The National has posted a interesting article regarding J.R.R. Tolkien and his love for languages. The author speaks of the Tolkien’s passion for languages and the interest that it has sparked among Tolkien fans. It continues to amaze me that one man created a world so detailed and authentic that it’s history is studied by a large number of people.

Tolkien’s passion for this kind of evocative euphony led him to create several artificial languages: concoctions of Welsh and Old Norse and bits of Finnish and musical syllables minted by his own imagination, which he put to work in verses and myth-fragments and, in time, full-blown romances. The best developed of these languages were Quenya and Sindarin, respectively the ceremonial and vernacular forms of Elvish. Tolkien spent years refining and reforming these languages according to his shifting inclinations, dreaming up population histories to explain their morphologies – chronicles of conquest and diaspora to account for an irregular verb. The books on which his fame now rests may be regarded as by-products of this process, as well as attempts to provide his “art-languages” with the grounding in fable that he felt was necessary for a tongue to flourish. “Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are dead,” he once wrote, “far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.” Tolkien wasn’t about to make that mistake.

To read the full article proceed to The National.