EDWARD VAJDA: Well,
today I'm going
to talk about literature
as well as language.
And the reason is that two
of the most famous works
of literature in history, the
most sold works of literature
in history, The
Lord of the Rings,
which is also an extremely
popular movie, three movies,
in fact, and The
Hobbit, which is going
to be a movie this December.
So everyone is waiting
for this very much.
These books and these movies are
some of the most popular works
of literature of all time, but
what people don't often know
is they're also
works of linguistics.
And so studying them,
and appreciating them,
takes an appreciation of
linguistic science, which
is often not understood to be as
interesting as it actually is.
So as the director of the
Western Linguistics program
and the helper of
the linguistics club,
one of the things that I
want to do in this lecture
is to show why linguistics
is important for literature,
and in particular, for
understanding the works of JRR
Tolkien, because JRR Tolkien
had a unique method of creating
literature.
He borrowed all sorts of things
from the real world, both past
as well as present,
ancient modern,
and he created a
rich fantasy world
that was as believable
as the real world,
even though you
knew it was fantasy
from the very beginning.
This is a special
talent, a special method
that he perfected,
and a lot of people
have followed in
his path ever since.
The Hobbit was published
in the mid 1930s.
The Lord of the Rings finally
came out in the early 1950s,
and since then there have
been a lot of other people
who have been trying to do
the same kind of deep fantasy
literature as Tolkien,
but maybe they
don't know quite
how Tolkien did it,
and that's what I want
to talk about today.
I want to talk about that
mixture of fantasy, reality,
and also the ascetics of sound.
All works of literature,
even realistic literature,
has elements of fantasy.
It has elements of reality that
the author has put into it.
And it also is a work of
art in the art of sound
because otherwise,
people wouldn't
be interested in reading.
You could just read a newspaper.
You wouldn't need
to read literature
if you wanted to find things
out about the real world.
So these factors are
involved in all literature,
but for Tolkien there's some
special combination of them
that I want to discuss.
Tolkien was different than
almost all modern linguists.
All of us modern linguists,
Chomsky, and others
are interested in language from
the communicative approach.
What language communicates.
That's how we study language.
In linguistics, that's the main
focus of studying language.
Tolkien is completely different.
He was interested in
language as an art form.
The sound of language
as an end in itself
and not just the meaning
as the end in itself.
And this was one of the
fundamental characteristics
of all of his
literary creations.
One of the other things we'll
be talking about in this lecture
as we explore Tolkien's method
are three very distinct ways
of appreciating and
understanding literature.
And all of these ways are valid.
Sometimes they
overlap, sometimes
they contrast with one another.
First of all, when you study
any work of literature,
you want to try to understand
the intentions of the author.
And second, you want to
look at the real world
context in history in
which the work was written.
Where did this work come
out of in the greater world?
And finally, and a lot of
times this is forgotten,
the reader is also
recreating the work
when he or she reads it.
And that means the
reader is, in a sense,
the re-author of the work.
The appreciation the
reader gets out of it
means that the reader
can get a message out
of the work that's different
than that the author put
into it.
The reader can apply
that message of the work
to the modern world in
which it's being read,
and it's a very different
world than the one
that it was written in,
and it was portrayed in.
So all these things are
very, very important
to understand in the
appreciation of Tolkien,
as well as in the
appreciation of literature.
When I was a fifth grader, and
we were studying literature
in elementary school,
I was so turned off
by studying literature.
In fact, I got so tuned
off I became a linguist.
That's how serious.
And the reason it turned me off
was the teacher would always
say, what do you think of
this short story we just read?
And so we would start to
say what we thought of it,
and she would say no, no, no.
The intended this,
and that, and that.
In other words, the
teacher would mix up
these different levels, and
I think if you pay attention
to the fact that they're all
valid, different, sometimes
contrasting levels,
it's a beginning
of the understanding of
literature and it's analysis.
Tolkien wrote The
Hobbit, and especially
The Lord of the Rings during
a period of human history
that had some of the most
awesome and terrifying events
in the last 10,000
years of history.
We had two world wars.
We had the fate of human
civilization hanging
in the balance and Tolkien was
writing The Lord of the Rings
when these events were going on.
These events had
to influence him.
They had to give
him ideas, and I
am going to argue
that some of the plot
line of The Lord of
the Rings, and even
some of the features
of the characters
do, in fact, have echoes in
what was going on at the time.
But Tolkien himself claimed
that there was no allegory
in Lord of the Rings.
Any kind of similarity
of the countries,
or of the characters,
or of the events
in the plot line that
was in Lord of the Rings,
and in the 20th
century real world,
was actually just
partly coincidental.
It was not really key to
the meaning of the work.
In other words,
Tolkien did not make
Sauron as a symbol for
Stalin, or Saruman as a symbol
to say something about Hitler.
