which relate to and vary from
one another in abstract and systematic ways that are applied to other
sets of roots as well, i.e., at the linguistic level. In a very similar way,
Arda ‘Realm’ < GAR- ‘hold, possess’ probably does owe something
to I.E. *gher- ‘grasp, enclose,’ whence garden and yard and Old English
geard; but Giddings and Holland belie their real methods in claiming
the same for S. ered ‘mountains,’ which in fact is the plural form of
orod ‘mountain,’ and so has no connection with Erde/Earth whatso-
ever. Thus, as Tolkien said of another, similar attempt at decoding
Tolkien’s nomenclature, Giddings and Holland’s claims “appear to
be unauthentic embroideries on my work, throwing light only on the
state of mind of their contrivers, not on me or on my actual intention
and procedure” (Letters 380).
7 David Lyle Jeffrey, “Tolkien as Philologist.” In Tolkien and the Invention
of Myth, edited by Jane Chance (University of Kentucky Press, 2004),
p. 78.
8 Cf. also Letters 282, and note the occurrence of “Greenleaf ” as a by-
name of Legolas in The Lord of the Rings itself.
9 On the whole, the pseudo-linguistic “decoders” seem to have taken
very much to heart the saying, attributed to Voltaire, that “etymology
is a science in which the consonants count for very little, and the vow-
els for nothing at all.” Whereas in fact, in Tolkien’s languages as in all
historical languages, every vowel and consonant is equally significant
and must be accounted for and explained in terms of the phonologi-
cal history and systematics of the language.
10 Nor am I particularly well-qualified to attempt such a chronicle, since
I myself did not join the effort until the early 1980s, and my records
of the earlier period are far from complete. This essay is also neces-
sarily limited in scope to noting, not just the chief publications and
major trends, but also only those in English, due both to the limita-
tions of space and to my own limited ability in languages other than
English, and not to any desire to slight the quality or importance of
work carried out in other languages. In particular, the Scandinavian
countries and Poland have a rich history of publications concern-
ing Tolkien’s languages, most notably: in Angerthas, the journal of
the Tolkien Society of Norway; Athelas, the journal of the Tolkien
Society of Denmark; the publications of the Mellonath Daeron of the
Swedish Tolkien Society Forodrim; and Little Gwaihir and Nyellinke El-
darin, both publications of the Polish Fantasy Club. A chronological

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 Carl F. Hostetter

notice of these and other such publications ran for many years in the
“Publications Received” department of Vinyar Tengwar, to which the
reader is referred for a more complete bibliographic overview.
11 It may be noted that this appendix to The Road Goes Ever On, together
with The Lord of the Rings, provides essentially all the information on
his languages that Tolkien published in his lifetime.
12 Now superseded by the edition of this work by Wayne G. Hammond
and Christina Scull, titled “Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings,” in
their Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2005), pp. 750–82.
13 The vowel mutation observed in S. orod ‘mountain,’ pl. ered (also eryd),
alluded to above, is another example of this type of plural forma-
tion, also conditioned by a lost, original plural ending, deduced and
eventually confirmed to be long *-ī. In Quenya, all original final long
vowels were shortened; in Sindarin, they were lost entirely, though *-ī
and *-ā both left traces of their former presence by affecting certain
vowels in preceding syllables.
14 It is this type of modeling that is meant when Tolkien and others
note that Sindarin is “based on” Welsh. The influence of Welsh on
Sindarin is found in the systematics of its phonological development
from Common Eldarin, and in the means by which it marks certain
grammatical cases and functions, not in the lexicon of the language.
15 And despite the lack of e-mail and even of word processors.
16 This is, alas, not nearly so true of the syntax of these translations,
which when not conforming strictly to one of the (all too few) pat-
terns found in Tolkien’s own compositions, tends noticeably to hew
rather slavishly to the syntax (and idiom) of the original text, or to
that of the native language of the translator.
17 It will be easy for Tolkienian linguists of the Internet age to take
access to such things for granted, but in 1982, the matter of tengwar
numerals had been a topic of considerable speculation and interest,
and so getting the answer directly from the source was very exciting,
and quite the coup for a society bulletin.
18 This attitude was part and parcel with the corresponding one with
regard to The Lord of the Rings and, later, The Silmarillion: that Tolkien
had essentially produced them in their published forms ab initio. Just
how wrong this view was, for both the legendarium and for the lan-
guages, became abundantly clearer with the publication of Tolkien’s
drafts in each new volume of The History of Middle-earth.

