A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. Andrew Higgins

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СКАЧАТЬ for 19 June 1927, it is recorded that Messrs R.G. Collingwood and John Masefield were unable to attend the Society dinner, and therefore ‘it was decided that the following two gentlemen be invited, Messrs. Ralph Straus and J.R. Tolkien [sic]’ (Johnson Society Minute Book, PMB/R/6/1/6 1927–9). In the event, neither attended the Dinner, which was held on 23 June. The following year, the minutes of 13 May 1928 show that both R.G. Collingwood and Tolkien were suggested as guests for the dinner of 20 June, but ‘the society voted in favour of Mr. Collingwood’ (Collingwood by that time had given two papers to the society on Jane Austen, both of which were greeted with enthusiastic reports in the minutes). However, Collingwood was unable to attend and Tolkien was duly invited instead. According to the minutes: ‘the society listened to various speeches, which, with the exception of that of Professor Tolkien, were remarkable for their singular lack of wit. Professor Tolkien then entertained the society with a series of amusing stories’ (Johnson Society Minute Book, PMB/R/6/1/6 1927–9).

      The minutes for the meeting of 29th November 1931 record that:

      In Public Business Professor Tolkien read one of the most ingenious papers that the Society has ever heard. The “Secret Vice”, which gave the paper its title, turned out to be the study & invention of obscure living languages, or codes. After a peculiar conversational opening, in which he touched on such elementary new languages as those produced by adaptation of already-existing languages, – he cited an example one in which the names of animals were used to denote certain words or phrases, & a whole new language built up on this principle, – Professor Tolkien went on to discuss those languages which were composed of words entirely their own, whether derived phonetically, or from some other (probably dead) language. The most interesting example of the phonetic type of language is that spoken in the island of Fonway, which apparently has no connection whatever with any other known language, nor is it spoken or understood elsewhere than in this one small island. Professor Tolkien finally regaled the Society with works of his own, written in an original phonetic language. He had, he said, on one occasion been surprised & rather dismayed to overhear two navvies conversing in a language which till then he had believed understood only by himself, its originator. The works which he now read, however, he believed to be entirely his own & to be unknown to anyone else.

      After a discussion started by the President, in which the conversation drifted down such byways of language study as are formed by the eccentricities of James Joyce & Gertrude Stein, the meeting was declared informal, but continued until after midnight.

      (Johnson Society Minute Book, PMB/R/6/1/7 1929–37)

      Remarkably, the minutes record the name of only one invented language, but not one associated with Tolkien’s legendarium, and which was also omitted from the first publication of ‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. What is also intriguing is that the discussion that followed Tolkien’s paper made mention of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, both of whom are referenced in Tolkien’s accompanying notes (see pp. 91, 100).

      In his edition of ‘A Secret Vice’ Christopher Tolkien speculates on a possible second delivery of this paper:

      The manuscript was later hurriedly revised here and there, apparently for a second delivery of the paper long after – the words ‘more than 20 years’ were changed to ‘almost 40 years’. (Monsters, p. 3)

      The manuscript does indeed contain a number of emendations, but many of them seem to be contemporary with the first delivery (see pp. 43, 44, 45). There are however three pieces of internal evidence that point to a possible second delivery, approximately 15–20 years from the first one: in addition to the emendation mentioned by Christopher Tolkien in the quotation above, Tolkien changed the words ‘this society’ to ‘this or any other society of philologists’ and the words ‘for a literary society’ to ‘for a learned society’ (see pp. 11, 12). Bearing in mind that the Johnson Society was – at least nominally – a literary society, it is possible that ‘A Secret Vice’ was delivered again to a Society with a philological agenda, c.1945–50. The date is intriguing, as during 1945–6 Tolkien was in the process of composing The Notion Club Papers (Sauron Defeated, pp. 145–327), a novel that was left unfinished, but which explores fascinating ideas on language and myth (see Fimi 2008, pp. 82–3). This novel also introduced a new invented language, Adûnaic. However, we have not been able to locate any concrete evidence for a second delivery of the paper. It may be that Tolkien prepared it – or began preparing it – but this second delivery did not happen. If it did occur, it may be that a record exists which will be located in the future. However, it is worth noting that Tolkien became relatively well-known after the publication of The Hobbit. It would, therefore, be curious that a second delivery has not been recorded in any of the Oxford periodicals.

      The Tolkien who first delivered ‘A Secret Vice’ on 29 November 1931 was a man actively engaged in social, academic and creative interests, all of which very much informed each other. In terms of his academic career, Tolkien had been Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College for a little over five years. During this time, he had a full schedule of teaching, tutorials, attending faculty meetings, supervising students’ theses, and, to make some additional money, external examining. Since arriving from Leeds, he had been developing a growing body of his own academic work and research. While at the University of Leeds, Tolkien had co-edited a new edition of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight with his colleague E.V. Gordon (1925). Between 1924 and 1927 Tolkien had been a regular reviewer of philological books and publications (‘Philology: General Works’) in The Year’s Work in English Studies. In 1925, he published several articles in The Review of English Studies, including ‘Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography’ and ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’, both of which explored various philological cruxes of Old and Middle English. For example, in ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’ Tolkien argued that a specific early English word ‘eaueres’ is not, in fact, a survival of the Old-English word ‘eofor’ (boar) but a word that had developed in early Middle English, ‘aver’, which can be translated as ‘“property, estate” but also “a cart-horse”’ (Solopova 2014, p. 232). Also in 1925, Tolkien contributed a translation to Rhys Robert’s article ‘Gerald of Wales and the Survival of Welsh’ in which he offered a reconstructed version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s prophecy on the survival of the Welsh language using a late twelfth-century version of South Midlands English (see Anderson 2005, pp. 230–4). In 1928, Tolkien published a six-page ‘Foreword’ to Walter Edward Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, a dialect that preserved evidence of influence from the Norse invasions in the eighth and ninth centuries on English word-forms (see Croft 2007, pp. 184–8). In 1929, Tolkien published his landmark analysis, ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association. In this highly detailed article, he demonstrated that two groups of disparate devotional works from the West Midlands of the twelfth century shared close similarities in phonology, grammar and spelling. Tolkien coined the term ‘AB language’ (bringing together labels used to designate the two groups of manuscripts) to suggest that, when taken together, these documents reflected the preservation of a local English scribal tradition, descended from late literary Old English, and which still persisted in the late twelfth century (see ESMEA and AW). On 16 May 1931, Tolkien delivered a paper to the Philological Society in Oxford on Chaucer’s use of Northern dialects in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ of The Canterbury Tales. Tolkien described Chaucer’s representation of Northern English dialect in the speech of the scheming clerks of ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ as Chaucer’s ‘linguistic joke’ (Reeve’s Tale, p. 2). A characteristic that much of the above academic work shares is a focus on the uses and intricacies of language. In all his academic exploration, Tolkien employed the philological or comparative method to uncover, reconstruct and fill in the gaps in the meanings of lost words, names and their attendant stories.

      Another aspect of academic endeavour with which Tolkien was actively engaged at this СКАЧАТЬ