Lhammas

From his schooldays, J. R. R. Tolkien was in his biographer John Garth's words "effusive about philology"; his schoolfriend Rob Gilson called him "quite a great authority on etymology".{{sfn|Garth|2003|p=16}} Tolkien was a professional philologist, a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics. He was especially familiar with Old English and related languages. He remarked to the poet and The New York Times book reviewer Harvey Breit that "I am a philologist and all my work is philological"; he explained to his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that this was meant to imply that his work was

{{blockquote|all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. ... 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."{{harvnb|Carpenter|2023|loc=#165 to Houghton Mifflin, 30 June 1955 }}}}

The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that{{sfn|Flieger|1983|pp=5–7}}

{{blockquote|it is important to remember that all of Tolkien's studies, the focus of his profession, was a concentration on the importance of the word. His profession as philologist and his vocation as writer of fantasy/theology overlapped and mutually supported one another".{{sfn|Flieger|1983|pp=5–7}} }}

In other words, Flieger writes, Tolkien "did not keep his knowledge in compartments; his scholarly expertise informs his creative work."{{sfn|Flieger|1983|pp=5–7}} This expertise was founded, in her view, on the belief that one knows a text only by "properly understanding [its] words, their literal meaning and their historical development."{{sfn|Flieger|1983|pp=5–7}}

Tolkien is best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, both set in Middle-earth.{{sfn|Carpenter|1977|pp=111, 200, 266 and throughout}} He created a family of invented languages for Elves, carefully designing the differences between them to reflect their distance from their imaginary common origin. He stated that his languages led him to create the invented mythology of The Silmarillion, to provide a world in which his languages could have existed. In that world, the splintering of the Elvish peoples mirrored the fragmentation of their languages.{{sfn|Shippey|2001|pp=228–231}}{{sfn|Flieger|1983|pp=65–87}}

The {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}} was written in 1937. It exists in three versions. The two long versions, A and B, are closely similar, so Christopher Tolkien published B in The Lost Road and Other Writings, annotating it with A's minor variations on the text. The third, latest, and much the shortest version is the {{Transliteration|sjn|Lammasathen}}.{{sfn|Fimi|2009|pp=73, 102}}

The {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}} as published presents the theory that all the languages of Middle-earth descend from the language of the angelic beings or Valar, Valarin, and were divided into three branches:{{harvnb|Tolkien|1987|loc=Part 2, chapter 5, "The Lhammas"}}

• Oromëan, named after Oromë, who taught the first Elves to speak. All languages of Elves and most languages of Men are Oromëan.
• Aulëan, named after Aulë, maker of the Dwarves, is the origin of the Khuzdul language. It has had some influences on the tongues of Men.
• Melkian, named after the rebellious Melkor or Morgoth, is the origin in the First Age of the many tongues used by the Orcs and other evil beings. (This tongue is unrelated to the Black Speech of Sauron.)

{{anchor|Tree of Tongues}}

File:Lhammas_Tree_of_Tongues.jpg becomes the language of the Elvish city of Gondolin in Beleriand; it would have had to evolve extremely rapidly to do so. Soon after the image was made, Tolkien radically reconstructed the history of the languages and of the Noldor Elves to make the language evolution fit the timeline better.{{sfn|Welden|2023|pp=12–29}}]]

The Elves developed the language they were taught into the language of the Laiquendi (Green-Elves) and Eldarin, the shared language of the Eldar. This in turn gave rise to the languages of the three divisions of the Eldar, Lindarin, Noldorin, and Telerin. What Tolkien called 'Elf-Latin', Qenya, the classical and ancient language of the Eldar, derived from Lindarin with influence from Noldorin.