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

19 See An Introduction to Elvish 20 and Letters 447.

20 Unfortunately, Carpenter misquoted the poem, inadvertently mak-
ing it appear even more different from later forms of Quenya than it
actually is. The four lines of “Narqelion” given on p. 83 should read:
“Ai lintuilind(ov)a Lasselanta / Piliningwe súyer nalla qanta / Kuluvai ya kar-
nevalinar / V’ematte sinqi Eldamar”. See Christopher Gilson’s edition
and analysis of “Narqelion,” with facsimile of the holograph manu-
script, in Vinyar Tengwar, no. 40 (April 1999).
21 This stance persists today, in the presumption of a “final-form” or
“mature” Quenya and Sindarin (“of the Lord of the Rings era”) by
Helge Fauskanger and David Salo and their followers, despite the
mounting evidence of the changes undergone by Quenya and Sinda-
rin following the publication of The Lord of the Rings, of considerable
areas of stability of typological themes and derivational mechanisms,
and of the prominent role of shifts of emphasis and selection among
co-existent features and formations across conceptual stages, as op-
posed to outright rejection and replacement.
22 That is, in the lexicon and grammar. The fact of marked differences
in the phonology of the respective languages, particularly between
Goldogrin and Sindarin, was recognized and accepted from the first,
and seems never to have entered the debate. Nonetheless, as Chris-
topher Gilson has subsequently shown, despite the phonological dif-
ferences, there remain a remarkable set of core forms and gram-
matical themes and elements that retained both their phonetic shape
and meaning unchanged, or only very slightly altered, through the
nearly sixty-year course of conceptual shifts from Goldogrin through
Noldorin to Sindarin (see his essay “Gnomish is Sindarin” in Tolkien’s
Legendarium). The grammatical differences, at least, among the vari-
ous stages of Tolkien’s languages are often enough due to a change
of prominence within the languages of particular derivational and
grammatical devices (as for example of means of plural formation,
or of marking, say, the past tense of verbs), not to a complete replace-
ment of one set of grammatical devices with another from one stage
to the next.
23 In Quettar the two “camps” were typically distinguished as “Ringites”
vs. “Silmarillionists,” so called for the former’s preference of, even
exclusive insistence upon, The Lord of the Rings as a source of lin-
guistic data over that of any posthumous publications such as The
Silmarillion, since it alone was published by Tolkien himself during
his lifetime. For a succinct overview of the two “schools,” and of the

33
 Carl F. Hostetter

strengths and weaknesses of each, see Patrick Wynne’s article, “The

Unified Field Theory of Elvish” in Parma Eldalamberon 8 (1989), 2.
24 The reader may have noted that the two positions here reached a
similar view regarding the use of earlier material for vocabulary
while favoring the later grammar. But it must also be noted that they
come to this point from opposite directions, for different reasons, and
with starkly different implications: in the first, Conceptionist, case,
out of a conviction that the earlier forms of the grammar, to the
extent that they appeared or were assumed to be incompatible with
what was known, or thought to be known, of the later grammar,
can and should be disregarded as having any independent value or
bearing on the later language; but in the second, Unifist, case, out of
a practical judgment that the earlier vocabulary provided authentic
Tolkien-made forms, within the Celtic “flavor” or mode of the El-
vish languages, broadly considered, having a desired meaning, but
that the later, Sindarin exemplars provided a fuller and more usable
grammar, there being in fact at that time almost no published ex-
amples of the grammar and syntax of Goldogrin and Noldorin.
25 The correctness of this at once more cautious and more open ap-
proach has subsequently been demonstrated time and again by con-
tinuing publications from Tolkien’s papers. For example, given the
Eldarin base ES- ‘indicate, name,’ and its Q(u)enya derivatives, the
noun esse ‘name’ and the verb esta ‘to name’; and given the Sindarin
periphrastic verb estathar aen ‘should be called,’ transparently based
on a verb-stem esta- ‘to call, name’; it was until quite recently widely
taken as a given that the corresponding Sindarin noun, though (then)
unattested, must be cognate with Quenya esse and so have the form
*es(s). However, with the publication of Tolkien’s (partial) Sindarin
translation of the Lord’s Prayer, we now have the (thus far, sole) ac-
tually attested noun, eneth ‘name,’ a form that clearly does not de-
rive from ES- but instead hearkens back to various forms in en- from
Gnomish, i.e., from the earliest, circa 1917, conceptual stage of the
language that would eventually, circa 1952, become Sindarin: e.g.,
enu-, enwa- ‘am called, am named’ and entha ‘name, call, indicate,
point out’ (Parma Eldalamberon 11:32, and cf. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 44, p.
24). Here, the underlying assumption that later bases and forms like
ES- and esta- replaced corresponding elements of the earlier concep-
tual stages proved to be false, and Tolkien’s later conception proved
to preserve (or perhaps to reintroduce, though the net effect is the
same) a feature from a much earlier conceptual stage.
26 Smith also brought an abiding interest in the linguistic problems and