He may have gotten ideas from
what was going on for the work,
but that was not his
purpose in writing it,
and that's not what he
was trying to convey.
And because the work
is such pure fantasy,
because it doesn't have specific
meaning that connects it
to the real world,
it really makes
the work very good for
the reader to recreate it.
The reader can inject
whatever is really
the meaning for the
reader into this work
As a result of the way
that Tolkien wrote it.
Based on the ascetics of sound
rather than the actual meaning
of the symbols in real world.
How did Tolkien get you
inside of this work?
How does it work?
A work of fantasy,
no matter what it is,
can only be engaging
to the reader
if the reader buys
into the fantasy
as a substitute for reality.
And the only way to
do that, if you're
looking at a world
that's beyond time,
you have to find some
thing in the work
that the reader identifies
with, subconsciously.
And in this work, Middle Earth
is alien, alien languages,
alien lands, alien
species of beings,
but we find ourselves
involved as if we are really
living in this imaginary
world because we see it
through the eyes of hobbits,
who are just as confused
about it as we are
when we start the book.
So before we're on page two
of The Hobbit, we're into it,
but not because
it means something
about what's in the news, it's
because we have subconsciously
become hobbits.
That's the secret and every
successful work of high fantasy
does this.
There's something in it
that you as the listener,
and the viewer, and the
reader identify with.
That is the secret
of creating fantasy
as an interesting story.
And that world that we
come into Middle Earth in
is, of course, the Shire.
And the Shire in some
ways is very familiar.
Even if we are not having as
much green thumbs as hobbits,
somehow it seems like a
cool countryside in England,
if you're an English speaker.
So the hobbit is the in, the
most familiar somehow part
of Middle Earth
that gets us to feel
like we're inside of the story,
even though it's fantasy.
And the farther you
get from the Shire,
the more things become strange.
The more the words and the
names of the places on the map
are not sounding
like country English.
When you get to Bree, the
words sounds like, guess what?
Welsh.
The word Bree in Welsh
means hill, in fact.
That's not a coincidence.
Tolkien is constructing
with layers of his words
and his language, increasing
lack of familiarity
and strangeness as
you go from the Shire
out with the hobbits
into this adventure.
And so what Tolkien
does is he harnesses,
for English speakers,
the coined "exoticness"
of the Celtic fringe, the
Welsh, and the Scottish,
and the Irish Celtic fringe with
their very distinct languages,
and very distinct
pronunciations of place names.
This is put around
the Shire to make
the Shire seem more
familiar, and what
is around it, less familiar.
And this continues onward
because other groups that
are part of the West,
that the Shire belongs to,
the Rohirrim of Rohan,
the people of Gondor,
the ancient lore that is
associated with those groups.
Those are also borrowed
from these concentric rings
around the Shire in
Northwestern Europe.
They're borrowed
from old English,
they're borrowed
from Scandinavia,
and this makes
Tolkien's Middle Earth
feel very familiar and real,
as if he's plotted it on a map.
And this idea of the
East, all the hordes
coming out of the East.
This is something that is also
somehow unconsciously familiar,
with all of the
invasions of the Huns,
and all of these other groups
in the history of Europe
from the east.
And in the 20th century,
the invasions from Germany,
the threat from Russia.
All of these things are
in the back of our minds
and this makes the storyline
seem realistic to us.
But Tolkien was
not saying anything
about real Russia, real
Germany, real Scandinavia,
or real Wales, and if you
pay attention to the way
that he mapped
things out, you will
find that these
are just convenient
sound symbolic methods to make
his fantasy world realistic.
They are not real symbols
of the real world.
Because if you map where
Wales is to England,
it's all the opposite of
where things should be.
Going past Bree and
southward to Mordor
is in the opposite
direction of where
you would go to get
to Russia, or to get
to parts of Eastern Europe.
So the map in the story did
not follow the map in reality.
The pieces of reality
that are borrowed
are all mixed up together
in this fantasy world
to make it realistic,
but it's not really
a symbol of that real world.
So we can ask an
important question.
Is Tolkien using fantasy to
portray reality and get a point
across between the lines that
he doesn't feel comfortable
saying out loud for
political repressive reasons?
Or is he borrowing lots
of reality from the past,
from mythology, from
the real world events,
and just using it--
conveniently sound symbolically
to make a very deeply
layered, believable fantasy.
From what I've said
so far, it's obvious
that it's the second thing
that Tolkien is doing,
but almost every other
writer, basically
every classical writer,
does exactly the opposite
of Tolkien.
They're doing the first thing.
They're really using
fiction and fantasy
to talk about reality
in symbolic terms.
The meaning is what is important
in most of these other works,
not the sound as the artistry.