The {{Transliteration|sjn|Ósanwe-kenta}}, or Enquiry into the Communication of Thought, was written as a typescript of eight pages, probably in 1960, and was first published in {{Transliteration|qya|Vinyar Tengwar}} (39) in 1998. Within its fictional context, a frame story, the text is presented as a summary by an unnamed editor of the last chapter of the {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}}. The subject-matter is "direct thought-transmission" (telepathy), or {{Transliteration|sjn|sanwe-latya}} "thought-opening" in Quenya. Pengolodh included it as last chapter to the Lhammas because of the implications of spoken language on thought-transmission, and since the Incarnates (Elves, and Men) use a spoken language, telepathy can become more difficult with time (cf. hröa).Ósanwe-kenta, or Enquiry into the Communication of Thought, Vinyar Tengwar, issue 39, 1998

{{further|Tolkien's frame stories}}

Tolkien later revised the internal history of the Elvish languages, stating that the Elves were capable of constructing their own languages, but did not update the {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}} to be coherent with this. The essay as it stands in The Lost Road and Other Writings can be thus seen as an interpolated manuscript, badly translated by Men in the Fourth Age or even later: "For many thousands of years have passed since the fall of Gondolin." In Tolkien's frame story, no autograph manuscripts of the {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}} of Pengolodh remained; the three surviving manuscripts came from the original manuscript through an unknown number of intermediate copies. A tradition of philological study of Elvish languages exists within the fiction; Tolkien mentions that "The older stages of Quenya were, and doubtless still are, known to the loremasters of the Eldar. It appears from these notices that besides certain ancient songs and compilations of lore that were orally preserved, there existed also some books and many ancient inscriptions."J.R.R. Tolkien, "Outline of Phonology", Parma Eldalamberon 19, 2010, p. 68.

{{further|Elvish languages of Middle-earth}}

File:Middle-earth vs Indo-European language trees.svg and Indo-European language{{cite web |title=Family: Indo-European |url=https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/indo1319 |website=Glottolog |access-date=31 May 2024}} trees compared. Tolkien, a philologist, was intensely interested in the evolution of language families, and modelled his fictional languages and their evolution on real ones.{{sfn|Smith|2020|pp=202–214}} The language names and evolution shown for Middle-earth are as used in the {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}}.]]

The {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}} and related writings like "The Etymologies" illustrate Tolkien's conception of the languages of Middle-earth as a language family analogous to Indo-European, with diverging branches and sub-branches — though for the immortal Elves the proto-language is remembered rather than reconstructed. This "concept of increasing separation" was also employed for the Sundering of the Elves in Tolkien's legendarium.{{sfn|Flieger|2002|p=71}}{{sfn|Smith|2020|pp=202–214}}

The {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}} indicates on Tolkien's diagrams of the "Tree of Tongues" that there were at various times some thirty Elvish languages and dialects.{{cite journal |last=Hyde |first=Paul Nolan |year=1988 |title=Quenti Lambardillion: Turkish Delight |journal=Mythlore |volume=14 |issue=3 |at=Article 12 |url=https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol14/iss3/12}}

{{further|The Etymologies (Tolkien)}}

After he had written the contemporaneous {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}} and The Etymologies (also published in The Lost Road and Other Writings), Tolkien decided to make Sindarin the major language of the Elves in exile in Beleriand. As such, it largely replaced Noldorin; eventually Tolkien settled on the explanation that after the Noldor returned to Beleriand from Valinor, they adopted the language used by the Sindar (Grey Elves) already settled there.{{harvnb|Tolkien|1987|pp=377–385 (Christopher Tolkien's introduction)}} The {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}} thus represents a stage in Tolkien's development of his Elvish languages (and of the Silmarillion legendarium), documented also in The Etymologies and an essay, "The Feanorian Alphabet".{{sfn|Goering|2017|pp=191–201}}{{sfn|Welden|2023|pp=12–29}}

File:Elvish language evolution in the Lhammas.svg|Elvish language evolution as described in the Lhammas and assumed in The Etymologies, 1937

File:Elvish language evolution after Lhammas 01.svg|Elvish language evolution once Tolkien had The Lord of the Rings under development, 1938 onwards. Sindarin has replaced Noldorin. The 'new' Noldorin is just the Noldor's not very distinct dialect of Quenya.

