You can’t learn to speak JRR Tolkien’s Elvish because he didn’t want you to

On November 29, 1931, JRR Tolkien introduced the world to Middle-earth—the most important part of it, anyway. The Hobbit would not be published for another six years. The Lord of the Ring was still decades away. But on that autumn evening, when the famous philologist presented a paper entitled “A secret vice,“He revealed his Elvish languages ​​for the first time.

Elves are at the heart of Tolkien’s mythology and this is evident throughout the latest film adaptation of his work, Prime Video’s The Rings of PowerQuenya, which Tolkien describes as a kind of “Elvish Latin,” is reserved mostly for names, formal phrases, and poetry — Gil-galad’s song in the Season 2 premiere, “Golden leaves,” is a Quenya composition, for example. Sindarin, the everyday language of the Elves, is what Elrond and Galadriel speak when they argue over the use of the Three Rings in the same episode, and what Celebrimbor’s protégé, Mirdania, reverts to when discussing her disturbing visions with Sauron.

And yet, as important as these languages ​​are to Middle-earth, Tolkien never “finished” Quenya or Sindarin—nor did he ever intend to. As a result, Tolkien Elvish is not something you can learn to speak, at least not with anything approaching fluency. You can use Tolkien’s material to compose simple Elvish sentences and short verses, but also profound conversations and longer compositions, such as those in The Rings of Powerrequire so much extrapolation, inference, and ingenuity that it is difficult to consider the results as Tolkien’s Elves at all.

While Quenya and Sindarin are ‘consciously personalized and offer personal satisfaction’, they do not stay private. The first two books of The Lord of the Ring in 1954, and readers began to decipher the Elvish language in it almost immediately. Eventually, they also tried to figure out how to speak and write it. first book in which Elvish is supposedly taught appeared in 1974; others followed. Today, Quenya and Sindarin can be found in movies, TV shows, video games, tabletop RPGs, how-to books, and more — none of which were written by Tolkien.

In “A Secret Vice,” Tolkien confesses that he has been constructing “imaginary languages ​​in their entirety or in broad outline for fun” since he was a teenager. He shares four early Elvish poemsand explains how constructed languages ​​are intimately tied to mythology. Real languages ​​develop over time, Tolkien argues, so invented languages ​​need a fictional history to maintain an “individual flavor” and the “illusion of coherence and unity.” That’s why Tolkien created Middle-earth: his languages ​​needed a home.

The most striking part of “A Secret Vice,” however, isn’t the early preview of Tolkien’s legendarium. It’s what the article reveals about his motivations for creating languages ​​in the first place. As Tolkien wrote in a letter he wrote to a fan in 1967, “this process of invention was/is a private enterprise undertaken to give myself pleasure by expressing my personal linguistic ‘aesthetic’ or taste and its fluctuations.” He was not trying to invent a new form of communication. Rather, Tolkien was experimenting with the artistic possibilities of a language that was not communicative. Other speakers would only have been in the way.

In Tolkien’s mythology, there are about 11 Elvish languages, all descended from a common ancestor. However, he only developed two of them in any real depth. Quenya came first; Tolkien began work on his High Elvish language in 1915. Sindarin has a more complicated lineage. In 1917, Tolkien began developing Gnomeor Goldogrin, a language with a clear Welsh influence. The author rediscovered Gnomish as Noldorin in the 1920s and 1930s, retaining the Celtic flavor but drastically changing the structure; the language kept that name until Tolkien was deep into writing The Lord of the Ringwhen he named the language Sindarin and gave it a new fictional history.

Interestingly, neither language was complete when Tolkien began documenting the fictional history of the Elves. In fact, evidence suggests that Elvish and Middle-earth grew up together. Tolkien wrote the first poem featuring a character from Middle-earth in 1914, a year before Quenya (then known as Qenya) appeared on the scene. earliest known Quenyan document is already full of famous names.

As with his fiction, Tolkien revised and refined Quenya and Sindarin until his death in the early 1970s. He changed his mind often and left behind a tangle of notes for scholars to untangle. In the article “Elven as she speaks,” Tolkien scholar and The Rings of Power Language consultant Carl F. Hostetter notes that Tolkien rarely finished the descriptive grammars he began. When he did, they were riddled with amendments and corrections, almost demanding new drafts.

Nearly every original Elvish composition Tolkien wrote introduced new ideas into the mix or changed existing rules. His explanations for the linguistic origins of many words, including names like Aragorn and Galadriel, changed frequently.

As a result, there is no stable version of either Quenya or Sindarin to learn, speak, or translate. There are multiple iterations of both, but they are all incomplete, and they are spread across multiple documents, many of which have not yet been made public. You can do what scholars like Hostetter do, and trace the evolution of the languages ​​over time, but there is no fixed, definitive edition of either to study.

But again, Tolkien wasn’t out to create a practical language for the real world. “A Secret Vice” makes it clear that he viewed his languages ​​as works of art, using them to express his personal ideas of beauty. Tolkien liked languages ​​that sounded good, even when divorced from their meaning — he expressed a fondness for Finnish and Welsh for this reason — but he was motivated even more by a “resourcefulness in the relations between symbol and signification.” In other words, he liked strong connections between the sounds of a word and its meaning, a concept known in linguistics as “sound symbolism.”

Given the random state of information Tolkien left behind, there are infinite ways to create Elvish dialogues. For the feature film adaptations of The Hobbit And The Lord of the Ring, A gateway to Sindarin Author David Salo took a history-focused approach that focused on maintaining consistency with Elvish in the novels. “I tried to do something that would be accessible to fans of Tolkien’s languages,” he told me in an interview for this piece. “If they looked at something I’d written, they might say, ‘Oh, that looks familiar.'”

First, Salo established Sindarin as it was in The Lord of the Ring as his baseline. Whenever possible, he tried to use that. However, when he found gaps, he went back to earlier iterations of the language and then rebuilt what he needed by adding Sindarin’s subsequent transformations. The final product ideally feels contemporary with The Lord of the Ringeven though it doesn’t come directly from Tolkien himself.

This method required a fair amount of inference and extrapolation, as well as some outright creation. Some of Tolkien’s ideas were inevitably discarded along the way. Furthermore, the output is inevitably influenced by Salo’s own tastes and opinions. Other people would probably make different decisions and end up with different, equally valid results.

Can we Real Name the versions of Quenya and Sindarin that appear in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and The Rings of Power Tolkien’s languages? Strictly speaking, no — not if Tolkien’s Elvish language is intended to express his personal aesthetic taste. There is only one person who knows that information, and he died in 1973.

But Elvish is not really Tolkien’s anymore. It belongs to everyone who reads The Lord of the Ring and is blinded by its linguistic possibilities. A shared cultural object may be the opposite of what Tolkien was trying to create, but that is what he ultimately got – and like any other shared language, Quenya and Sindarin evolve over time.

Ultimately, Salo thinks Tolkien would be flattered that his “secret vice” has captured the imaginations of others. “I think he would be critical in various ways, but I don’t think he would be offended,” Salo said. “He would also realize that, in the process of breaking away from both his own thoughts and the fictional world that he created, (Elvish) became its own thing. It became something different than what it was when it left his pen.”