Let's talk about
Russian literature
because who can talk about
literature without talking
about Russian literature?
Almost no one.
The great father of Russian
literature, Alexander Pushkin,
was also the father of
Russian encrypted literature.
Every fairy tale
that Pushkin wrote,
every short story
that Pushkin wrote
with its romantic settings,
it was all encoded, encrypted,
editorials on the
world that he lived in,
in repressive czarist Russia.
And this is the point
of what he is writing.
So for instance, in his famous
prologue of a very long fairy
tale called Ruslan
and Ludmila, he
has a cat that is chained
to a big oak tree,
and this is one of
the most famous dances
in Russian literature.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
And you might think, boy, this
is a fairy tale, for sure.
There's a cat that
talks and sings.
It's on a chain, it's
on a big oak tree.
Wow, this is a fairy tale.
It's way more than a fairy tale
because for Pushkin, the oak
tree was Mother Russia, the cat
was the artist and the writer
who was chained by the golden
chain of Russia's culture
to that oak tree, and could
not go very many steps
from that oak tree.
Could only sing a
song or tell a tale.
He was writing about
the plight of himself
and all writers in Russia.
This is the meaning
of that fairy tale.
The communication was
what was important.
Also it was beautiful, and
the sound was beautiful,
the images were beautiful,
the fantasy was beautiful,
but the purpose was
communication of reality.
My other favorite
writer, Nikolai Gogol,
wrote a famous short story
called "The Nose", in which
the nose got away from
its owner, who woke up
with just an empty spot, a flat
spot on the middle of his face,
and then nose was parading
around as a personage.
The owner of the nose
was a flirtatious person
and be couldn't flirt
any more with no nose.
[INAUDIBLE] flirt.
So he found his
nose, and the nose
was going into a
cathedral, and he
wanted to go up
to claim the nose,
but he had realized the nose was
of a higher rank than he was,
and he couldn't really
go up to the nose.
He felt ashamed so
he couldn't do it.
And so many people have written,
what does this work mean?
What fantasy is in this
work and if there's
all kinds of symbols in it.
Of course there's symbols,
but the reality of it
is probably a lot more simple.
Gogol himself had
a very long nose.
He sometimes himself
was called the nose.
Alexander Pushkin
was his great friend,
who brought him
to St. Petersburg,
and helped him get famous.
Pushkin fell into disfavor.
Had lots of problems.
Gogol got to be write number
one, and was flaunted around,
and he and Pushkin
had a falling out
as a result of those things.
And so what Gogol
was doing was making
fun of Pushkin in this
poem because Pushkin
had lost his nose.
Pushkin was the person in
"The Nose" who had lost it,
and his name was Kovalyov,
and Kovalyov, [RUSSIAN]
means to forge.
Pushkin means a cannon.
So it's a play on words
of Pushkin's last name.
And at the end of the
story, the nose somehow
magically gets back
on Kovalyov's face,
and all is wonderful.
It's a happy ever after.
And at the end of this
real life incident,
Gogol and Pushkin made up,
and became friends again.
And Gogol was just making fun
of this episode in their lives.
So once again, he was using
what looked like crazy fantasy,
for a very, very communicative
purpose that was almost
a joke between the writers.
My other favorite
writer, Dostoevsky,
was also in all of
his works talking
about deadly serious reality.
He wrote the novel,
The Demons, [RUSSIAN],
and it was really a
takeoff a criticism
of some of the
revolutionary groups that
were in Russia at the
time, and his condemnation
of their methods,
and of their goals.
The demons were
very much symbols
of real forces in his society.
And his Notes From
the Underground,
a very, very anti-hero
who lives underground,
was very bitter about life.
It was a answer to
Chernyshevsky's story, What
is to be Done, which
is a utopia that
claimed that human
intellect and reason can
make a paradise on earth.
Dostoevsky said that
it is impossible,
that humans are flawed, and
that you cannot have this kind
of paradise from just humans.
You have to have faith.
You have to have
something beyond.
And Dostoevsky's
character was a proof
that you could not have
paradise from just human reason
and human planning.
And his character
was a very negative,
self-destructive character.
This all had very, very
serious meaning in his day
and in his age.
He was writing about
things that he couldn't
write about in the
newspaper because
of the political situation,
just like Pushkin.
And in the Soviet times, things
got even tougher for writers.
There's a famous fantasy work of
20th century Soviet literature,
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov.
It was such a sensitive
work, he could not
have it published
in his lifetime.
It was written in the 1930s.
He died in 1940.
It was hidden in a drawer.
It was found and published
in 1967 for the first time.
This story talks about the devil
coming to Moscow in the 1920s,
and with a retinue of all
kinds of funny demons,
and so forth like this.
And they take up residence
in this apartment,
which is 302 Encore, is
the name of the apartment.