Bill Welden, writing in Arda Philology, comments that "the High-elven tongue of the Noldor", mentioned by the Tolkienesque character Faramir in a draft of The Lord of the Rings,{{harvnb|Tolkien|1990|loc=part 2, chapter 5}}{{sfn|Welden|2023|pp=12–29}} sounds, and looks from the "Tree of Tongues" in the {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}}, as if it must be Quenya "as we would expect". But, Welden writes, it's actually "almost exactly" Sindarin, which Tolkien derived from Welsh. Further, the version of The Lord of the Rings that he submitted to his publisher relied on "pretty much" the same conception of the Elvish language family, with Noldorin instead of Sindarin as the language of Gondor. Tolkien tried several schemes to make the change to Sindarin work in terms of rates of linguistic change. Because the Noldor's use of Sindarin was rather sudden, he settled on a radically new scheme: when the Noldor arrived back in Middle-earth from Valinor, they adopted the native language of Beleriand where they settled. The Elves of Beleriand were Sindar, Silvan Elves who had never gone to Valinor. The Noldor had been speaking Noldorin, a dialect of the ancient language of Quenya, and it had changed little, unlike Sindarin. The {{Transliteration|sjn|Lhammas}} and The Etymologies had been describing Sindarin (but calling it Noldorin). Tolkien hastened to redraw the "Tree of Tongues", in a version recorded in Parma Eldalamberon 18, to accommodate this restructuring.{{sfn|Welden|2023|pp=12–29}}

{{reflist|24em}}

• {{ME-ref|Carpenter}}
• {{ME-ref|Letters}}
• {{cite book |last=Fimi |first=Dimitra |author-link=Dimitra Fimi |title=Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits |title-link=Tolkien, Race and Cultural History |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |year=2009 |isbn=978-0-2302-1951-9 }}
• {{cite book |last=Flieger |first=Verlyn |author-link=Verlyn Flieger |year=1983 |title=Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World |title-link=Splintered Light |publisher=Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing |isbn=978-0-8028-1955-0}}
• {{cite book |last=Flieger |first=Verlyn |author-link=Verlyn Flieger |title=Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World |title-link=Splintered Light |edition=revised |year=2002 |publisher=Kent State University Press |isbn=978-0-8733-8744-6}}
• {{cite book |last=Garth |first=John |author-link=John Garth (author) |title=Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth |title-link=Tolkien and the Great War |publisher=HarperCollins |year=2003 |isbn=978-0-00711-953-0}}
• {{cite journal |last=Goering |first=Nelson |title=The Feanorian Alphabet, Part 1; Quenya Verb Structure by J.R.R. Tolkien |journal=Tolkien Studies |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=2017 |issn=1547-3163 |doi=10.1353/tks.2017.0015 |pages=191–201 |url=https://hcommons.org/deposits/download/hc:30764/CONTENT/goering-2017-review-the-feanorian-alphabet-part-1-quenya-verb-structure-by-j.r.r.-tolkien.pdf/ |url-access=subscription }}
• {{cite book |last=Shippey |first=Tom |author-link=Tom Shippey |title=J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century |date=2001 |publisher=HarperCollins |isbn=978-0261-10401-3 |pages=228–231}}
• {{cite book |last=Smith |first=Arden R. |author-link=Arden R. Smith |chapter=Invented Languages and Writing Systems |editor-last=Lee |editor-first=Stuart D. |editor-link=Stuart D. Lee |title=A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien |date=2020 |orig-year=2014 |publisher=Wiley Blackwell |isbn=978-1119656029 |oclc=1183854105 |pages=202–214}}
• {{ME-ref|LROW}}
• {{ME-ref|WR}}
• {{cite book |last=Welden |first=Bill |chapter=How We Got Sindarin |title=Arda Philology 7: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on JRR Tolkien's Invented Languages, Omentielva Otsea, Hayward, 10-13 August 2017 |editor=Beregond, Anders Stenström |year=2023 |publisher=Arda |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JXr7EAAAQBAJ&dq=Lhammas&pg=PA12 |isbn=9789197350075 |pages=12–29}}

{{Languages of Middle-earth}}

{{Middle-earth}}

Category:Tolkien linguistic studies

Category:The History of Middle-earth

Category:1987 fiction books