Tag Archives: Common Speech

Babeling

04 Wednesday Jun 2025

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Dear readers, welcome, as always.

For someone who claimed that he disliked allegory (see, for example, his letter to Milton Waldman, late 1951, Letters, 204), it might seem odd that Tolkien devised one, which we can read near the beginning of “Beowulf:  the Monsters and the Critics”:

“A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall.  Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers.  Of the rest he took some and built a tower.  But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building.   So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover when the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material.” (7-8)

Tolkien goes on to explain his allegory as being about Beowulf and its critics over the years, including more recent ones—

“To reach these we must pass in rapid flight over the heads of many decades of critics.”

It’s the beginning of the next sentence which then interests me:  “As we do so a conflicting babel mounts up to us…” (8)

From that word “babel”, we can see where Tolkien probably acquired his central image–

(from the early 15th-century Bedford Hours—for more see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Hours )

and its basis–

“1 Erat autem terra labii unius, et sermonum eorumdem.2 Cumque proficiscerentur de oriente, invenerunt campum in terra Senaar, et habitaverunt in eo.3 Dixitque alter ad proximum suum: Venite, faciamus lateres, et coquamus eos igni. Habueruntque lateres pro saxis, et bitumen pro cæmento:4 et dixerunt: Venite, faciamus nobis civitatem et turrim, cujus culmen pertingat ad cælum: et celebremus nomen nostrum antequam dividamur in universas terras.5 Descendit autem Dominus ut videret civitatem et turrim, quam ædificabant filii Adam,6 et dixit: Ecce, unus est populus, et unum labium omnibus: cœperuntque hoc facere, nec desistent a cogitationibus suis, donec eas opere compleant.7 Venite igitur, descendamus, et confundamus ibi linguam eorum, ut non audiat unusquisque vocem proximi sui.8 Atque ita divisit eos Dominus ex illo loco in universas terras, et cessaverunt ædificare civitatem.9 Et idcirco vocatum est nomen ejus Babel, quia ibi confusum est labium universæ terræ: et inde dispersit eos Dominus super faciem cunctarum regionum.”

“The earth was of one language, however, and of the same speech.  And when they were setting forth from the east, they found a plain in the land of Senaar and they settled in that [place].  And one said to his neighbor, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them with fire.’  And they had bricks in place of stones and pitch in place of cement.  And they said, ‘Come, let us make a city and tower for ourselves, whose top may reach the sky; and let us glorify our name before we may be split up into all the lands.’  The Lord came down, however, so that he might see the city and the tower which the sons of Adam were building and said:  “Look—there is one people and language for all.  They have begun to do this nor will they desist from their plans until they may fill them with [their] labor.  Come, therefore.  Let us go down and confuse their speech there so that each one may not hear [i.e. understand] the tongue of his neighbor.’  And so the Lord split them up from that place into many lands and they stopped building the city.  And on account of that the name of this [place] has been called “Babel” since there the speech of the whole land has been confused and thence the Lord scattered them over the surface of all the regions.” (Genesis 11.1-9, my translation—the meaning of “Babel” and its origin have been the subject of scholarly argument—see:    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel  )

It’s interesting, however, to see that this is a tower of Babel in reverse:  instead of it being built, it is being pulled down—although, as in the case of the Biblical tower, events around the tower produce confusion:  in the case of Babel, linguistic; in the case of Tolkien’s tower, critical, with so many differing opinions about approaches to Beowulf.

In our world, Tolkien had early been concerned with the fact that the earth was full of languages, Biblically created or not, for which he believed that a common language, a lingua franca, might be a cure, a cure he believed might lie in Esperanto:

“Personally I am a believer in an ‘artificial’ language, at any rate for Europe—a believer, that is, in its desirability, as the one thing antecedently necessary for uniting Europe, before it is swallowed by non-Europe; as well as for many other good reasons—a believer in its possibility because the history of the world seems to exhibit, as far as I know it, both an increase in human control of (or influence upon) the uncontrollable, and a progressive widening of the range of more or less uniform languages.  Also I particularly like Esperanto…” (“A Secret Vice”, in Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, 198.  For more on Esperanto, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto and https://ia800205.us.archive.org/13/items/esperantotheuniv00ocon/esperantotheuniv00ocon.pdf          and for more on Tolkien and the subject, see:  Arden R. Smith, “Tolkien and Esperanto”, Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center, Vol.17 (2000), 27-46) 

For Europe perhaps one language, then, but, for Middle-earth?

If we only think of those spoken or mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, we find numerous languages—not surprising for someone who more than once had said that he created people so that there would be someone to speak his languages (see, for example, his letter to Houghton Mifflin, 30 June, 1955, Letters, 319—note:  this is only a rough list for a much more complicated subject—for more, see, for example, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F, I, “The Languages and Peoples of the Third Age”).  Here is a basic roster:

1. the Elves (Quenya and Sindarin—for more, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvish_languages_of_Middle-earth )

2. the Dwarves (Khuzdul)—for a very good, linguistically-based essay on this, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khuzdul

3. the Rohirrim (Rohirric—or Rohanese—or simply Rohan—see this essay for more on the various possible names for the language:  https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Rohanese )  The Hobbits appear to have spoken at some point in their history a related language—see Appendix F “Of Hobbits” for more.