And this is deadly
serious allegory
about Stalin and
his Pollock bureau,
taking over the Soviet Union.
Every single one of these
devils, and their names,
and what they do, and who they
kill, and all of the events,
it all has a double meaning
about what really happened,
but couldn't be said out
loud in the 20s and 30s
in Bulgakov's time.
This great fantasy, where
cats walk around with guns,
and shoot people,
and drink liquor,
but it is really about politics.
It is an editorial about the
real politics of the day.
This kind of
encrypted literature
is not just in Soviet Union.
We had it in the United States.
During the 1950s, there was
a push by some politicians
to attack writers,
other politicians,
because they're
supposedly communists,
and they were pushed out
of jobs, and threatened,
and their lives were ruined.
The American writer,
Arthur Miller at this time,
wrote a story about
the Salem witch trials
called The Crucible.
But it was really
about the McCarthy age
that he was writing.
Once again, he was
using literature
to write in code about reality.
Even ancient, pre-writing
phases of literature,
like Aesop's Fables,
these are all fantasy
designed to talk about reality.
That's their purpose.
Tolkien was different
than all of this.
For Tolkien, it was the
aesthetics of language.
It was the fitness
of exactly what
word you should use to name
this villain or that villain.
Not because it hints at that
person in the real world
this is supposed to be.
There was no person
in the real world
that any of the characters in
The Lord of the Rings and The
Hobbit were supposed to be.
None whatsoever.
It just made it seem
cooler and more realistic.
And I think when Tolkien at
first wrote these things,
no one understood
what he was doing.
It was just weird, but
people got interested in it.
He got a cult following.
People even come to a lecture
about Tolkien in large crowds
given by someone like
me, he's so interesting.
So Tolkien hit on a new
way of using language
and in using fantasy
in literature
for the aesthetics of sound.
So pure fantasy constructed
from deeply layered versions
of past and present reality.
This is Tolkien's
method and it worked.
Why does it seem so real?
I've already told you a
little bit about this.
Tolkien, when he was
a teenager, there
were no Game Boys at this time.
He entertained himself by
inventing languages, made up
languages.
He even invented a word
for inventing languages,
Glossopoeia.
And he made, eventually,
for The Lord of the Rings,
and The Silmarillion,
and The Hobbit,
parts of at least 14 languages.
Several of which I'll tell you
in detail later in the lecture.
This was something
that he did before you
had any intention of ever
writing any work of literature.
The works of literature
followed this interest
in creating language
for the love
of the sound of the language,
rather than the symbolic--
within the actual
meaning behind.
And just what?
The most interesting
writing of the 20th century
was a professor of linguistics.
[LAUGHTER]
I know.
Get on your cellphones,
call the Bellingham Herald.
This is news, but it's true,
and you can verify it even
on Wikipedia on the web.
He was a professor of
medieval literature
and also of historical
linguistics.
How cool is that?
And Tolkien as a teenager
got the idea of language
for language sake.
It was very much not in keeping
with the rest of 20th century
linguistics, which is the
communicate approach, which we
linguists are all interested.
Tolkien was interested in
Indo-European languages.
How languages can descend
from a common ancestor
to time, how mother languages
could create daughter
languages, and the
diversity of this
is studied by comparing
the languages in something
called historical
comparative linguistics.
Tolkien actually became
an expert at this
and taught it at the University.
And one of the things
he was expert in
was the Germanic language,
to which English belongs.
There are three branches
of the Germanic family.
One of the branches has become
extinct hundreds of years
before Tolkien studied it.
Tolkien wasn't
satisfied with this.
He wanted to create a
fourth imaginary branch
of the Germanic language
family that had, in fact, never
existed as far as
we know in history,
and he called it Gautish.
And he even made
it up and made up
sound rules by
which it had evolved
from the really existing
proto-Germanic languages.
And this was just him
getting started because he
also as a teenager
who got interested
in ancient literature.
In classics of Christian,
and pre-Christian, West and
Northwest European
literature, like Beowulf.
And a lot of names that
come into his works,
like Gandalf, and other
names, are actually
words that are
somehow used in some
of these ancient literatures.
He liked the sound of them
and he fit the sound of them
to the story that he
was later writing.
He also became an expert
in the Norse myths
and in the ancient Midgard,
which is really Middle Earth.
And so this was part of
what got him interested,
the combination of folklore
and language sound symbolism
as a teenager, was what
set him on the path
to begin to construct his
imaginary Middle Earth.
The turning point for him
was discovering and falling
in love with Finnish, and
the Finnish epic, Kalevala,
which is part of Northwestern
Europe, the Finns,
but it's completely different.
It's actually historically--
this language and this group
of people are from
Central Asia, completely
unrelated to the rest
of Europe, and yet it's
part of Western Europe.
