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J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor at Oxford, had been inventing languages since boyhood. He later said the languages came first, and that he made Middle-earth, the world of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, partly to give them a place to live.

Letter to Houghton Mifflin, 1955

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The story behind the card

Tolkien was a philologist, a scholar of how languages change over the centuries. After the First World War his first job was on the Oxford English Dictionary, tracing the history of words beginning with W, and from 1925 he was professor of Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, at Oxford. His two main Elvish languages have real models: Quenya draws on Finnish and Latin, and Sindarin on Welsh. He gave them grammars, sound changes and long histories, so the names in his books sound as if they had grown over thousands of years. He set out the idea in a 1955 letter to his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Some scholars, such as Dimitra Fimi, think the mythology and the languages grew up together, since his first poem of the mythology came a few months before his first Elvish language.

Türkçe oku
Oxford'da profesör olan J.R.R. Tolkien çocukluğundan beri diller icat ediyordu. Sonradan önce dillerin geldiğini, Hobbit ile Yüzüklerin Efendisi'nin geçtiği Orta Dünya'yı da kısmen bu dillere bir yurt olsun diye kurduğunu söyledi.
Houghton Mifflin'e mektup, 1955

Tolkien bir filologdu, yani dillerin yüzyıllar içinde nasıl değiştiğini inceleyen bir bilim insanıydı. Birinci Dünya Savaşı'ndan sonraki ilk işi, Oxford İngilizce Sözlüğü'nde W harfiyle başlayan sözcüklerin geçmişini araştırmaktı; 1925'ten itibaren de Oxford'da Anglosakson dili, yani Eski İngilizce profesörüydü. İki ana Elf dilinin gerçek dünyadan modelleri vardır: Quenya Fince ve Latinceden, Sindarin ise Galceden beslenir. Tolkien bu dillere dil bilgisi, ses değişimleri ve uzun bir geçmiş verdi; bu sayede kitaplarındaki adlar binlerce yıl içinde kendiliğinden oluşmuş gibi durur. Bu düşünceyi 1955'te Amerikalı yayıncısı Houghton Mifflin'e yazdığı bir mektupta anlattı. Dimitra Fimi gibi bazı araştırmacılar ise mitolojiyle dillerin birlikte geliştiğini düşünür; çünkü Tolkien'in bu mitolojiye ait ilk şiiri, ilk Elf dilinden birkaç ay önce yazılmıştı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Languages constructed by Tolkien
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