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

strategies of translating Tolkien’s works, and particularly the non-

Modern English element therein, into other languages, which he ex-
plored in his long-running and (as seen from the correspondence it
elicited) very popular column “Transitions in Translations” in Vinyar
Tengwar.
27 An interest Loback would long explore in his column Essitalmar (Que-
nya, ‘Roots of Names’) in Vinyar Tengwar. It is a curious fact that names
are often relegated to separate study (where not omitted entirely) in
etymological indices and dictionaries, and in historical linguistics; es-
pecially curious as names often preserve forms that have disappeared
from daily usage. Both of these facts are as true of Tolkienian as they
are of primary-world linguistics; but it is particularly odd of Tolkien-
ian linguistics as Tolkien himself seems to have had a particular inter-
est in nomenclature.
28 Actually, an adaptation of that poem, one making it more readily
fit both the Elvish milieu and the available vocabulary. In fact, the
whole endeavor is set by Martsch amidst her plea that translations
into Elvish must proceed from source material that is “suitable, both
in vocabulary and in subject matter.” I agree wholeheartedly—see
my essay “Elvish as She Is Spoke” in which I moreover suggest that
it would most fruitfully proceed from thorough, considered study of
Tolkien’s own Elvish vocabularies and attested grammar—and wish
that more would-be translators of the present Internet age would
take this plea to heart, sparing us the strained-beyond-breaking at-
tempts at “translation” of, e.g., Death Metal songs, tattoo slogans, TV
listings, and daily news reports.
29 For example, the system of verb tenses as presented in Basic Quenya
omits the aorist, which we know from posthumously published writ-
ings was a fundamental tense in that language in all its conceptual
stages, both before, during, and after the writing of The Lord of the
Rings.
30 This last work listed all of the entries in the main Dictionary in order of
its reversed spelling, so that, for example, periannath ‘hobbits’ is listed
as htannairep. This allows one to quickly find and compare all words
in the corpus that end with any given sequence of letters, and further
groups word-final morphemes just as the normal order groups word-
initial morphemes: a great boon in particular for finding derivational
and inflectional endings.
31 This brief examination of the chief pedagogy and lexicography of
the time is by no means exhaustive. Other, smaller, and in the end

35
 Carl F. Hostetter

unsustained attempts at pedagogical courses in learning or even

“speaking” Quenya also appeared, particularly in Quettar; and less
ambitious lexicons were compiled and published in these years, most
notably by Julian Bradfield and Anthony Appleyard.
32 See Mythlore 36 (Summer 1983), 20.
33 The text is presented in facsimile, with corrected readings, in Vinyar
Tengwar, no. 40 (April 1999).
34 My own interest in and study of Tolkien’s languages had largely been
pursued in limited spare time throughout high school and college,
and although I had read each volume of The History of Middle-earth
as they appeared, I had not made any serious attempts at forming
my own synthesis or systematization of all the information contained
therein, as various of the chief participants in the debate had (some,
over the course of decades). In fact, I agreed to become the editor of
Vinyar Tengwar, at Quiñónez’s invitation, largely as a means of forc-
ing myself to keep up with all the discussions and to become more
conversant with the accumulated scholarship of the previous three
decades. Certainly, I had originally no intent to write articles or any
expectation that I would or could contribute anything new to the
scholarship. I remember that initially, and particularly as I grew more
familiar with the scholarship in An Introduction to Elvish, Parma Eldalam-
beron, and Quettar, I felt that pretty much all that could be done, in
terms of analysis, deduction, and inference from the available evi-
dence, had been done: all that was left to do, it appeared to me (how
wrong I was!), was simply to collect, collate, index, and annotate all
the published materials.
This was the goal of the project, first proposed by Quiñónez, to
produce, as first conceived, a single volume, referred to in Quenya as
I Parma ‘The Book,’ that would update and extend An Introduction to
Elvish (and hopefully supplant Ruth Noel’s Languages of Middle-earth);
and then, as the scope of such an omnium-gatherum became more ap-
parent, as a series of society publications. Furthering work on I Parma
was also the chief purpose of the series of annual conferences of the
Elvish Linguistic Fellowship (“ELFcon”) that ran from 1991 to 1994.
In hindsight, it is easy to see why this project, though announced,
never came to fruition: first, the continuing publication of The History
of Middle-earth (thankfully!) brought ever more new material into con-
sideration, even as the previously-published material was still being
digested; and second, the Conceptionist/Unifist debate had made
it clear that whatever the degree of continuity or discontinuity, it
would not do either to try to present all the material as of-a-piece,

