Abby Epplett, Historian

I am a longtime listener to the podcast Lingthusiasm recorded by linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne . I had first learned about this podcast while watching “Tom’s Language Files” , a miniseries created by educational YouTuber Tom Scott . The title of the podcast is a portmanteau of “linguistics” and “enthusiasm”, and its tagline is “A podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics”. For me, it is nice to experience a show so focused in its purpose and habitual in releasing new episodes, as a new thirty-minute conversation comes out every third Thursday of the month. Gretchen and Lauren provide straightforward explanations of complex concepts in a way that makes the listener feel intelligent and never overwhelmed. Besides singing them praises, I will discuss several of their over one hundred episodes that I found most interesting.

While putting the final touches on last week’s post, I realized I had yet to discuss The Lord of the Rings in the context of national epics and then concluded that this was an ideal time to do so. Tolkien himself was interested in national epics, both studying and creating them. During the talk “Lost Tales and Found Myths” at the Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference , Sonali Chunodkar mentioned Tolkien’s early attempt to create a national epic using the characters of Aelwine and Ing as creators of England, but he seemed to have realized this flavor of nationalism trended towards supporting colonialism and white supremacy, so he quickly dropped the idea.

As the name suggests, Bywater was a hobbit town in the Shire located by water, more specifically by the Water, the hobbit-name for a river that emptied into the Brandywine. Unlike Hobbiton, which appeared to be a late medieval village overseen by a landlord, Bywater was a commercial center occupied by working and middle-class hobbits who owned a shop or knew a trade. My design of Bywater considers many factors, including a map created by Tolkien, pre-historic town design, medieval markets towns, revivals of medieval architecture occurring around the time of the book’s publication, and design features specific to pubs and shops still used in modern England.

Since the late medieval period, pubs have been a culturally and historically significant aspect of English life. Accordingly, the largest historical organizations in the region put forth great effort to catalogue and preserve such establishments. Historic England lists England’s Historic Pubs to commemorate businesses and their buildings that have shaped local identity, Historic UK has identified the oldest pubs and inns in England , while Heritage Pubs and Historic Pub Interiors recorded by The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) gives a glimpse of how pub-going has changed over hundreds of years, and how some aspects have remained the same.

On Christmas 2023, I was gifted the book Interesting Stories for Curious People written by Bill O’Neill. This was the second book by this author that I have read, as I reviewed The Great Book of Alaska in December 2022 . Today’s review is also a reminder that I need to move more quickly through my ever-growing book pile. Just like Alaska , Interesting Stories is written at a middle school reading level, mixes humor with more serious topics, and cites none of its sources. This is a great first stop for learning interesting facts but certainly not a work to include in a bibliography.

While I previously discussed the appearances of upper class hobbit-lasses from the Shire at the beginning of the Fourth Age during my article about Elanor Gardner Fairbairn , I wanted to expand upon this explanation to include more Shire Hobbits from this time who would appear in the framing device . The opening scene of the hypothetical animated musical would occur during Shire Reckoning (S.R.) 1482 on the day after Mid-Summer and feature a diverse gathering of hobbits. Their clothing style would reflect real-world fashion from the 1890s in Western Europe and North America, while their physical appearances or phenotypes would follow the descriptions first presented in the “Prologue: 1 Concerning Hobbits” , and further explained below. As a leading scholar of medieval studies, Tolkien must have been well-acquainted with the variety of cultures living in Europe throughout its history, and I believe The Lord of the Rings paralleled his interpretation of real-world people and eve...

In my first essay after my winter holiday hiatus, I begin a new chapter to Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical where I describe the process of research and producing a hypothetical adaptation of the bestselling book series by British linguist J.R.R. Tolkien. At last, I will begin presenting selections of dialogue and music to accommodate the concept art that I began creating in 2024. Composers commonly make demo recordings of their work using themselves or their friends as the performing artists, from “I’m in the Middle of a Muddle” for the 1950 Disney animation Cinderella sung by middle-aged male songwriters Mack David , Al Hoffman , and Jerry Livingston instead of a peppy young woman like the title character, or an early version of “How Far I’ll Go” for the 2016 Disney animation Moana sung by Broadway star Phillipa Soo , a close friend of its songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda , since her voice perfectly matched the protagonist. But before I reveal my own demo reel, I ne...

At last, I have arrived at the final appendix! Appendix F is divided into two parts with the first covering the languages spoken by the many peoples of Middle-earth during the Third Age, and the second covering Tolkien’s method of “translation” for those languages. Even to the end, Tolkien maintained his character as a typical early to mid-20 th century translator. Elvish and Mannish languages in Arda evolved along similar paths as real-world Indo-European languages with the development of a common speech, pidgins and creoles from the merger of two or more languages, categorization of languages as high or low based on the social status of the speakers, codeswitching and reappropriation of slurs, and languages falling out of use to become lost.

The first part of “Appendix E: Writing and Spelling”, focused on pronunciation. I am notoriously bad at pronouncing words that I only know by sight, some of my favorites being liaison, epitome, Yosemite, and mischievous. Because I learned most of my vocabulary from reading, I rarely heard more difficult words pronounced aloud until high school or college, when I learned the hard way that what I heard in my head was not the generally accepted way to say the word. I tended to think my linguistic snafus were pretty funny.

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.