Get Your Book Red Here

I recently watched the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movies and enjoyed them immensely. I admit that fantasy, though so often written strangely or even badly, is the genre that catches my highly active imagination the most. Again, I believe it comes back to a root fascination with power that I do not possess. What would it be to have the skill of Gandalf and attack or protect persons hundreds of miles away? Not with bombs, mind, but with nature and with brilliance, to break a mind or save a soul? Awesome, is the answer. But as, for good reason, humans do not possess such great power, as the power they do have is often used for great ill. This being the case, fantasy allows one’s mind to break the boundaries of the natural and run freely into the supernatural, the realm of magic.

However, J.R.R. Tolkien’s books (and these movies) had one very human, but very difficult aspect that wrapped itself around my mind: created languages. In fact, Tolkien admitted that the languages seem to have come fist and the stories were created to provide a realm in which to use them. The languages he developed most extensively were (not the black language of Mordor, sorry) but two forms of elvish: Quenya (pronounced kwenya) and Sindarin. I’ve taken a fancy for a while to the idea of creating a language, but as I am neither a linguist nor well informed on the aspects of grammar nor longsuffering in such matters, I read such things as the Language Construction Kit with interest but without results.

I also admit that the particularly lovely sound of elvish caressed my ear and I began to wonder whether or not this language (I didn’t know there was more than one) could be studied and acquired. It can. Tolkien’s original Quenya is the one I settled on, only to find complex manuals written by linguists or at least those who had studied language and grammar enough to use the most difficult terms they could muster. I also found that even these languages were not complete enough to really provided a speaker with a basis for fluency and were thus learned for the purpose of writing and interpreting the language in the novels and Tolkien’s various other works and letters.

I did find, however, a bastardized and much simplified version of the language had been made by a group called the GreyCompany, a group interested in roleplay based on Tolkien’s elf kingdom. (There was, as you may have guessed quite an explosion of interest and websites concerning these in the early 2000’s but all of the sites I visited are now defunct. ) I had been much hoping that someone had thought to do this. BUT, the internet was full of so many pooh-poohing purists that I was put off this track until weeks later. It made me wonder how anyone could be a purist concerning a created and much modified language… I thought that the simplification of the language was an excellent idea, but I seemed to be one of the few.

In the world of languages, is academic pursuit enough?

Or, is it permissible to modify what is not, after all, some kind of sacred and permanent structure in order to keep it alive?

Ladies and gentleman, the title of this post gives you my reply.