Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Introduction to the History of Conlangs

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J.R.R. Tolkien was a professional philologist, an Ancient Greek word meaning “lover of words”. This branch of linguistics focuses on etymologies, the historical meaning behind words and how they evolve over time. Because of his interest, an unusually high number of characters within The Lord of the Rings are writers, translators, and linguists.

A common pastime in Elvish culture was inventing new words and grammars, allowing them to create more languages and dialects than other races. While Hobbits were less inclined to get an education, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins worked as translators in Elvish languages, while Merry Brandybuck compiled words from the lost Hobbit language that remained in the Shire variants of the Hobbitish dialect of Westron, also called the Common Speech. Most members of the Fellowship were multilingual. Gandalf understood the highest number of spoken and written languages, including various dialects of Westron, Black Speech or the language of Mordor endowed with evil powers, the ancient Sindarin script used by Celebrimbor to label the Door to Moria, runes in the Dwarfish language Khuzdul, and seemingly whatever other language the plot required.

Tolkien was not the first philologist to construct fictional languages for his stories, but he changed the perception of the practice from an elite academic exercise to a pastime enjoyed by the nerdier members of everyday society. Conlangs — the abbreviation for “constructed languages”, which was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2017 — have become their own branch of science fiction and fantasy. The love of conlangs is so pervasive in pop culture that I previously listened to four podcast episodes on the subject: “A Designed Language” in 99 Percent Invisible by Roman Mars, “Verisimilitude” from The Allusionist by Helen Zaltzman, “Do You Speak Conlang?” from Imaginary Worlds by Eric Molinsky, and its rerun “Conlang” on Twenty Thousand Hertz by Dallas Taylor with Defacto Sound. Outside of this pleasant echo chamber of nerdery, I imagine the general public rarely considers conlangs.

The History of Conlangs

Like many aspects of modern nerd culture, the earliest known conlang was invented by a woman. Predating first science fiction author Mary Shelley and first programmer Ada Lovelace was first conlanger Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine nun from the Holy Roman Empire during the 12th century. As a prolific writer, composer, and leader in the Catholic Church, Hildegard created a language now known as a lingua ignota, Latin for “language unknown”. She likely viewed her language as divinely inspired, sent by God as part of her visions. In addition to deriving new words, she created her own twenty-three character script. This language, along with her other works, were bound together in Riesencodex, German for “Giant Codex”, now stored at Landesbibliothek Wiesbaden [Wiesbaden State Library] in Germany after centuries of travel. This is not so unlike the fictional journey of the Red Book of Westmarch from Middle-earth with its copies traveling around the continent even after the original was lost.

During the mid-13th to early 14th century, Dante Alighieri famously wrote Divine Comedy and less famously wrote De vulgari eloquentia, his theory on the evolution of language. He explained his thoughts through pages of mockery about Italian dialects, suggestions that women were stupid, and comparisons between working class people and animals. While Dante was not the sort of person one would want to be around, he did lay some shaky groundwork for other linguists to create the reconstructed language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the hypothetical ancestor to languages spoken throughout Europe and Central Asia.

Around this time, religious conlangs became all the rage. The book series Ars Magna by Ramon Llull were recently rediscovered in 2001. Llull lived on the island Majorca, a place last mention in “Introduction to Maps” as a mapmaking center. At this crossroad of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Llull wanted to create a “perfect” language to convert his neighbors to Catholicism, which ultimately was unsuccessful.

While most surviving conlangs come from Western European languages, Balaibalan was a combination of Persian, Turkish, and Arabic used by Muslim mystics. Italian polyglot Alessandro Bausani published “About a Curious “Mystical” Language Bal-a I-Balan” in 1954, the same year that The Fellowship of the Ring came out, to offer an explanation for the 15th or 16th century language. He would have studied the copy of the Balaibalan dictionary stored at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, while another copy is in the Princeton University Library. Bausani’s analysis was shaped by his Baha’i faith as he noted, “The importance of this attempt of the Artist to imitate God’s creative power is rather great.” Even with this research, little is known about Balaibalan’s creators.