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

nor simply to ignore everything written before The Etymologies, nor

even simply to divide the materials into pre- and post-Lord of the Rings
piles and present all the materials in two large gatherings rather than
one. Instead, it became more and more apparent that the material
represented a continuum of conceptual stages, each differing from
the others to greater or lesser degree, and each also representing
a distinct Tolkienian invention, and thus a distinct Tolkienian lan-
guage, that deserved to be treated of in its own right. It was coming
to this realization, a sort of synthesis of the Conceptionist and Unifist
positions—from the former, the fact of changes and developments in
the languages over time; from the latter, the recognition that these
changes were nonetheless within a continuum flowing from, connect-
ed, and thus essentially unified by Tolkien’s linguistic aesthetic, and
that each stage of this continuum represented Tolkien linguistic aes-
thetic at that time, and was thus a language in its own right, as worthy
of study as any other stage in the continuum—that made me see just
how truly premature any attempt at collection and summation was,
and further just how much analytical work remained to be done not
only with The Etymologies, but particularly with the Lexicon materials
given in The Book of Lost Tales (which were and are still all but entirely
neglected save in the pages of Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar
and in a handful of notable articles by a small number of authors on
various web sites and forums).
35 An interest I shared and explored with Patrick Wynne in our erst-
while column “Words and Devices” in Vinyar Tengwar.
36 In a mode owing much to scholarly editions of medieval texts, a
mode which came to be labeled the “Excruciatingly Thorough Anal-
ysis” and was formerly practiced by a number of Tolkienian linguists
in various journals, and is still (as appropriate) in Parma Eldalamberon
and (frequently) in Vinyar Tengwar. I will note here the phenomenon,
at first glance seemingly paradoxical, that it is often the case that the
shorter is the text, or complex of related texts or versions of texts, to
be presented, the more apparatus is required from the editor for its
proper explication. In part, this is because longer texts and especially
complexes of related texts often are explicated chiefly by reference
to themselves, or to translations and notes that Tolkien himself was
more likely to provide for longer works, and less for shorter. Short
texts, on the other hand, are often dislocated from any context, which
must be discovered (where possible—it is not always) or hypothesized,
and presented in notes supplied by the editor. Further, even when un-
translated, longer texts lend themselves to interpretation more read-
ily by having inherently more opportunities to guess ambiguous or

37
 Carl F. Hostetter

enigmatic meanings by surrounding context than do short texts.

37 This project began quite modestly, first with the correspondences I
and Christopher Gilson maintained (independently) with Christo-
pher Tolkien, as editors of our respective journals concerned to keep
him and the Tolkien Estate aware of our publications, to ask ques-
tions about the linguistic materials already published, and in time to
begin publishing some of the materials that had previously been col-
lected from the Marquette archives. This early working relationship
resulted in a proposal by Christopher Tolkien to Christopher Gilson
to provide him with photocopies of the circa 1917 “Gnomish Lexi-
con” (from which Christopher Tolkien had quoted in the glossarial
appendices to the two volumes of The Book of Lost Tales), to produce
a complete edition of the work for publication in Parma Eldalamberon.
Gilson subsequently approached each of us in turn—as an already
established working group of like-minded colleagues (particularly
with regard to interest in all stages of Tolkien’s linguistic concep-
tions), who had moreover already had some experience in working
with Christopher Tolkien to publish materials from the archives—
to participate in this publication, with the approval of Christopher
Tolkien, who sent installments of the “GL” to us over the subsequent
months. It was not until 1992 that Christopher Tolkien proposed
expanding the scope of the project to include eventually all of his
father’s linguistic writings, for (chiefly) chronological presentation in
(chiefly) Parma Eldalamberon, with Vinyar Tengwar focusing on short-
er, fragmentary, dislocated, and/or otherwise contextually more or
less independent texts, such as those we ourselves collected from the
Tolkien archives at Marquette University and the Bodleian Library.
38 For my own part, the availability of TolkLang and, later, other Inter-
net discussion forums, has enabled me to focus Vinyar Tengwar more
and more exclusively on the publication and analysis of new primary
material from the Tolkien archives.
39 As though Tolkien’s languages, unlike natural languages, were strictly
regular, strictly logical, eschewed homonyms and synonyms, and had
a strict, one-to-one correspondence between formal categories and
grammatical function. On the contrary, ambiguity, “irregularity,”
and (from the standpoint of logic and necessity) superfluity are the
hallmarks of natural languages, and the purposeful efforts at elimi-
nating these from such constructed auxiliary languages as Esperanto
and Loglan/Lojban are what impart to those languages their highly
artificial character. Tolkien, on the other hand, was concerned spe-
cifically to construct languages that seemed to have arisen naturally,

