A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. Andrew Higgins

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      In the Victorian period the traveller’s tale became linked to several of the earliest works of science fiction such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac: The Story of A Wrecked Record (1880) and Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), all of which included specimens of fictional languages (see Higgins, 2015, pp. 47–8). Bulwer-Lytton’s use of language invention is especially interesting as the imaginary language of Vril-ya ‘is constructed as an extrapolation from the accepted truths of the linguistic science of the time’ (Yaguello 1991, p. 45). Indeed, Bulwer-Lytton dedicated this dystopian novel to the Oxford philologist Max Müller whose ideas on language development and decay Bulwer-Lytton imaginatively incorporated into the invented history of the language of Vril-ya.

      Tolkien’s linguistic invention also responded to his times in similar ways. As outlined above, ‘A Secret Vice’ was first conceived and delivered at an important period in the continuum of Tolkien’s literary and academic work. This time also represented a particular social, historical and intellectual moment. The late 1920s and early 1930s saw the last promising flowering of International Auxiliary Languages, important trends and changes in linguistic theories, and language experimentation in art, mainly represented by Modernism as a literary movement. ‘A Secret Vice’ and Tolkien’s accompanying drafts and papers seem to engage with, and respond to, these contemporary trends and contexts.

      Creating a new language, or seeking to re-create a long-lost ideal language, has been an important – yet often overlooked – aspect of the Western tradition. Medieval scholars attempted to recover, or rediscover, the language of Adam, the primeval ‘perfect’ language lost via the sin of Babel, according to the Judaeo-Christian tradition (see Eco 1995; Yaguello 1991, pp. 10–14). Many brilliant minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Francis Lodwick^fn6, Gottfried Leibniz, John Wilkins and George Dalgarno, endeavoured to construct a universal philosophical language, which would be based on a logical and mathematical description of the universe and would eliminate the perceived imprecise, disorganized and unsystematic disposition of natural languages (see Okrent 2009, 19–75). By the nineteenth century, the a priori (made from scratch) languages of the previous era had given way to international languages, constructed a posteriori (using elements of existing natural languages), also termed auxiliary as they were meant to serve a more utilitarian role: to facilitate communication at a time when the world was seemingly becoming smaller. The acronym IAL (International Auxiliary Language) was used for a plethora of such projects, the proliferation of which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reached ‘epidemic proportions’ (Yaguello 1991, p. 52). As Yaguello notes:

      the period 1880–1914 witnessed frenzied activity in this sphere. Monnerot-Dumaine lists 145 projects for this period alone, which amounts to almost 40% of the total of 368 [invented] languages spread over four centuries. (1991, p. 53)

      As Fimi has discussed (2008, pp. 93–5), it was in the midst of this intellectual climate that Tolkien started working on the earliest stages of his legendarium, and the ‘coeval and congenital’ construction of his fictional languages. Some of the most significant IALs from that period, of which Tolkien will have been aware, included Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, and Novial (see Letters, p. 231). Two of them are referred to in Tolkien’s writings presented in this volume.

      Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof’s IAL was published in 1887 under the pseudonym ‘Doktoro Esperanto’ (Doctor Hopeful), which eventually gave his language its name. His ‘hope’ was that his language would unite humanity and bring in a new era of international tolerance and respect. Esperanto was designed to be intelligible by Europeans with very little study. According to D.B. Gregor, speakers of Romance languages could immediately recognize 80% of Esperanto, speakers of Germanic languages 63%, and speakers of Slavic languages 17% (Gregor 1982, p. 28). It boasted a grammar with no exceptions and relied on a system of roots and affixes. Esperanto acquired a strong following and continues to be spoken by around one million people today (Smith 2011, p. 38).

      Esperanto’s success inevitably led to many imitators, reformers and improvers. Novial (nov-‘new’ + IAL) was such a project by prominent linguist Otto Jespersen. Jespersen chose roots for Novial ‘according to the principle of greatest internationality’ and used auxiliary verbs in a similar way to English (Smith 2011, p. 39). There are two instances in Tolkien’s published writings where he referred to Novial (pretty much unfavourably – see below) but he mentioned Esperanto by itself on a number of occasions in his published corpus, including in ‘A Secret Vice’, in his preamble to introduce the subject of imaginary languages.

      Tolkien seems to have learnt Esperanto by 1909, as suggested by evidence contained in a small notebook he kept at the time called the ‘Book of the Foxrook’.^fn7 In this notebook the seventeen-year-old Tolkien outlined a secret code consisting of a ‘rune-like phonetic alphabet’ and ‘a sizeable number of ideographic symbols’, which Tolkien called ‘monographs’, each of which represented an entire word (Smith and Wynne 2000, p. 30). This ‘Private Scout Code’ (as Tolkien called it) worked, presumably, by using the ‘monographs’ for most words, and the rune-like alphabet (each enclosed in a cartouche) ‘to spell personal names or words for which a monograph was not available’ (ibid., p. 31). He appears to have invented a writing system that combined a phonetic alphabet (clearly associated with the sounds of English) and ideographic symbols. The instructions on the sounds that his rune-like alphabet represented, though, are in pure Esperanto, and he maintains that – with a few exceptions – his alphabet is used to spell phonetically ‘as in Esperanto’ (ibid., p. 31).^fn8

      Tolkien refers to the Esperanto World Congress of 1930 in ‘A Secret Vice’ (p. 4) and a year later he had become a member of the Board of Honorary Advisers to the Education Committee of the British Esperanto Association. In a letter supporting Esperanto, published in The British Esperantist in May 1932, he claimed that he wasn’t a ‘practical Esperantist’ but that ‘25 years ago I learned and have not forgotten its grammar and structure, and at one time read a fair amount written in it’ (cited in Smith and Wynne 2000, p. 35)^fn9. In his letter, Tolkien claims that the most important obstacle for any IAL is ‘universal propagation’ adding that one of the main reasons he supports Esperanto is that ‘it has already the premier place, has won the widest measure of practical acceptance’ (ibid.). These utilitarian concerns notwithstanding, Tolkien also praises Esperanto for its ‘individuality’, ‘euphony’, ‘coherence and beauty’, elements that he attributes to the ‘genius of the original author’ (ibid.).

      Oronzo Cilli (2014) has recently uncovered further links between Tolkien and the Esperanto movement. Tolkien’s name is cited as one of the ‘patrons’ of the 24th British Esperanto Congress which was held in Oxford at Easter 1933. Tolkien is also a co-signatory (together with 23 other academics and educators) of an article on ‘The educational value of Esperanto’ published in the May 1933 issue of The British Esperantist, which seems to have originated in a meeting of the same title recorded in the congress proceedings (see Cilli 2014). Whether Tolkien participated in the 1933 congress or not, he lends his support to a series of statements in favour of Esperanto which broadly agree with his earlier expressed ideas about this IAL: its endurance, popularity, and usability. This document concludes that Esperanto should be ‘the first language to be studied, after the mother tongue, in the schools of all countries’ (cited in Cilli 2014) and also refers to the ever-increasing original literature in Esperanto. This last point is of special importance when it comes to considering Tolkien’s next (and last) recorded comment on Esperanto, which comes from a letter composed over 20 years later. In 1956, in a draft letter to a certain Mr Thompson, Tolkien delves into his creative process and notes:

      It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally СКАЧАТЬ