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I have officially forgotten everything about BB7

Oh, Sam!

Sam-Sa+I+ogen=Imogen!! OMG IT'S ALL FALLING INTO PLACE!!

Glyn was a racist prick with a small penis and a lazy eye. I remember that much.
 
One thing was important to Tolkien. Languages should be beautiful. Their sound should be pleasing. Tolkien tasted languages, and his taste was finely tuned. Latin, Spanish and Gothic were pleasing. Greek was great. Italian was wonderful. But French, often hailed as a beautiful language, gave him little pleasure.

But heaven itself was called Welsh. In his essay "English and Welsh", Tolkien recalls how he once saw the words Adeiladwyd 1887 (It was built 1887) cut on a stone-slab. It was a revelation of beauty. "It pierced my linguistic heart," he recalls. It turned out that Welsh was full of such wonderful words. Tolkien found it difficult to communicate to others what really was so great about them, but in his essay he makes an honest attempt: "Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant." He then lists concrete examples like Welsh wybren being "more pleasing" than English sky. -MC p. 190-193.

But there were more pleasures in store for young Tolkien. One day he found...a Finnish grammar!!! He soon found himself in phonaesthetic ecstasy. "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me" (Letters:214). High on Finnish he scrapped his latest project ("make your own Germanic language"), for now he had found more powerful inspirations.

Many years later, he stated that the Elvish tongues were "intended (a) to be definitely of a European kind in style and structure (not in detail); and (b) to be specially pleasant. The former is not difficult to achieve, but the latter is more difficult, since individuals' personal predilections, especially in the phonetic structure of languages, varies [sic] widely... I have therefore pleased myself" (Letters:175-176). This in effect meant that from the point he discovered Welsh and Finnish, they were the main influences on his own linguistic constructions.

Of course, he was right in observing that individual taste varies widely. The Welsh language that he loved so much and modeled Sindarin on, was once described as "a mass of grunts and gargling sounds" by a Norwegian radio reporter. Still, many people seem to agree that the Elvish tongues are generally euphonious. Tolkien registrered positive feedback: "The names of persons and places in this story were mainly composed on patterns deliberately modelled on those of Welsh (closely similar but not identical). This element in the tale has given perhaps more pleasure to more readers than anything else in it" (MC:197).

But we are leaping ahead of things; let us return to the very beginning. While World War I was still raging, Tolkien's linguistic constructions definitely became Elvish languages. On March 2nd, 1916, 24-year-old Tolkien wrote to his beloved Edith telling her that he had been working on his "nonsense fairy language - to its improvement. I often long to work at it and don't let myself 'cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby!" Mad or not, he was to give in to his longing and keep working on this hobby throughout his life. - Letters:8.

Exactly at this point, in 1916, while Tolkien was in hospital having survived the Battle of Somme, the very first parts of his "mythology for England" were written - fragments of what would one day become the Silmarillion. At the same time, or rather a little before, he wrote his first Elvish word-lists. One thing triggered the other: "The making of language and mythology are related functions," he observed in A Secret Vice. "Your language construction will breed a mythology" (MC:210-211). Or again in a letter written many years later, shortly after the publication of LotR: "The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows... [LotR] is to me...largely an essay in 'linguistic aesthetic', as I sometimes say to people who ask me 'what is it all about?' " (Letters:219-220) Few people took this explanation seriously. "Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real," Tolkien complained. "But it is true." - Letters:264.

From the very beginning, there were two main languages in his mythology: one that sounded much like Finnish, and one that was similar to Welsh. Unlike their inspirations, they were related and were derived from a common primitive language. The Finnish-like language was called "Qenya" right from the start; a small spelling reform was all that stood between it and its final name. The other language was originally called Golgodrin or "Gnomish", it was i-Lam na-Ngoldathon or "the tongue of the Gnomes". (Its later form, so heavily revised that it was not really the "same" language, was long called Noldorin; only as Tolkien was completing LotR did he realize that its real name was Sindarin. But see below.) The first Gnomish lexicon was published a few years ago and turns out to be very comprehensive, probably the most complete "dictionary" Tolkien ever made for any Elvish language. The "Qenya" word-list was finally published in 1998 and turns out to be another very comprehensive document, as can be seen from the indices presented on this web-page (whether by English glosses or Qenya words).

The years passed by and the stories of the Silmarillion evolved, but it seems that the relevance of the original dictionaries soon dwindled: Frequent revisions inevitably rendered them obsolete. In the second half of the thirties, however, Tolkien made a list of some seven hundred Primitive Elvish "stems" and some of their derivatives in later languages. It was apparently this list, the so-called Etymologies, he was referring to when he started to write The Lord of the Rings (he added to the list some words and names from this work, e.g. mith "grey" and rhandir "pilgrim", that together give Mithrandir). The Etymologies was published in its entirety by Christopher Tolkien in The Lost Road p. 347-400. A fairly typical entry goes like this:


MBUD- project. *mbundu: Q mundo snout, nose, cape; N bund, bunn. Cf. *andambundâ long-snouted, Q andamunda elephant, N andabon, annabon.

Here we have several archaic forms (duly asterisked as "unattested") plus the descendants of these forms is Q (Quenya) and N ("Noldorin", read: Sindarin). This brings us over to the technique used by Tolkien in devising his linguistic creations. How was it done?
 
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