4. the Dunlendings and the Wild Men of Druadan Forest (?  descended from very early humans in Middle-earth—in Appendix F, Tolkien describes their language:  “Wholly alien was the speech of the Wild Men of Druadan Forest.  Alien, too, or remotely akin, was the language of the Dunlendings.”)

5. the Ents (seemingly invented their own language, described in Appendix F as “…unlike all others:  slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded…”)

6. men (here meaning descendants of the Numeroreans—Westron—complicated—see Appendix F “Of Men” for some of that complication)

7. Orcs (“it is said that they had no language of their own, but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to their own liking”—to which would be added the “Black Speech”, invented by Sauron as—yes, a lingua orca, or common speech—see Appendix F, “Of Other Races”, “Orcs and the Black Speech”)

8. to which we might add the languages of the Easterlings and the Haradrim

And here we’re back to Babel again.

(Gustave Dore, from his very dramatic illustrations for La Bible)

People in Middle-earth can revert to their own languages—

“…Following the winding way up the green shoulders of the hills, they came at last to the wide wind-swept walls and the gates of Edoras.

There sat many men in bright mail, who sprang at once to their feet and barred the way with spears.  ‘Stay, strangers here unknown!’ they cried in the tongue of the Riddermark, demanding the names and errand of the strangers.”

“ ‘Well do I understand your speech…yet few strangers do so.  Why then do you not speak in the Common Tongue, as is the custom in the West, if you wish to be answered?’ “  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

Here Gandalf reveals, that, just as there was Tolkien’s Esperanto in our world, in Middle-earth there was clearly an equivalent:  “the Common Tongue”.  Descended from the language of the Numenorean invaders of Middle-earth (letter to Naomi Mitchison, 25 April, 1954, Letters, 264), this was just what its name says:  it was the common speech of a majority of the people in western Middle-earth—along with the exceptions listed above.  To JRRT, it was also the equivalent of the English into which the text had been “translated”.  In that same letter to Naomi Mitchison, Tolkien wrote:

“If it will interest you, I will send you a copy (rather rough) of the matter dealing with Languages (and Writing), Peoples and Translation.

The latter has given me much thought.  It seems seldom regarded by other creators of imaginary worlds, however gifted as narrators (such as Eddison).  But then I am a philologist, and much though I should like to be more precise on other cultural aspects and features, that is not within my competence.  Anyway ‘language’ is the most important, for the story has to be told, and the dialogue conducted in a language; but English cannot have been the language of any people at that time.  What I have, in fact, done, is to equate the Westron or wide-spread Common Speech of the Third Age with English; and translate everything, including names such as The Shire, that was in Westron into English terms…” (263-264)

In other words, what Tolkien has done is exactly the opposite of what the Lord was said to have done.  The account in Genesis tells us that, by “confundens ibi linguam eorum”—“confusing there their language”, the Lord intentionally had caused chaos, breaking up the single people into many groups, each speaking its own language and therefore unable to collaborate in continuing their daring construction.  JRRT, by writing—he would say “translating”—his work almost entirely in English (Tolkien had added in the letter to Mitchison “Languages quite alien to the C[ommon] S[peech] have been left alone), has produced a work in which he has brought together the speakers of a number of different languages, combining them into one, in order to produce what—pardon the pun—is a towering achievement.

(This image has produced a fair amount of confusion, it seems, on the internet—in some sources it’s labeled as by Rudolf von Ems, but sometimes another image of the building of the tower is substituted.  For the moment, I’ll go with Rudy c.1370—but check out this site for more Babel-building:  https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2007/01/72-views-of-tower-of-babel.html labeled as 72 views of the tower )

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Consider how dull the world would be with only one language, instead of the more than 7000 currently spoken (see:  https://www.worldatlas.com/society/how-many-languages-are-there-in-the-world.html ),

And remember, in any language you like—including Entish—that there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

For more on the languages of Tolkien, there are a number of useful sites such as:  https://ardalambion.net/ .

Class, Order, Family… (Part 1)

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in J.R.R. Tolkien, Language

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Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

In Lerner and Loewe’s musical My Fair Lady (1956),

image1alady

based upon George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion (1913), one major character is Professor Henry Higgins, who studies English dialects.  He is given to musical rants and, in his first, he laments “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” with the couplet:

“An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him,

The moment he talks he makes some other

Englishman despise him.”

Somewhere—we’ve temporarily lost the quotation—Tolkien, in signing over his rights to The Lord of the Rings to someone, stipulated that Merry and Pippin weren’t to be “rustics”.

