Sauron Defeated (42 page)

'Looking at a picture once of a cone-shaped mountain rising out of wooded uplands, I heard myself crying out: "Desolate is Minul-Tarik, the Pillar of Heaven is forsaken!" and I knew that it was a dreadful thing. But most ominous of all are the Eagles of the Lords of the West. They shake me badly when I see them.

I could, I could - I feel I could tell some great tale of Numenor.

'But I'm getting on too fast. It was a long time before I began to piece the fragments together at all. Most of these "ghost-words" are, and always were, to all appearance casual, as casual as the words caught by the eye from a lexicon when you're looking for something else. They began to come through, as I said, when I was about ten; and almost at once I started to note them down. Clumsily, of course, at first. Even grown-up folk make a poor shot, as a rule, at spelling the simplest words that they've never seen, unless they have some sort of phonetic knowledge. But I've still got some of the grubby little note-books I used as a small boy. An unsystematic jumble, of course; for it was only now and again that I bothered about such things.

But later on, when I was older and had a little more linguistic experience, I began to pay serious attention to my "ghosts", and saw that they were something quite different from the game of trying to make up private languages.

'As soon as I started looking out for them, so to speak, the ghosts began to come oftener and clearer; and when I had got a lot of them noted down, I saw that they were not all of one kind: they had different phonetic styles, styles as unlike as, well

- Latin and Hebrew. I am sorry, if this seems a bit complicated.

I can't help it: and if this stuff is worth your bothering about at all, we'd better get it right.

'Well, first of all I recognized that a lot of these ghosts were Anglo-Saxon, or related stuff. What was left I arranged in two lists, A and B, according to their style, with a third rag-bag list C

for odd things that didn't seem to fit in anywhere. But it was language A that really attracted me; it just suited me. I still like it best.'

'In that case you ought to have got it pretty well worked out by now,' said Stainer. 'Haven't you got a Grammar and Lexicon of Lowdham's Language A that you could pass round? I wouldn't mind a look at it, if it isn't in some hideous phonetic script.

Lowdham stared at him, but repressed the explosion that seemed imminent. 'Are you deliberately missing the point?' he said. 'I've been painfully trying to indicate that I do not believe that this stuff is "invented", not by me at any rate.

'Take the Anglo-Saxon first. It is the only known language that comes through at all in this way, and that in itself is odd.

And it began to come through before I knew it. I recognized it as Anglo-Saxon only after I began to learn it from books, and then I had the curious experience of finding that I already knew a good many of the words. Why, there are a number of ghost-words noted in the very first of my childish note-books that are plainly a beginner's efforts at putting down spoken Old English words in modern letters. There's wook, woak, woof = crooked, for instance, that is evidently a first attempt at recording Anglo-Saxon woh.

'And as for the other stuff: A, the language I like best, is the shortest list. How I wish I could get more of it! But it's not under my control, Stainer. It's not one of my invented lingoes. I have made up two or three, and they're as complete as they're ever likely to be; but that's quite a different matter. But evidently I'd better cut out the autobiography and jump down to the present.

'It's now clear to me that the two languages A and B have got nothing to do with any language I've ever heard, or come across in books in the ordinary way. Nothing. As far as it is possible for any language, built out of about two dozen sounds, as A is, to avoid occasional resemblances to other quite unrelated tongues: nothing. And they have nothing to do with my inventions either. Language B is quite unlike my own style.

Language A is very agreeable to my taste (it may have helped to form it), but it is independent of me; I can't "work it out", as you put it.

'Any one who has ever spent (or wasted) any time on composing a language will understand me. Others perhaps won't. But in making up a language you are free: too free. It is difficult to fit meaning to any given sound-pattern, and even more difficult to fit a sound-pattern to any given meaning. I say fit. I don't mean that you can't assign forms or meanings arbitrarily, as you will. Say, you want a word for sky. Well, call it jibberjabber, or anything else that comes into your head without the exercise of any linguistic taste or art. But that's code-making, not language-building. It is quite another matter to find a relationship, sound plus sense, that satisfies, that is when made durable. When you're just inventing, the pleasure or fun is in the moment of invention; but as you are the master your whim is law, and you may want to have the fun all over again, fresh. You're liable to be for ever niggling, altering, refining, wavering, according to your linguistic mood and to your changes of taste.

