Dirk Vanderbeke - Language Lore and Learning in 'The Lord of the Rings' (original) (raw)
Related papers
In The Two Towers, Aragorn describes the people of Rohan as “wise but unlearned,” an unlettered, non-literate culture nevertheless possessesed of its own wisdom, valued for its own sake. By contrast, the highly literate, indeed archival, culture of Gondor possesses large stores of written wisdom, lost to all but a few of Gondor’s inhabitants. Inevitably, it is the oral, folk-wisdom of Gondor that best prepares the way for the King and provides for healing of the wounds of Middle Earth. The contrast between these two cultures is indicative of a larger, often overlooked element of Lord of the Rings, words as repositories of wisdom, and in particular the necessity of bridging the gaps between oral and literate modes of wisdom for the greater good of Middle Earth. By stressing the cooperation of peoples possessing oral or literate wisdom while also portraying “levels” of literacy in society, Tolkien anticipates the orality-literacy theories of Walter Ong and scholarly reactions that favor a “continuum” model over a strictly dichotomous relationship between orality and literacy, which often favors literacy. My paper traces representations of literate, semi-literate and non-literate cultures in Lord of the Rings in order to emphasize their connection to contemporary orality-literacy theory.
The religion and the magic of language in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
Seven: An Anglo-American Review
Then God said, "Let the waters under the heavens be gath ered together into one place, and let the dry land appear," and it was so. -Genesis [W]e make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker. -J.R.R. Tolkien
Stolen Language, Cosmic Models: Myth and Mythology in Tolkien
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2005
Much has been written about J. R. R. Tolkien's mythology, and an article on "Tolkien and Myth" might seem to run the risk of simply repeating what has been said many times before. The roots of Tolkien's mythology in Northern myth and linguistic study, as well as the traces of Christianity in his work, have been the subject of many articles and books, as have his personal statements about his desire to create a mythology for England (see Tolkien, Letters 144-45). But not only the question of how Tolkien's mythology was created should be attended to; surely equally important is the question of why and to what end. Myth's function both in Tolkien's secondary world and beyond it should become the subject of scrutiny. The study of myth, and indeed what is understood by that term, has changed enormously in the fifty years since the publication of The Lord of the Rings, and many influential critics have provided us with new and fascinating ways to analyze myth and its position in literature. This study will focus mainly upon theoretical structuralist perspectives and relate them to Tolkien's work. The question of why the use of myth in literature became so popular in the twentieth century will also be addressed and Tolkien's use of it compared to that made by other twentieth-century writers, particularly some of the modernists. A glance at modernism's "mythical method" (Eliot, Selected Prose 177), relating them to Tolkien's work, reveals some surprising simi-
An Analysis of Purpose and Relative Distance among J.R.R. Tolkien's invented languages
2020
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien did not create his many fictional languages so that his fiction may live, but rather created the fictional stories so that his languages may live. It could then be argued that his Middle-Earth saga is predominantly a language study. Deeming it thus, the question I pose is whether the languages Tolkien created for his series of novels are intrinsically related to the language of the common speech, English, and if so, how does this common speech affect the development of the fictional languages? If we regard the language of the Rohirrim as a linguistic mutation of English, how might it be crafted for, say, a French audience with French as the common speech? This dissertation will investigate the extent to which Tolkien's mother tongue influenced the creation of his series of fictitious languages. We shall see how each of his invented languages relates to the language in which the books are written. Examining and disputing some of the findings of other Tolkien scholars, we will discover the purpose of his languages and how translation of the books ought to see translation of the fictional languages. This will lead us to the conclusion that his languages were created first with Middle-earth having been created to give the former somewhere to exist. Pursuing equivalent effect, a translation without altering Elvish et al. will not see this brought to fruition.
How to Do Things with Words: Tolkien' s Theory of Fantasy in Practice
After his St Andrews lecture on ‘Fairy Stories’ Tolkien projected his theory of sub-creation into his legendarium. In this projection the theory of what the human sub-creator does with thought and words became a model for what miraculous and magical beings can do with spirit and matter. For example, Fëanor’s making of the Silmarils and Sauron’s forging of the Ring were conceived (or in the first case, re-conceived) as acts analogous to human fantasy. Middle-earth thus became a world in which the magical potential of human words is revealed in the visible being of magical things.
The Lord of The Rings: Linguistic Aesthetics and a Mirror to the Past
2020
A short essay on Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" tracing the more specific concept of lámatyáve (phonetic fitness) as seen in the languages of Middle Earth, and the more genetic concept of language as a window to the historical past, as seen in Tolkien's pseudo-history of linguistic development of Middle-Earth's languages.