Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing

Language in The Lord of The Rings

In 1962, Anthony Burgess published A Clockwork Orange, a futuristic morality tale dealing with the futility of using aversion therapy in trying to rehabilitate criminals. Critics have often praised the work for being bold and imaginative—in particular because Burgess creates his own slang. It seems that at the time, the idea that our language would evolve in the future and that a writer took that into account was something of a literary breakthrough.

Yet Tolkien did something far more involved than come up with half a dozen neologisms and a couple of shifts in syntax. Tolkien began to play with languages in a way that few have ever done, and all of this deals with resonance. So it bothers me when I hear modern writers refer to what Tolkien did as a "literary stunt," while many of those same folks would hail Anthony Burgess as a genius.

Let me see if I can explain what Tolkien did. Right now I am writing in English. It's a rather large language, primarily because it borrows from so many other languages. Throughout history, England has been conquered by a number of peoples—the Danes, the Normans, the Norse, the Anglo-Saxons, the Romans, and so on. With each invasion, the nobility and even some of the commoners adopted the language of the conquerors, so that often when we speak, we have a choice of several different words to choose from, each borrowed from a separate tongue, that all have roughly the same meaning.

But of course, we don't need words to mean the same, so we assign slightly different definitions to the words—we give them nuances. Thus, as the sun falls behind the hills we might say that it is "evening," "twilight," "dusk," "gloaming," "sunset," or "nightfall." In each of our minds, we develop a sense of gradations that probably don't exist in most other languages. In my mind, evening is brighter than gloaming. Twilight is right in the middle of the act. Sunset is the moment when the sun is gone from the sky, and so on.

Added to this barrage of conquerors, England sometimes became home to various refugees—such as Gypsies, Moors, and Jews—and England was also visited by traders and missionaries from other nations, so that the language absorbed terms this way.

Then of course, as the English empire spread across the world, people came in contact with dozens of other cultures throughout Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, and when a word was found that was useful, that word fell into common usage in English. Thus we have words like "desert," which was borrowed from the Arabs. The English language didn't require such a term—there are no deserts in England.

The result is that today there are over two million words in the English language by some estimates, when you take into account all of the various terms used in specialized trades like law, medicine, the sciences, and so on.

By contrast, most cultures get by with far fewer words. If you are living in a village in the Pacific islands where your society has had no contact with the outside world, you don't need a huge vocabulary. You don't need words like "engine," "printing press," or "processors." Some languages have fewer than ten thousand words total. Often, new words are created in such languages by simply stacking existing nouns. A fellow once told me that in one Asian country where he lived, the word for white man was, "pigs that walk on two feet and talk, ha, ha!"

So English has absorbed a large number of languages, and of course linguists realized long ago that words from different cultures tend to have various effects upon us emotionally. A person who uses a large number of Latinate words while speaking is often considered to be something of an egghead. A person who uses French too much may seem pretentious. Words from Old Dutch or Old Norse are often considered crude.

As a philologist, Tolkien noted the influence that such words had upon his readers. As he began writing The Lord of the Rings, he realized that his Hobbits, his Men, his Elves, Orcs, Trolls, Dwarves, and so on would all need to have their own languages. Since, according to old German legend, the Elves and Dwarves were both offshoots of the same race, he initially decided to create languages for them that had Old German and Old Norse roots, while his Hobbits spoke a language with Old English roots.