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

and thus he deliberately built in “irregularities,” multiplicities of form

and function, and all the other supposed impediments that attempts
to synthesize “usable” forms of Quenya and Sindarin have tended to
reduce or remove.
40 Fauskanger’s first announcement of Ardalambion was made in a post to
the TolkLang list on May 15, 1997; see: http://tolklang.quettar.org/
messages/Vol24/24.49. Although Ardalambion as a whole is under the
authorship of Helge Fauskanger, he makes it plain that his presenta-
tion of Sindarin grammar, in particular, is based on and owes very
much to work shared with him by David Salo, and represents Salo’s
own conclusions.
41 http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/sindarin.htm#Heading18.
42 One of which, of a supposed “mixed conjugation” class, is extrapo-
lated on the basis of a single supposed past-tense form *dram, which
is itself unattested.
43 This was true enough at that time, though it can be noted that there
are numerous other cases of formations in Quenya and Sindarin that
have only a single attestation that have nonetheless found their way
into the accounts of those languages given on Ardalambion, sometimes
even as the basis for generating whole new paradigms.
44 See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling/message/27459. My
pointing out at that time that English manages to avoid “significant
confusion” despite the fact that -(e)d can be used to form both past-
tense verbs and passive participles (e.g. “baked”), and that -(e)s can be
used to form both plural nouns and present-tense verbs (e.g., “pass-
es”), elicited no reply (see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling-
d/message/88). Fauskanger has since removed his statement attrib-
uting mudas to an authorial or editorial error from Ardalambion, but the
gist of it is quoted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling/mes-
sage/27382. He still, however, lists the “Sindarin” past-tense form as
mudant.
45 Compiled by myself and Patrick H. Wynne and published in two
parts, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 45 (November 2003) and 46 (July 2004).
46 Fauskanger at least has taken steps over time to show more of the ac-
tual nature of the languages to his readers, and to make it clearer that
Ardalambion presents only an approximation, intentionally simplified
and regularized, of what in reality are much more complex linguistic
and historical situations. Unfortunately, as is plainly evidenced from
numerous internet discussion forums, these qualifiers are generally

39
 Carl F. Hostetter

not noticed, or at any rate not heeded, by the vast majority of Tolkien
language enthusiasts or would-be speakers of Quenya or Sindarin.
47 And it had naturally not been uncommon to construct almost entire-
ly hypothetical forms for use in Elvish translations and compositions;
but that was as an essentially artistic, not scholarly, activity.
48 This is not to say that the “Conceptionist” and “Unifist” debate did
not touch on these more fundamental issues of nature and purpose,
but it seems to me that the crux of that debate—namely, how do the
earlier materials relate to the later, and most importantly, how, if at
all, can they be used to illuminate and expand our understanding
and knowledge of the later forms of the languages—arises from a
presumption that the point of studying Tolkien’s languages is in fact
to discern somewhere in Tolkien’s writings a complete and consistent
“final version” of Quenya and Sindarin, and from the corollary pre-
sumption that it was Tolkien’s own goal to achieve such completed
versions of his languages. The “Conceptionist,” in the extreme for-
mulation, would answer that the earlier materials described funda-
mentally and irreconcilably different languages from Quenya and
Sindarin, and that those earlier versions, simply by being earlier and
different, were wholly rejected by Tolkien and wholly supplanted by
the later, “final” and “perfected” form, and so regard the earlier ma-
terials as essentially useless for understanding those languages. The
“Unifist,” in the extreme formulation, would answer that in fact all
of these materials and the forms of the languages they presented
were at least theoretically reconcilable with one another as part of a
conceptual whole, of which the various manuscripts and published
writings afforded us glimpses of various parts. But both “camps”
shared an underlying assumption that the materials—in part or in
sum, whether in just the later writings, or through reconciliation of
the whole corpus—contained, somewhere within them, a single, ar-
chetypal, “true” form of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, which it was for
each “camp” the goal and purpose, whether explicit or implicit, to
discern and to use.
49 See the announcement of the list at http://tolklang.quettar.org/mes-
sages/Vol32/32.48 and the “Purpose of List” at http://www.yari-
areth.net/David/elfing.html.
50 I have elsewhere characterized “Neo-Elvish,” and translation into
“Neo-Elvish,” in some detail, in an essay titled “Elvish as She Is
Spoke” to which this present work is very much a companion. See
the Works Cited for the reference and for a link to an online version
of the paper.

