Editing J. R. R. Tolkien (section)

== Languages and philology ==
=== Linguistic career ===

{{further|Philology and Middle-earth}}

Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and [[philology]]. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated with [[Old Norse]] as his special subject. He worked on the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'' from 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including ''[[walrus]]'', over which he struggled mightily.<ref>{{cite book |last=Winchester |first=Simon |title=The meaning of everything: the story of the Oxford English dictionary |date=2003 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-860702-4 |location=Oxford |oclc=52830480}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Gilliver |first=Peter |title=The ring of words: Tolkien and the Oxford English dictionary |date=2006 |publisher=Oxford University Press |others=Jeremy Marshall, E. S. C. Weiner |isbn=978-0-19-861069-4 |location=Oxford |oclc=65197968}}</ref> In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at the [[University of Leeds]], where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of [[linguistics]] from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English [[heroic verse]], [[history of English]], various [[Old English]] and [[Middle English]] texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory [[Germanic languages|Germanic]] philology, [[Gothic language|Gothic]], [[Old Icelandic]], and [[Middle Welsh language|Medieval Welsh]]. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at [[Pembroke College, Oxford]], he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "[[Viking revival|Viking Club]]".<ref group="T">{{harvnb|Carpenter|Tolkien|1981|loc=''Letters'' #7, to the Electors of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford, 27 June 1925}}</ref> He had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of [[Finnish language|Finnish]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Grotta |first=Daniel |title=J.R.R. Tolkien: architect of Middle Earth |date=1976 |others=Frank Wilson |isbn=0-914294-29-6 |publisher=Running Press |location=Philadelphia |oclc=1991974}}</ref>

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of [[Race (classification of human beings)|racial]] and linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lecture ''[[English and Welsh]]'', which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak.<ref>{{cite book |last=Scull |first=Christina |title=The J.R.R. Tolkien companion & guide |date=2006 |publisher=HarperCollins Publishers |others=Wayne G. Hammond |isbn=0-261-10381-4 |location=Hammersmith, London |page=249 |oclc=82367707}}</ref> He considered the [[West Midlands (region)|West Midlands]] dialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", and, as he wrote to [[W. H. Auden]] in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)."<ref group="T">{{harvnb|Carpenter|Tolkien|1981|loc=''Letters'' #163 to [[W. H. Auden]], 7 June 1955.}}</ref>

=== Language construction ===

{{See also|Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien}}

Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for [[constructed languages|constructing languages]]. The most developed of these are [[Quenya]] and [[Sindarin]], the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's ''legendarium''. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of [[aesthetics]] and [[euphony]], and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elven-latin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek.<ref name="letter144" group="T">{{harvnb|Carpenter|Tolkien|1981|loc=''Letters'' #144 to Naomi Mitchison, 25 April 1954.}}</ref>

Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of [[International auxiliary language|auxiliary languages]]: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture ''[[A Secret Vice]]'',<ref>{{cite web |last=Corsetti |first=Renato |date=31 January 2018 |title=Tolkien's 'Secret Vice' |url=http://blogs.bl.uk/european/2018/01/tolkiens-secret-vice.html |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180204082940/http://blogs.bl.uk/european/2018/01/tolkiens-secret-vice.html |archive-date=4 February 2018 |website=British Library}}</ref> "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he had concluded that "[[Volapük]], [[Esperanto]], [[Ido (language)|Ido]], [[Novial]], &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".<ref name="letter180" group="T">{{harvnb|Carpenter|Tolkien|1981|loc=''Letters'' #180 to 'Mr Thompson' (draft), 14 January 1956.}}</ref>

The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which now commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings ''dwarves'' and ''dwarvish'' (alongside ''dwarfs'' and ''dwarfish''), which had been little used since the mid-19th century and earlier. (In fact, according to Tolkien, had the [[Old English]] plural survived, it would have been ''dwarrows'' or ''dwerrows''.) He coined the term ''[[eucatastrophe]]'', used mainly in connection with his own work.<ref>{{cite news |last=Fisher |first=Richard |title=Eucatastrophe: Tolkien's word for the "anti-doomsday" |url=https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221005-eucatastrophe-tolkiens-word-for-the-anti-doomsday |year=2022 |access-date=9 February 2023 |work=[[BBC]]}}</ref>