Tolkien became
fascinated with this
and it caused him to use it
as part of his Western world.
It became the basis of
his elves and his Elvish
in its sound symbolism.
This lingual-mythic synthesis,
once he added the Finnish in,
was beginning to take shape.
Quenya, the High Elvish,
was based especially
on real world
language of Finnish.
And in both of these
languages, Finnish and Quenya,
you have a large
number of sounds
that you can sing or hum.
Those are called sonorants.
[HUMMING]
OK, and you don't
have lots of sounds
that are called obstruents,
which you can't hum,
you can only yell at
people using them.
[GRUNTING]
All right, those kinds of
sounds have a different effect
and I'm proving it.
There's also no
initial clusters.
There's no words in
Finnish that sound like
[GIBBERISH]
OK, and there's not even
any double consonants.
And so these things were brought
into the elvish to make it
sound mellifluous And the word
mellifluous doesn't have any
of those "buh-guh"
sounds in it either.
But there's a real
Finnish language
that belongs to a real language
family called Uralic languages.
There's almost 30 of these,
and they stretch all the way
from Norway, all the
way to central Siberia.
Tolkien realized that all
these languages had a history
and came from a
proto-language, proto-Uralic.
Tolkien realized
that they are all
spoken by all these people, some
of which became part of Europe,
even though they
had a completely
different origin than the rest
of the people's of Europe.
Tolkien incorporated lots
of this to make his elvish
and his elves so exotic,
and yet part of the West.
This is one of the magic
ingredients he used.
But when he did this, he
was not saying anything
about the Finnish language.
He was not saying anything
about Finns or Uralic peoples
whatsoever.
It was convenient for his
lingual mythic synthesis
and also for his sound
symbolic aesthetic.
That's why he chose
these languages.
So if you look at Finnish,
you have a real Finnish word
that means "in the wind".
It really means
"wind-in," "tuuli-ssa."
And in Quenya elvish, you
have completely different
meaningful pieces of the word,
which is called morphemes,
but it's built on
the same principle.
You've got the noun, you've
got the locational marker
that comes after the
noun, not before the noun.
That's called the post-position.
And "tuuli-ssa," and "suri-nen,"
which is a completely made up
word, it's sort of has the same
feel and sound to, and this is
what elvish got it's
characteristic feel, and sound,
and structure from.
And this is called, if
you're a real linguist
buff, suffixal agglutination.
And Tolkien realized
that just like there's
different versions of modern
Finnish and modern Uralic
languages, why not
have different versions
of modern elvish like
Sindarin, and Quenya,
and have them descend from a
proto-Elvish, another language
to invent with
sound laws of change
that he can invent as well.
So in Sindarin, the word
that means west is dun,
and in Quenya it's
numen, and these words
have a similarity too.
Dwelling is bar, and
in Quenya it's mar.
So the "buh and the "muh"
are really similar sounds.
On this side, in Sindarin,
the "duh," "buh," "guh"
is pronounced without any
sound going out of your nose.
In Quenya, those same sounds
are pronounced-- "duh" becomes
"nuh," "buh"
becomes "muh," "guh"
becomes "nguh" just by
lowering the back of your mouth
and letting the sound
come out of your nose.
So there's a systematic
sound correspondence
between these two
forms of Elvish,
just like in the different
types of Germanic languages,
just like in the different
types of Finnic languages.
Exactly what we
have in real world,
we had in the Tolkien
imaginary language.
And there's even a big
grammar of Sindarin
that you can learn and read.
This is one of Elvin languages
that you can devote yourselves
to.
And when you look
at Sindarin, he
made it different than
Quenya by incorporating
features of Welsh inside of it.
Another very exotic
language, but that
is next door, and part of
the Northwestern Europe.
So for instance, if you
look at the way the Sindarin
Elvish works, you
can have a consonant
at the beginning of
the word, and then
when you have what
is called a clitic,
a function particle at
the beginning of that,
it causes that initial consonant
to mutate to a similar sound.
So periain means halfling, but i
pherian, means "the halflings."
Gaur means a werewolf, and
i ingaur is "the werewolf".
And so he's using real sound
symbolisms, real word formation
techniques that exist in Welsh,
that don't exist in English,
to make this version of
Elvish different than Finnish,
and also different, very much
exotically so, from English,
and it worked.
And you can even
reconstruct proto-Elvish
if you got an
afternoon because you
can look at the modern
Sindarin, and the modern Quenya,
and you can find the
sound correspondences,
and you can figure out
what the sound must
have been like eons
before, in the time
of the trees or something
deep into the Silmarillion.
So you even have
proto-Elvish and sound laws.
OK, that's pretty cool,
and it's exactly what
you have in real languages.