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

51 I have done so myself, most notably in the form of a “Quenya” trans-

lation of the Lord’s Prayer made with Patrick Wynne (Vinyar Tengwar,
no. 32, November 1993: http://www.elvish.org/articles/Attolma.
html). It proved to be an object lesson for us in the severe limitations
of any attempt to “use Quenya,” when we afterwards received copies
of Tolkien’s own translation of the same (published in Vinyar Tengwar
43, January 2002, and available at: http://www.elvish.org/VT/sam-
ple.html), and compared the two. Unlike Tolkien, but like everyone
else who would attempt to write in Elvish, we necessarily relied on
circumlocutions and paraphrase in the face of every want of vocabu-
lary; and like everyone else we relied ultimately on our own native
idiom and syntax to supply whatever was not evidenced in Tolkien’s
own writings: both of which, naturally and inevitably, proved to be
quite different in some key parts of the translation from Tolkien’s
own conception of Quenya idiom and syntax.
52 Again, see my discussion of this matter in “Elvish as She is Spoke.”
53 In fact, there is very good reason to think otherwise. It is frequently
asserted by the most ardent proponents of “Neo-Elvish” that the only
real hindrance to being able to “speak Elvish” is that the bulk of
Tolkien’s writings in and on his languages as yet remain unpublished.
But as Bill Welden, my colleague in editing and publishing these
writings, has shown in his article on “Negation in Quenya” (Vinyar
Tengwar 42), further publication will actually tend (as it already has)
to make the notion of Quenya and Sindarin as “known” languages
less clear-cut, as it will increasingly provide in place of one or no
“answer” to common grammatical questions, instead a multitude of
different answers from Tolkien’s own pen, even in late and closely
contemporary writings, as Tolkien tried out different ways of express-
ing various concepts, even such seemingly basic grammatical con-
cepts and categories as the definite article or the pronominal system
(both of which categories were in considerable flux even long after
the publication of The Lord of the Rings), or in such seemingly simple
functions as expressing “yes” and “no” (which in fact stand in intri-
cate and systematic relation to the broader grammar and lexicon and
so could not be simply replaced with different words without broader
disruptions). Each such scheme is just as “authoritative” as another,
yet differs in detail and at times fundamentally from each other; and
at various times each could in turn be just as unsatisfactory as the
others to Tolkien, for stated reasons fundamental to his aesthetic or
to the systematics of the larger grammar of which each part stands
in relationship; so that, as Welden concludes in his article, “the ques-
tion of whether a word or grammatical construct is ‘proper Quenya’