'It is not in the least like that with my ghost-words. They came through made: sound and sense already conjoined. I can no more niggle with them than I can alter the sound or the sense of the word polis in Greek. Many of my ghost-words have been repeated, over and over again, down the years. Nothing changes but, occasionally, my spelling. They don't change. They endure, unaltered, unalterable by me. In other words they have the effect and taste of real languages. But one can have one's preferences among real languages, and as I say, I like A best.

'Both A and B I associate in some way with the name Numenor. The rag-bag list has got pretty long as the years have gone on, and I can now see that, among some unidentified stuff, it contains a lot of echoes of later forms of language derived from A and B. The Numenorean tongues are old, old, archaic; they taste of an Elder World to me. The other things are worn, altered, touched with the loss and bitterness of these shores of exile.' These last words he spoke in a strange tone, as if talking to himself. Then his voice trailed off into silence.

'I find this rather hard to follow, or to swallow,' said Stainer.

'Couldn't you give us something a bit clearer, something better to bite on than this algebra of A and B?'

Lowdham looked up again. 'Yes, I could,' he said. 'I won't bother you with the later echoes. I find them moving, somehow, and instructive technically: I am beginning to discern the laws or lines of their change as the world grew older; but that wouldn't be clear even to a philologist except in writing and with long parallel lists.

'But take the name Numenore or Numenor (both occur) to start with. That belongs to Language A. It means Westernesse, and is composed of nume "west" and nore "folk" or "country".

But the B name is Anadune, and the people are called Adunaim, from the B word adun "west". The same land, or so I think, has another name: in A Andore and in B Yozayan,(39) and both mean

"Land of Gift".

'There seems to be no connexion between the two languages there. But there are some words that are the same or very similar in both. The word for "sky" or "the heavens" is menel in Language A and minil in B: a form of it occurs in Minul-tarik

"Pillar of Heaven" that I mentioned just now. And there seems to be some connexion between the A word Valar, which seems to mean something like "The Powers", we might say "gods"

perhaps, and the B plural Avaloim and the place-name Avalloni.

Although that is a B name, it is with it, oddly enough, that I associate Language A; so if you want to get rid of algebra, you can call A Avallonian, and B Adunaic. I do myself.

'The name Earendil, by the way, belongs to Avallonian, and contains eare "the open sea" and the stem ndil "love, devotion": that may look a bit odd, but lots of the Avallonian stems begin with nd, mb, ng, which lose their d, b, or g when they stand alone. The corresponding Adunaic name, apparently meaning just the same, is Azrubel. A large number of names seem to have double forms like this, almost as if one people spoke two languages. If that is so, I suppose the situation could be paralleled by the use of, say, Chinese in Japan, or indeed of Latin in Europe. As if a man could be called Godwin, and also Theophilus or Amadeus. But even so two different peoples must come into the story somewhere.

'Well there you are. I hope you are not all bored. I could give you long lists of other words. Words, words, mostly just that.

For the most part significant nouns, like Isil and Nilu for the Moon; fewer adjectives, still fewer verbs, and only occasional connected phrases. I love these languages, though they are only fragments out of some forgotten book. I find both curiously attractive, though Avallonian is nearest to my heart. Adunaic with its, well, faintly Semitic flavour belongs more nearly to our world, somehow. But Avallonian is to me beautiful, in its simple and euphonious style. And it seems to me more august, more ancient, and, well, sacred and liturgical. I used to call it the Elven-Latin. The echoes of it carry one far away. Very far away.