It's exactly what you
have in proto-Uralic.
You can reconstruct
proto-Uralic from looking
at Finnish and Hungarian.
Real modern languages that show
what the ancient language must
have looked like.
Tolkien was inventing not
only artificial languages,
but artificial histories
of artificial languages,
and artificial mother languages
of artificial languages.
As far as I know, no one
has ever done that before.
There hasn't even been a
proto-Klingon yet made.
And if you go out
at it deeper, you
find there's a whole
family of Elven languages,
just like there's a whole family
of Finno-Uralic languages,
and there's a historical
diversification of them
that is reflected in
his literary works.
Now, I think some of you
are starting to freak out,
and you might just want to stick
with one single type of this,
and my advise is to just study
the Sindarin because in Lord
of the Rings, all of
the happening figures
are speaking Sindarin.
So I think, not to scare you
off, just go with the Sindarin,
and it will get
you far at parties.
And the other really interesting
thing about the Elvish words
that are used throughout
The Lord of the Rings,
especially The of
the Rings, but also
The Hobbit, The
Silmarillion, is that they
have a meaning that goes back
to those Elven languages.
Like Orod means mountain,
ruin means burning, and not
just in this combination
that means Mount Doom,
but in other combinations.
Mor means black, Dor means
land, not just in this world,
but in other combinations.
So we have a whole bunch of
other words that have dor--
Eriador and other
names of places.
So this works as
versions of Elvish,
but it also works subconsciously
sound symbolically from you,
the speakers of English,
because the word
ruin has a subconscious
connotation of destruction.
It's a great name for a
mountain that is Mount Doom.
And Mordor sounds like the
word murder in English.
I don't think it's going to
have a nice connotation no
matter what.
You're never going to have a
bank named The Bank of Mordor.
[LAUGHTER]
So Tolkien is not only making
these words work in his Elvish,
and his historical
reconstruction
of these languages,
and language families,
he's making them work
on the most basic gut
level of English native
speakers reading, and thinking
that sounds creepy, and it does.
We go farther.
The Balrog, "bal" in
Christian tradition,
is this evil pagan god.
It has a feel of that.
"Rog" has all of those sounds
that are kind of scary.
[GRUFF BARKING]
You can't really sing
them, but also "rog"
is the Russian word
in real modern Russian
that means horn, if
you study Russian.
This is not a coincidence.
Tolkien is borrowing from
languages of the east
to put into the scary things
that are in his stories
to make it more realistic, this
scenario that he is creating.
And when we get to the
black speech of Mordor
that is on the ring, we find
a completely different speech.
It's written in
Elven characters,
but it is a completely
and utterly different
invented language.
We don't have a lot of it, but
we do have what is written--
well, it got melted,
but we do have
what was written in this ring.
And so it sounds
something like this.
[SPEAKING BLACK SPEECH OF
 MORDOR]
[APPLAUSE]
That always happens, I'm sorry.
I apologize, but
as a linguist, we
have to go further,
and take another look.
Any good linguist
takes an inscription
and creates interlinear
morpheme glossing.
In other words, in English
you right what each of them
are meaningful pieces
of the foreign language
means, and then you have
the grammatical symbols too.
And what you can see from
interlinear morpheme glossing,
is this language is not
unlike Finnish in the sense
that you've got the basic
meaning at the beginning,
and then you've got some
suffixes at the end.
So this is also a type of
suffix or agglutination,
but the sounds are all raspy.
Lots of
[GRUNTING]
sounds and it has a
completely different effect
in the English aesthetic
of how words sound
or don't sound in English,
then we do with the Finnish.
And that gives this speech
a really scary quality,
even if you don't
lose electricity
in the Council of Elron
when it's uttered.
And guess what?
It extremely closely mirrors
the real phonological and
morphological structure of a
whole group of real languages,
that Turkic and Mongolian
languages that are in--
guess where?
The east, from the place
the historical invasions
come into Europe from.
Turkic languages do
have these features,
and so does Mongolic, and a
whole group that is sometimes
called Altaic languages.
Not Korean and Japanese, they
don't have these features.
All of these features are
there and they were borrowed,
and incorporated
into what we know
of the black speech
of Mordor, and it
goes pretty interestingly deep.
The word that the
Orcs use for fire,
[INAUDIBLE] it sounds
a lot like the modern--
actually, I said it
in Mongolian, sorry.
"Gat" is fire in Mongolian
and it sounds an awful lot
like this Orc speech, "ghash,"
that means fire as well.
And I don't think
this is a coincidence.
Tolkien studied all
of these languages.
He knew all of these
languages and he
borrowed the feel of them.
He didn't want to say
anything about Turks,
or Mongols, or Finnish
people, or Welsh people,
but he wanted to create a
real sound symbolic reality
that the English speaking
people would accidentally
feel at home in, and
could identify with,
and he succeeded.