41
 Carl F. Hostetter

becomes, paradoxically, more uncertain the more we learn about

how Tolkien worked” (34). Thus it is that, although often pressed
to provide “the” paradigm for this or that department of grammar
by the more vocal proponents of “Neo-Elvish,” it would be not only
pointless but, worse, fundamentally misleading for us to do so, as
there is very often not just one such paradigm to be found in Tolkien’s
papers, even in the latest writings, but many differing versions, none
of which is inherently or obviously better or more authoritative than
(sometimes dozens of) others. Providing any one of these in response
to such requests would inevitably cause it to be accorded a canonicity
that would be wholly illusory and arbitrary (just as is that accorded to
many of the “known” facts of “Neo-Elvish” now).
54 Yet again, please see my discussion of this matter in “Elvish as She is
Spoke.”
55 For a particularly clear presentation of this fact of unifying thematic
variation, rather than complete discontinuity, in Tolkien’s linguistic
invention, see Christopher Gilson’s essay, “Gnomish is Sindarin,” in
Tolkien’s Legendarium. Not coincidentally, thematic variation, and nev-
er-ceasing increase or decrease in emphasis (with or without subse-
quent loss) of various grammatical mechanisms and categories, and
even some surprising resurgences of earlier themes, is fundamental
not only to Tolkien’s external process of invention, but to the internal
history of his invented languages (as indeed to the history of all natu-
ral languages as well).
56 Attitudes that are at this writing unfortunately still quite prominently
in evidence on Ardalambion, and still emanating from it into the rest of
the discussion of Tolkien’s languages on the Internet.
57 It is a curious fact that, as I write this, the whole of Tolkien’s writ-
ings on (and in) his Elvish languages from their inception through the
mid-1920s having been published—including the two most extensive
lexicons he ever made, by far (both in number and in scope of en-
tries), and a succinct but more or less complete grammar of Qenya
as it stood circa 1925—nonetheless almost nothing has been written
either in or about those forms of the languages by anyone outside
those engaged in the editing and publication of these materials, save
for a very few, bright exceptions in the works of Ivan Derzhanski and
Thorsten Renk. Instead, following the lead of the chief proponents
of “Neo-Elvish,” these materials are quite studiously ignored save as
sources of “needed vocabulary” for the neo-languages. This is espe-
cially ironic in that Tolkien’s earliest Qenya and Gnomish lexicons are
both far larger and—for reasons having largely to do with increasing

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

remoteness of the imagined time of the fictional milieu from our own
as Tolkien developed and expanded the legendarium—endowed with a
much broader and more quotidian vocabulary than The Etymologies.
So it is that these two earliest lexicons not infrequently provide the
only authentically Tolkienian form conveying a meaning desired for
the sorts of translations now most commonly attempted by would-be
speakers of Elvish—which are often quite mundane if not banal, and
usually quite removed from the milieu (and thus the vocabulary) in
which Tolkien set his languages.
58 Most notably at Thorsten Renk’s website, Parma Tyelpelassiva (Que-
nya, ‘Book of Silver Leaves’).
59 Nor are these alterations of Tolkien’s glosses minor matters, as they
are used as the basis for most of Salo’s lengthy and seemingly descrip-
tive account of compound types in Sindarin. See Patrick Wynne’s
thorough account of this rather startling fact in his December 4, 2004
post, “Inaccurate translations in David Salo's A Gateway to Sindarin,”
to the Lambengolmor mailing list at: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/
group/lambengolmor/message/765.
60 Edited, published, and first analyzed by Bill Welden (though Salo
neglects to note or credit that fact) in Vinyar Tengwar 44 (June 2002):
21–30, 38.
61 Salo also continues with the unsupported assertion that “Tolkien’s
handwritten capital C and capital G are very similar.” As someone
who has been reading Tolkien’s manuscripts for almost two decades
now, I must say this supposed feature of Tolkien’s handwriting comes
as a surprise to me. In any event, as anyone who wishes to can plainly
see from the facsimile of Ae Adar Nín that accompanies Welden’s pre-
sentation and analysis of the text, there is no question whatsoever
that Tolkien in fact wrote bo Ceven, not bo Geven. See the cover of this
volume.
62 See my elaboration of these points of Sindarin grammar in my post
to the Lambengolmor list of November 26, 2004 at: http://tech.groups.
yahoo.com/group/lambengolmor/message/761.
63 For a more thorough review of A Gateway to Sindarin by someone in-
timately familiar with Tolkien’s languages, I highly recommend that
by Thorsten Renk at http://www.phy.duke.edu/~trenk/elvish/salo_
discussion.html.
64 See Thorsten Renk’s reconsideration of “The Sindarin Verb Sys-
tem” in light of this work at: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~trenk/elv-
ish/verbs.html.