Away from Middle-earth altogether, I expect.' He paused as if he was listening. 'But I could not explain just what I mean by that,' he ended.

There was a short silence, and then Markison spoke. 'Why did you call it Elven-Latin?'(40) he asked. 'Why Elven?'

'I don't quite know,' Lowdham answered. 'It seems the nearest English word for the purpose. But certainly I didn't mean elf in any debased post-Shakespearean sort of sense.

Something far more potent and majestic. I am not quite clear what. In fact it's one of the things that I most want to discover.

What is the real reference of the aelf in my name?

'You remember that I said Anglo-Saxon used to come through mixed up with this other queer stuff, as if it had some special connexion with it? Well, I got hold of Anglo-Saxon through the ordinary books later on: I began to learn it properly before I was fifteen, and that confused the issue. Yet it is an odd fact that, though I found most of these words already there, waiting for me, in the printed vocabularies and dictionaries, there were some - and they still come through now and again -

that are not there at all. Tiwas,(41) for instance, apparently used as an equivalent of the Avallonian Valar; and Nowendaland (42) for Numenore. And other compound names too, like Freafiras,(43) Regeneard,(44) and Midswipen.(45) Some were in very archaic form: like hebaensuil "pillar of heaven", or frumaeldi; or very antique indeed like Wihawinia.'(46)

'This is dreadful,' sighed Frankley. 'Though I suppose I should be grateful at least that Valhalla and Valkyries have not made their appearance yet. But you'd better be careful, Arry!

We're all friends here, and we won't give you away. But you will be getting into trouble, if you let your archaic cats out of your private bag among your quarrelsome philological rivals. Unless, of course, you back up their theories.'(47)

'You needn't worry,' said Lowdham. 'I've no intention of publishing the stuff. And I haven't come across anything very controversial anyway. After all Anglo-Saxon is pretty near home, in place and time, and it's been closely worked: there's not much margin for wide errors, not even in pronunciation.

What I hear is more or less what the received doctrine would lead me to expect. Except in one point: it is so slow! Compared with us urban chirrupers the farmers and mariners of the past simply mouthed, savoured words like meat and wine and honey on their tongues. Especially when declaiming. They made a scrap of verse majestically sonorous: like thunder moving on a slow wind, or the tramp of mourners at the funeral of a king.

We just gabble the stuff. But even that is no news to philologists, in theory; though the realization of it in sound is something mere theory hardly prepares you for. And, of course, the philologists would be very interested in my echoes of very archaic English, even early Germanic - if they could be got to believe that they were genuine.

'Here's a bit that might intrigue them. It's very primitive in form, though I use a less horrific notation than is usual. But you had better see this.' He brought out from his pocket several scraps of paper and passed them round; westra lage wegas rehtas, wraikwas nu isti.

'That came through years ago,(48) long before I could interpret it, and it has constantly been repeated in various forms: westra lage wegas rehtas, wraikwas nu isti.

westweg waes rihtweg, woh is nupa

and so on and on and on, in many snatches and dream-echoes, down from what looks like very ancient Germanic to Old English.

a straight way lay westward, now it is bent.

It seems the key to something, but I can't fit it yet. But it was while I was rummaging in an Onomasticon,(49) and poring over the list of AElfwines, that I got, seemed to hear and see, the longest snatch that has ever come through in that way, Yes, I said I wasn't a seer; but Anglo-Saxon is sometimes an exception. I don't see pictures, but I see letters: some of the words and especially some of the scraps of verse seem to be present to the mind's eye as well as to the ear, as if sometime, somewhere, I had seen them written and could almost recall the page. If you turn over the slips I gave you, you'll see the thing written out. It came through when I was only sixteen, before I had read any of the old verse; but the lines stuck, and I put them down as well as I could. The archaic forms interest me now as a philologist, but that's how they came through, and how they stand in my note-book under the date October 1st 1954. A windy evening: I remember it howling round the house, and the distant sound of the sea.