During the Enlightenment, which occurred during the 17th and 18th century, the desire for conlangs shifted from religious devotion to a need for universal communication. Many were a priori constructed languages, Latin for “from what comes first”, meaning they were not based on previously existing words or grammars but entirely invented. Books upon books were written for new languages. Among the more successful was John Wilkins, who published Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language in 1668. He wanted to replace Latin as the scholarly language with a convoluted system in which every subsequent character in a word narrowed down a category until only one object was described. This language was not pronounceable and came with its own writing script. Wilkins claimed the script was inspired by “China”, but it bears no resemblance to Chinese characters, and no Chinese person was consulted during the project. This type of language is called a pasigraphy, from Greek meaning “all write”, and modern versions have been used to facilitate basic conversation for people with communication-based disabilities.

The need for practical, universal communication continued into the 19th century to the present day. More recently created languages tend to be a posteriori, Latin for “from what comes after”, and borrow elements from existing languages. The first of these to have prolonged, international interest was Volapük, created by Johann Martin Schleyer, a German Catholic priest. After the publication of a magazine article in 1879 and a full-length book in 1880, his movement was met with enthusiasm but soon fell apart.

Much more successful was L.L. Zamenhof and his conlang Esperanto, debuting with a book in 1887. Zamenhof was a great candidate for a conlanger. While professionally an eye doctor, he spoke multiple languages, including his native languages of Polish, Russian, and Yiddish, and thought a common tongue would create a society without war. He was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize twelve times in his lifetime, but never won, and was posthumously honored by UNESCO in 2017, the 100th anniversary of his death. His three children, also Esperanto speakers, all died in the Holocaust in 1942, sadly proving that a shared language will not create world peace.

Around the time pacifists began creating useful or auxiliary languages to unite humanity, creative writers introduced artistic languages or artlangs to use in fiction. In 1912, Edgar Rice Borroughs published the first artlang, the Barsoomiam language spoken by Martians in A Princess of Mars. While a few words were scattered across his book series, the 2012 Disney movie John Carter from Mars included a wider vocabulary developed by conlanger Paul Frommer. Unfortunately, this movie is considered one of the worst box office bombs of all time.

Other books, movies, and television shows had much greater success. Tolkien went public with his language creation beginning in 1931 with his lecture “A Secret Vice”, also called “A Hobby for The Home”. He advocated for inventing languages as a fun family past time and subsequently wrote best-selling books using his languages. His favorite languages, the Elvish tongues of Sindarin and Quenya, needed little expansion for Peter Jackson’s award-winning The Lord of the Rings movies in the early 2000s, while the secretive Dwarfish language of Khuzdul received an expanded vocabulary from conlanger David Salo for Jackson’s less than award-winning Hobbit trilogy. Textbooks on the subject, including The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth by Ruth S. Noel and A Gateway to Sindarin by David Salo, allow fans to study and even fluently speak the languages.

Other fictional languages have a dedicated following, and the number of fictional languages has grown exponentially over the past few decades. Devotees to the Klingon language, initially created along with Vulcan by Marc Okrand for the Star Trek franchise, can study through the Klingon Language Institute or Duolingo. Similarly, the languages of Dothraki and High Valyrian from George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books were expanded by David J. Peterson for the HBO television series, and High Valyrian has also received a Duolingo course. Finally, Paul Frommer had better luck when recruited to create Na’vi for James Cameron’s Avatar franchise.

A Golden Age of Conlangs?

Broadway had its moment in the 1940s through 1960s. The 2010s were prime time for documentaries. Now, conlangs are having their moment in the sun. Declared “officially a Pop Culture Thing” by Vox in 2019, fantasy franchises are now almost obligated to contain at least one fictional language. Dialect coaches like Erik Singer, who trained actors in real world accents, now work alongside conlangers to develop the fictional voices. Accents must remain consistent throughout filming with the added challenge of having no reference material for practice listening. Outside of technical difficulties, the multiple authorship of these languages, along with the involvement of major media companies, has created new issues of intellectual property (IP). Lawyers of the future may specialize in grappling with ownership on conlangs, which will prove important once Disney finally buys the rights to LOTR and makes a critically acclaimed Muppets version.