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 Carl F. Hostetter

WORKS CITED
Allan, Jim, ed. An Introduction to Elvish. Frome, Somerset, UK: Bran’s
Head Books, 1978.
Appleyard, Anthony. “Quenya Grammar Reexamined.” First version,
in four parts, as TolkLang messages 3.01, 3.04, 3.06, and 3.08,
February 24, 1992, archived at http://tolklang.quettar.org/
messages/Vol3/. Most recent version, 1995, archived at http://
tolklang.quettar.org/articles/Appleyard.Quenya.
Beyond Bree. Newsletter edited by Nancy Martsch. http://www.cep.unt.
edu/bree.html.
Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1977.
Elfling. Internet mailing list. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling.
Fauskanger, Helge. Ardalambion. Web site. http://www.uib.no/People/
hnohf/.
Giddings, Robert and Elizabeth Holland. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Shores of
Middle-earth. London: Junction Books, 1981.
Hostetter, Carl F. “Elvish as She Is Spoke.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954-
2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne
G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 2006: 231–55. Also available at http://www.
elvish.org/articles/EASIS.pdf.
Hyde, Paul Nolan. Linguistic Techniques Used in Character Development in the
Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. 3 vols. Dissertation. West Lafayette, IN:
Purdue University, 1982.
———. A Working Reverse Dictionary. Simi Valley, CA: n.p., 1989.
———. A Working Tolkien Glossary. 7 vols. Simi Valley, CA: n.p., 1989.
Lambengolmor. Internet mailing list. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/
lambengolmor/.
Noel, Ruth S. The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1980.
Parma Eldalamberon. Journal currently edited by Christopher Gilson.
http://www.eldalamberon.com/parma15.html.
Quettar. Journal last edited by Julian Bradfield. http://tolklang.quettar.
org/quetinfo.

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 Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years

Renk, Thorsten. Parma Tyelpelassiva. Web site. http://www.phy.duke.

edu/~trenk/elvish/.
Salo, David. A Gateway to Sindarin. Salt Lake City: University of Utah
Press, 2004.
Tengwestië. Online journal edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick H.
Wynne. http://www.elvish.org/Tengwestie/.
TolkLang. Internet mailing list. http://tolklang.quettar.org/.
Vinyar Tengwar. Journal currently edited by Carl F. Hostetter. http://www.
elvish.org/VT/.

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING

Primary works
This list is not exhaustive. Its purpose is to point to the chief texts
available to provide the interested reader with an overview, in Tolkien’s
own words, of the principal aspects and problems of his invented lan-
guages, their purpose and use, and their development (both internal and
external).

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Appendix E.” In LotR.

———. “Appendix F.” In LotR.
———. Dangweth Pengoloð. In Peoples.
———. “Drafts for a letter to ‘Mr Rang.’” In Letters 379–87.
———. “The Early Qenya Grammar.” In Parma Eldalamberon 14 (2003):
35–86.
———. The Etymologies. In Lost Rad.
———. The Lhammas. In Lost Road.
———. Lowdham’s Report on the Adunaic Language. In Sauron.
———. “Notes on Óre.” In Vinyar Tengwar 41 (July 2000):11–19.
———. Ósanwe-kenta: ‘Enquiry into the Communication of Thought.’ In Vinyar
Tengwar 39 (July 1998): 21–34.
———. The Problem of Ros. In Peoples.
———. Quendi and Eldar. In War.

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 Carl F. Hostetter

———. “From Quendi and Eldar, Appendix D.” In Vinyar Tengwar 39 (July
1998): 4–20.
———. “To Rhona Beare.” In Letters 277-84.
———. “To Richard Jeffery.” In Letters 424–28.
———. The Road Goes Ever On. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.
———. “A Secret Vice.” In MC.
———. The Shibboleth of Fëanor. In Peoples.
———. “From The Shibboleth of Fëanor.” In Vinyar Tengwar 41 (July 2000):
7–10.

Secondary works
Articles
Gilson, Christopher. “Gnomish Is Sindarin.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium:
Essays on the History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F.
Hostetter. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000: 95–104.
Hostetter, Carl F. “Elvish Compositions and Grammars.” In The J.R.R.
Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D. C. Drout .New York:
Routledge, 2006: 155-59.
———. “Languages Invented by Tolkien.” In The J.R.R. Tolkien
Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D. C. Drout .New York: Routledge,
2006: 332-43.
Welden, Bill. “Negation in Quenya.” In Vinyar Tengwar 42 (July 2001):
32–34. See also his letter of comment in Vinyar Tengwar 44 (June
2002): 4, 38.
WEB SITES
Resources for Tolkienian Linguistics http://www.elvish.org/resources.
html.
CONFERENCE
Omentielva. 2005–. Biennial international conference, with planned pro-
ceedings in the series Arda Philology (forthcoming). http://www.
omentielva.com/.

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