And it's very interesting
that The Lord of the Rings
has been translated into
dozens of languages.
One of the best ways to
learn a foreign language
is to read The Hobbit
in that language,
and then you already know
what it is in English,
and you just can learn
the language that way.
It works.
OK, so if you look in
modern Hungarian at what
is written in the
inside of the ring,
it's very similar in
Hungarian translation.
And when you read in Hungarian,
The Lord of the Rings,
all those Orc words don't sound
so unfamiliar because Hungarian
is a Uralic language,
is heavily influenced
by Turkic and other language.
And I'm afraid to read
the Hungarian because
of the electricity situation.
My great grandparents
spoke Hungarian.
My last name is Hungarian, but
I better not do it just in case.
Because the sound symbolic
fell of these languages
is going to not quite
work in translations.
Just like any poetry,
it won't quite
be as perfect in the
translation as you have it
in the native language
in which it was written.
Let's talk about two more
of the many languages
that Tolkien created.
The Dwarves are
part of the West.
There is a Dwarvish language
that's kind of kept secret.
Not too much of it goes
into The Lord of the Rings,
but there's enough of it
there for us to say something
about the origins of it.
And what we know about
the Dwarvish language
is exactly parallel to what
we know about a major language
family that is at the root
of Western civilization,
and that is the Afro-Asiatic
language family to which
Hebrew and Arabic belong.
The very unique features of
structure of this language
are exactly what we
find in Dwarvish,
as much as we know of Dwarvish.
Semitic, which is the
branch of Afro-Asiatic
to which the language of
Arabic and Hebrew belongs,
has a unique structure
in which that consonants,
three consonants in the word,
are what convey the basic core
meaning of the word.
And whether the word
is a noun, or a verb,
or past tense, or
future tense, or plural,
those all depend
on what vowels are
inserted inside of the word, and
sometimes a prefix or a suffix.
This is a unique feature
with very few vowels,
but you shuffle them in
and out of these kinds
of basically templates.
This is how modern
Arabic and Hebrew works.
So "suh, luh, muh" means peace
and salaam in many languages
means peace.
In Hebrew, with the sound
correspondence, it's Shalom,
and Islam is religion of
submission, and peace with God.
Muslim is adherent to that.
And we have the same
"suh, luh, muh."
Very, very different way
of making words than we
do in English, where we have
a root that looks like a word,
and then we add things after it.
We never mix what's inside
of that root up very much.
But this is exactly what
happens in Dwarvish.
They have a
tri-consonantal root.
So the word that means
dwarves is [DWARVISH],
and the Dwarvish
language is [DWARVISH].
It's the same
[DWARVISH], but you're
playing around with the
vowels, just like you
are in Hebrew and Arabic.
And this kind of a way of making
words is so alien to English
that we borrow Arabic
words and don't even
know what we're doing.
For instance, we
borrowed the Arabic word
from Malaysian that
means good bye,
and in Malaysian it's Salaam.
What did we borrow
it to in English?
So long because it's
such a different way
of making words up.
Now, the Dwarves had a script,
and one letter in the script
is called [DWARVISH], but
more of them is called Cirth.
You change the vowel
in the middle of it
and that's very much
like modern Arabic.
Modern Arabic borrows the
Western world like bank,
and you make a plural
bunuuk, by that same pattern
that I showed you before.
This is very, very,
very different
from West European languages.
It's very much like Dwarvish,
as far as we can tell.
So that's cool.
[GASPING]
[INAUDIBLE] also
Old Entish and it
takes a very long time to
say anything in Old Entish.
But I'm starting to run out
of time, so I better be quick.
I just have sad news for you.
Very little was
recorded of Old Entish.
And there's little
I can tell you,
except to say that
in the real world,
many of the world's
languages are also
disappearing without
linguists recording them.
Just like Old
Entish, they're not
going to be known by
future generations.
So you should get out
in the field, like I
do in Siberia, without the
mosquitoes, if possible,
and record them yourself.
All right, so I gave you a
little bit of information
about how all the sounds, and
the words, and the place names
get into this huge story,
and why it makes the story
seem like a real
world that you've
lived in for your whole
life, and even earlier.
But how does the story
line, the plot line work?
How did Tolkien
succeed in making
a story where you
really care about what
happens to those Hobbits?
Not that you just feel like one.
That you really feel that
this is world changing
history that's about to happen.
He did this because he lived
through the 20th century
and he borrowed ideas from
that 20th century that
made his work real, even
though it was fantasy,
and was not a symbol
of that 20th century.
How did Tolkien know what it
felt like to run away from home
and leave everything you knew
with your faithful friend who
belongs to a different
class than you do?