On the informal side, conlang and linguistics clubs have sprung up at schools and universities. The Language Creation Society was incorporated in 2007 to unite conlangers and host conferences, although its website and social media accounts seem somewhat dead. Internet forums burgeon with new invented languages without a single thought given to IP, possibly because many of these languages are abandoned without significant development. This led me to consider the main complaint about conlangs: in our postcolonial world where the natural languages spoken by Indiginous people were stigmatized and systematically replaced by the language of the colonizers — most frequently English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, or German — why do talented linguists use their skills to build a fantasy world instead of helping to revive dying languages?

The same conundrum existed in Middle-earth, as described in “Note on the Shire Record” at the end of the Prologue. The Hobbits were colonized by the Men of Numenor and lost their own language, which seemed to have been in the same language group as Rohirrim (The Fellowship of the Ring, 17). Out of the many writers and translators in the book, only Merry Brandybuck showed interest in saving what remained of the language and wrote the book Old Words and Names in the Shire. In contrast, Bilbo Baggins focused on translating works from Sindarin to Westron, while Frodo learned multiple non-Hobbitish languages and edited translated texts.

Language Interpretation in the Animated Musical

Understanding the role of conlangs in The Lord of the Rings is crucial to understanding the plot. However, most readers do not have the time to thoroughly learn the fictional languages. This leads snippets of dialogue feeling mysterious or untouchable, even though the meaning of these words is concrete and knowable, in contrast to Tolkien’s ambiguity in other parts of the text. Without immediately provided translation, the reader may feel as confused as Sam Gamgee, who constantly asked the nearest interpreter to explain what a foreign language speaker is saying but received replies ranging from helpful to aggressive.

One of my goals for the hypothetical animated musical is to make the text more accessible. Works by Tolkien can be regarded as having a high barrier to entry because of the level of linguistic knowledge needed to understand the work beyond a surface level. Providing immediate language interpretation in multiple formats will lower this barrier. There are three ways to provide interpretation.

First, instead of using the conlang, the speaker uses English. Most of the original text is technically in this format. The characters speak the Common Tongue or Westron, which Tolkien “translated” from his copy of the Red Book of Westmarch. Character dialogue is sometimes described as spoken in an Elvish language or in Black Speech but written in English. When dialog appears in English in the original text, the animated musical would also use English.

Second, a character speaks when using a conlang, and the translation is immediately given in English. Characters may give a short speech about word origin, such as when Bilbo explained one of Aragorn’s nicknames, “Dúnadan”, a Sindarin compound word meaning “Man of the West” (Fellowship, 261). The occasional footnote explaining a word or cultural concept would become a snippet of dialog in the animated musical. After presenting Galadriel’s song “Namárië” (Fellowship, 424), the longest passage in Sindarin, the text includes Tolkien’s “translation” in English of Frodo’s translation in Westron. These layers of translation reminded me of the English version of Biblia Sacra Vulgata, originally a translation of the original Greek and Hebrew scriptures into Latin completed by Jerome in 405 AD, which the Roman Catholic Church declared its official Bible in 1546. In the animated musical, “Namárië” could be sung through twice: first by Galadriel in Sindarin, and second by Frodo in English.

Third, a character speaks when using a conlang, and no translation is given. This happens rarely in the books, but these few instances can be frustrating, especially to first time readers. The elvish warrior Glorfindel calls to Aragorn in Sindarin while riding through the forest, “Ai na vedui Dúnadan! Mae govannen!” (Fellowship, 236). Fortunately, the modern reader can look up the answer online using Parf Edhellen, a dictionary of Tolkien languages. The official answer is “Hail at last, Man of the West. Well met!”, which might translate to modern English as “Hey finally, Westerner. What’s up!” For the animated musical, subtitles would convey this information, and I would provide my own translation.

For the past seven hundred years, people have invented languages to convey their devotion to God, unite the world in peace, and bring joy to their lives and the lives of others. While other applications of linguistics might be more practical, this love of new sounds and ways of spreading knowledge is a wholesome pastime. If nothing else comes from my project than allowing others to experience the quiet hope conveyed in The Lord of the Rings through a more accessible approach to its myriad of conlangs, then I will have succeeded.


Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical