The Peoples of Middle-earth (7 page)

For if the labour has been long (more than fourteen years), it has been neither orderly nor continuous. But I have not had Bilbo's leisure. Indeed much of that time has contained for me no leisure at all, and more than once for a whole year the dust has gathered on my unfinished pages. I only say this to explain to those who have waited for this book why they have had to wait so long. I have no reason to complain. I am surprised and delighted to find from numerous letters that so many people, both in England and across the Water, share my interest in this almost forgotten history; but it is not yet universally recognized as an important branch of study. It has indeed no obvious practical use, and those who go in for it can hardly expect to be assisted.

Much information, necessary and unnecessary, will be found in the Prologue....

In the Second Edition of 1966 this Foreword was rejected in its entirety. On one of his copies of the First Edition my father wrote beside it: 'This Foreword I should wish very much in any case to cancel.

Confusing (as it does) real personal matters with the "machinery" of the Tale is a serious mistake.'(12)

NOTES.

1. On this passage see note 11.

2. On my father's conception at this time of the use in Middle-earth in the Third Age of Noldorin on the one hand, and of 'the language of the woodland Elves* on the other, see p. 36, $18, and commentary (pp. 65-6).

3. On this passage concerning the origin of the Common Speech see p. 63, $9.

4. In Appendix A (RK pp. 349 - 50) the length of time between the birth-dates of Eorl the Young and Theoden was 463 years.

5. My father was asserting, I think, that a language so base and narrow in thought and expression cannot remain a common tongue of widespread use; for from its very inadequacy it cannot resist change of form, and must become a mass of closed jargons, incomprehensible even to others of the same kind.

6. This passage concerning the Dwarves, absent in the original version of Appendix F, reappeared subsequently (p. 75), and was retained, a good deal altered, in the final form of that Appendix (RK p. 410).

7. My father deeply regretted that in the event his 'facsimiles' of the torn and burned pages from the Book of Mazarbul were not reproduced in The Lord of the Rings (see Letters nos.137, 139-40; but also pp. 298-9 in this book). They were finally published in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1979.

8. This is where the passage that concludes Appendix F in the published form first arose. See further pp. 76-7.

9. Nauglir: curiously, my father here returned to the form found in the Quenta of 1930, rather than using Naugrim, found in the Quenta Silmarillion and later (see V.273, 277; XI.209). As with those referred to in notes 6 and 8, this passage, absent in the original version of Appendix F, was reinstated and appears with little change in the published form (where the name is Naugrim).

10. Years later my father called this text a 'fragment' (see note 12). It ends at the foot of a page, the last words typed being 'since their birth', with 'in the deeps of time' added in pencil.

11. For passages from F' that reappeared in the course of the development see notes 6, 8 and 9. In this connection there is a curious and puzzling point arising from F'. In this text my father showed his intention to say something in the published work about the fiction of translation: that he had converted the 'true' languages of Men (and Hobbits) in the Third Age of Middle-earth, wholly alien to us, into an analogical structure composed of English in modern and ancestral form, and Norse ($$5-6, 8). Introducing this subject, he wrote ($4): 'It is said that Hobbits spoke a language, or languages, very similar to ours. But that must not be misunderstood. Their language was like ours in manner and spirit; but if the face of the world has changed greatly since those days, so also has every detail of speech ...'

One might wonder for a moment who said this of Hobbits, and why my father should introduce it only to warn against taking it literally; but it was of course he himself who said it, in the original version P 1 of the Foreword: Concerning Hobbits (VI.311, cited on p. 8): 'And yet plainly they must be relatives of ours ... For one thing, they spoke a very similar language (or languages), and liked or disliked much the same things as we used to.' This was repeated years later in the revision of the second text P 2 (see the comparative passages given on p. 8), but here the qualifying statement, warning against misunderstanding, is not present.

I cannot explain why my father should have made this cross-reference to the Foreword: Concerning Hobbits, in order to point out that it is misleading, nor why he should have retained it -

without this caveat - in his revision of P 2. What makes it still odder is that, whereas in the first versions of Appendix F (in which the 'theory and practice' of the translation of the true languages was greatly elaborated) the remark is absent, it reappears in the third version (F 3, p. 73), and here in a form almost identical to that in F': it is given as a citation, 'It has been said that "the Hobbits spoke a language, or languages, very similar to ours"', and this is followed by the same qualification: 'But this must not be misunderstood. Their language was like ours in manner and tone ...' As a final curiosity, by the time the third version of Appendix F was written the remark had been removed from the Prologue (see the citation from the text P 5 on p. 8), and replaced by 'They spoke the languages of Men, and they liked and disliked much the same things as we once did', though still, as in the published Prologue, in the context of this being a sign of the dose original relationship of Hobbits and Men.

12. Many years after the writing of F' my father noted on the typescript: 'Fragment of an original Foreword afterwards divided into Foreword and Prologue'. This was misleading, because F' played no part in the Prologue, but did contribute to the Foreword of the First Edition and to Appendix F.

*

The history of Appendix F, whose final title was The Languages and Peoples of the Third Age (while the discussion of alphabets and scripts, originally joined to that of the languages, became Appendix E, Writing and Spelling), undoubtedly began with the abortive but not unproductive text F>, but the first version of that Appendix is best taken to be constituted by two closely related manuscripts, since these were written as elaborate essays to stand independently of any 'Foreword'.

Long afterwards my father wrote (p. 299) that 'the actual Common Speech was sketched in structure and phonetic elements, and a number of words invented'; and in this work he is seen developing the true forms in the Westron tongue to underlie the translated (or substituted) names, especially of Hobbits. A great deal of this material was subsequently lost from the Appendix. This original version is also of great interest in documenting his conception of the languages of Middle-earth and their interrelations at the time when the narrative of The Lord of the Rings had recently been completed; and also in showing how substantially that conception was still to be developed before the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954-5.

To date this version precisely seems scarcely possible, but at least it can certainly be placed before the summer of 1950, and I think that it may well be earlier than that.(1)

The earlier of the two texts, which I will refer to as F 1, is a fairly rough and much emended, but entirely legible, manuscript entitled Notes on the Languages at the end of the Third Age. A second manuscript, F 2, succeeded it, as I think, very soon if not immediately, with the title The Languages at the end o f the Third Age. Writing with great care and clarity, my father followed F 1 pretty closely: very often changing the expression or making additions, but for the most part in minor ways, and seldom departing from the previous text even in the succession of the sentences. The two texts are far too close to justify giving them both, and I print therefore F 2, recording in the primarily textual notes on pp. 54 ff. the relatively few cases where different read-ings in F 1 seem of some significance or interest (but in the section on Hobbit names, where there was much development in F 2, all differences between the two texts are detailed).

F2. was substantially corrected and added to (more especially in the earlier part of the essay), and some pages were rewritten. These alterations are not all of a kind, some being made with care and others more roughly, and I have found it extremely difficult to determine, in relative terms, when certain of them were made: the more especially since the development after F 2 was not a steady progression, my father evidently feeling that a different treatment of the subject was required. Some corrections undoubtedly belong to a time when the text as a whole had been supplanted. I have therefore included in the text that follows all alterations made to the manuscript, and in most cases I have shown them as such, though in order to reduce the clutter I have in some cases introduced them silently, when they do no more than improve the text (largely to increase its clarity) without in any way altering its purport.

In general I treat F 2 as the representative text of the original version, and only distinguish F 1 when necessary. The paragraph-numbers are of course added editorially. A commentary follows the notes on pp. 61 ff.

The Languages

at the end of the

Third Age.

$1. I have written this note on the languages concerned in this book not only because this part of the lore of those days is of special interest to myself, but because I find that many would welcome some information of this kind. I have had many enquiries concerning such matters from readers of the earlier selections from the Red Book.*

$2. We have in these histories to deal with both Elvish and Mannish (2) tongues. The long history of Elvish speech I will not treat; but since three [> two] varieties of it are glimpsed in this book a little may be said about it.

$3. According to Elvish historians the Elven-folk, by themselves called the Quendi, and Elven-speech were originally one.

The primary division was into Eldar and Avari. The Avari were those Elves who remained content with Middle-earth [struck out:] and refused the summons of the powers; but they and their (* The Hobbit, drawn from the earlier chapters of the Red Book, those mainly composed by Bilbo and dealing only with the discovery of the Ring.)

many secret tongues do not concern this book. The Eldar were those who set out and marched to the western shores of the Old World. Most of them then passed over the Sea and came to that land in the Ancient West which they called Valinor, a name that means the Land of the Powers or Rulers of the World. But some of the Eldar [added: of the kindred of the Teleri] remained behind in the north-west of Middle-earth, and these were called the Lembi or 'Lingerers'. It is with Eldarin tongues, Valinorean or Lemberin [> Telerian] that these tales are concerned.

$4. In Valinor, from the language of that Elvish kindred known as the Lindar, was made a High-Elven speech that, after the Elves had devised letters, was used not only for lore and formal writing, but also for high converse and for intercourse among Elves of different kindreds. This, which is indeed an

'Elven-latin' as it were, unchanging in time and place, the Elves themselves called Quenya: that is simply 'Elvish'.

$5. Now after long ages of peace it came to pass, as is related in the Quenta Noldorion, that the Noldor, who were of all the kindreds of the Eldar' the most skilled in crafts and lore, departed as exiles from Valinor and returned to Middle-earth, seeking the Great Jewels, the Silmarilli, which Feanor chief of all their craftsmen had made. Their language, Noldorin, that at first differed little from the Lindarin or Quenya, became on their return to Middle-earth subject to the change which even things devised by the Elves here suffer, and in the passing of time it grew wholly unlike to the Quenya of Valinor, which tongue the exiles nonetheless retained always in memory as a language of lore and song and courtesy.*

$6 According to the Elves Men shared, though in a lesser degree, many of the powers of the Elves, and they were capable of devising languages of a sort for themselves, as indeed they have done, it seems, in many remote lands. But in fact Men did not in all regions go through the slow and painful process of invention. In the North and West of the Old World they learned language direct and fully made from Elves who befriended them in their infancy and early wanderings; and the tongues of Men (* On the other hand the Noldorin and Lemberin tongues, that had long been sundered, being now spoken by peoples dwelling side by side, drew closer together; and though they remained wholly distinct they became similar in sound and style.)

which are, however remotely, of this origin the Quendi have at all times found the more pleasant to their own ears. Yet soon even these western tongues of Men became estranged from the speech of Elves, being changed by process of time, or by Men's own inventions and additions, or by other influences, notably that of the Dwarves from whom long ago some Men learned much, especially of delving, building, and smithying.