It's because he himself had to
go off to war when he was still
a teenager in World War
I, and in the trenches,
and most of his friends
were killed there.
And he was thrown together with
people of different classes
than he was, and they became
friends and buddies, just
like the Hobbits in the story.
He knew all of that because
he had lived through it,
and that's why he could
put that into his work
to make it so real,
but he wasn't writing
about the first World War.
He just had ammunition from
having been a human being who
lived through it.
Same about The
Lord of the Rings.
He wrote the main plot line
of The Lord of the Rings
when Hitler and Stalin were
making a secret pact, just
like Saruman and Sauron.
I almost said Stalin.
This had to have influenced
the cool idea of part
of his storyline.
OK, the union of the two towers.
That seemed invincible
at the time.
And Helm's Deep,
he was writing this
at the time when England was
having the Battle of Britain.
England stood alone against
all of the union of those two
towers and it managed
to fend off that attack.
And this had to have
given him the idea that
made his battle of
Helm's Deep so realistic.
But was he really talking
about World War II?
No, he was not.
He just was using
pieces of his real life,
and his real time
to make his fantasy
more deep, and believable, and
he got ammunition as a writer
from that.
So what we have-- and moving a
little towards the conclusion
of what I've been saying today,
is that The Lord of the Rings
is an amazing work.
And you could
throw The Hobbit in
there too because
it's, in a sense,
the world's most
ancient and far removed
from the modern time, and
yet the most plausible work
of fiction in a certain sense.
In a sense of you buying
into it and feeling like
you're really there.
Feeling like it's real
when you know it never was.
It's very successful.
I would say it's
the most successful
because of all these layers
of languages that he used.
It's also one of the
first modern 20th century
works of fiction, and
that is not usually
appreciated by people who want
to talk about the Silmarillion,
and ancient times
in Middle Earth.
How come it's so modern?
What did Tolkien do?
Tolkien was one of
the first writers
to really portray,
accurately, the modern problem
of addiction.
He did that in The
Lord of the Rings
first and better than anyone
else up to that point.
Modern ideas of mental
illness is in his work,
very clearly before it became so
popular to get onto the Yahoo,
and find all these
kinds of articles.
He was portraying this very
realistically in a modern way.
It is also one of
the first, if not
really the first, modern
work on environmentalism.
It goes through his whole work
from The Hobbit, all the way
to the end of The
Lord of the Rings.
"The old world will burn
in the fires of industry."
And everything that is
green and good in this world
will be no more.
This is real environmentalism,
modernly stated
environmentalism,
and Tolkien was
afraid of the loss of
the beautiful world
to all of the changes that
were happening in his time.
He cared about that.
That's a modern idea.
He put it into his
ancient fantasy work
and I think he was one of the
most salient people to do this.
Maybe people have
become environmentalists
having read this without even
knowing that that happened.
So one of the main reasons
why this work of fantasy
is so much more successful than
all other works of fantasy--
there's two reasons.
The fantasy was
constructed with such
an artistic and
multi-layered use
of different pieces of
historical and modern reality.
That's the first reason.
The second reason
is it wasn't tied
to real communicative
function of the symbols
having a real meaning.
They were things that
can touch your heart
in any way they want.
That ring can be
anything you want.
It can be any evil that you feel
and see in the world yourself.
From any direction of
the political spectrum,
you can put what is really
the ring a symbol of.
Whether it is secular or
religious, you can put that in,
and you have the right
to do it as the reader
because you can rewrite it.
When you read The
Lord of the Rings,
you rewrite it as
the reader, and you
can do it because it's not
tied to any particular meaning.
All of these things
that subconsciously
make this work so rich, and
so meaningful, and so epic.
Those are not the things
that you as the reader
are obligated to
see in the work.
They're only what makes it so
sound symbolically realistic.
That is amazing.
And so the ring is
a perfect allegory
because it really doesn't
mean anything at all.
It's meaning what you, as
finishing the work, means.
And in order to
understand all of this,
you really have to go back
to Tolkien, the professor.
Tolkien the teenager, who's
inventing artificial languages.
You really have to take
linguistics to understand
this great work of literature.
Especially historical
[INAUDIBLE].
This is a fact.
And with that, I
can end the lecture.
But I will say, as a
linguist and someone also
my whole life
interested in folklore,
interested in how
languages work,
I want to make a summer
course out of this whole thing
that I introduced today.
So that hopefully
will be next summer.
An upper level course
if you're really
looking for something
multi-disciplinary
to broaden your mind.
So I hope I will see some
of you in that course.
So thank you very much
for your attention--
[APPLAUSE]
I really appreciate
this big crowed.
So if you want to give any
kind of donation on the way
out to linguistics club, not
to me, just feel free to do so,
but it's completely
not necessary.
So thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
All right.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