This word “rustic” entered English in the mid-15th century, being derived from the Latin rus, ruris, n., “country/farm” and its adjective, rusticus/a/um, “rural/of the countryside”, the adjective then meaning “a country person”—like these Romans

image1romanfarmers

or these, in the medieval world

image2peasant.jpg

or these, from JRRT’s childhood.

image3farmfolk

To JRRT, the linguist, what made the rustic was clearly not so much the look or even the activities which country people did so much as how they spoke. In Chapter One of the first book of The Lord of the Rings, we overhear a group of older hobbits discussing Bilbo and Frodo and Daddy Twofoot says:

“And no wonder they’re queer…if they live on the wrong side of the Brandywine River, and right agin the Old Forest.  That’s a dark bad place, if half the tales be true.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

Here, we see “agin” for “again”, “dark bad place”, which is more a rhythmic pattern of dialect than the words themselves (although we wonder about the placement of those adjectives together), and the use of the old subjunctive “if half the tales be true”.  And, in the next paragraph, Gaffer Gamgee then uses a dialect form of “drowned”—“drownded”.  The content of this dialogue is gossip, but the sound of it is meant to provide a quick aural sketch of rural people with perhaps the faint suggestion that such gossip is based upon few facts and much “folk wisdom”, such as the idea that, because one lives on the far side of a river, one is “queer”, leading to the conclusion that rustics are, at best, ill-informed, and, at worst, ignorant and potentially bigoted.

And so, we would presume that what JRRT wanted was that Frodo’s cousins should sound like Frodo, who speaks, in Middle-earth, what Tolkien calls “the Westron or ‘Common Speech’ of the West-lands of Middle-earth” and what is in Modern-earth called “Received Standard English”.  Here’s a brief example of that from that same chapter, when Gandalf and Frodo are discussing Bilbo and the Ring:

“If you mean , inventing all that about a ‘present’, well, I thought the true story much more likely and I couldn’t see the point of altering it at all.  It was very unlike Bilbo to do so, anyway; and I thought it rather odd.”

Vocabulary  choice plays a strong part here, with a Latinate element—“altering”—and the use of “odd”, where the Gaffer had earlier used “queer”, plus what we might think of as “higher class” words, like “likely” and “unlike” and “rather” as adjectives.

The Bagginses and their relatives, after all, are looked upon as well-to-do–“a decent respectable hobbit” the Gaffer says of Frodo’ father, Drogo, and calls Bilbo, “a very nice well-spoken gentlehobbit”.  In Middle-earth, dialect—especially here meaning that spoken by what appear to be meant to be “rustics”—can make the difference between gentlehobbits and people like the Gaffer.   As the Henry Higgins mentioned above says to Colonel Pickering, whom he regards as a social equal, of Liza Doolittle, a Cockney (inner London, lower-class girl):

“If you spoke as she does, sir,

Instead of the way you do,

Why, you might be selling flowers, too.”

image4pat

It’s not just among hobbits that we see what Henry Higgins calls a “verbal class distinction”, however.  Here’s Saruman

image5aasaruman

speaking to Gandalf:

“I did not expect you to show wisdom, even in your own behalf; but I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly, and so saving yourself much trouble and pain.  The third choice is to remain here until the end.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

We notice here the long compound sentence (long sentence made up of clauses which depend upon each other), from “I” to “pain”.  This is clearly the equivalent of “gentlehobbit” talk.

And here is one of Saruman’s orcs:

“…We are the fighting Uruk-hai!  We slew the great warrior.  We took the prisoners.  We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand, the Hand that gives us man’s-flesh to eat  We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we choose.  I am Ugluk.  I have spoken.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

image5aorcs

Here, we have a series of simple, declarative sentences (sentences with only one subject and verb)—three in a row– followed by a longer sentence which is built upon a simple sentence, “We are the servants of Saruman the Wise…”, followed by an example of what is called “polysyndeton”—that is, several shorter sentences joined together by a conjunction (a word like “and” or “or”).  All of this is followed by two more simple declarative sentences.

This is clearly not “rustic” speech—just compare it with that of Daddy Twofoot, above.  Instead, it reminds  us of translations of Native American speeches, like this, from the brave and wise Chief Joseph (1840-1904—Native American name in translation, “Thunder Traveling to Higher Areas”),

image5chiefjoseph

of the Nez Perce:

“Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our Chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Ta Hool Hool Shute is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my Chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

How might we characterize this?  It’s clearly very different from the speech of the orc’s master, who tends to speak in longer, more complex sentences, indicating more sophistication in the use of language (we remember the danger of listening too long to him, as demonstrated in The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 10, “The Voice of Saruman”).   We would say that, where the “rustic” dialect—pronunciation (“agin”), odd forms (“drownded”), old verb forms (“be true”)–differentiates the Gaffer and Daddy Twofoot from Frodo (and Merry and Pippin), for the orcs—or Ugluk, at least– it is sentence structure which differentiates the Isengard equivalent of “gentlehobbit” speech from that of the “rustic” orcs.

It isn’t only sentence structure which we would suggest makes orcs sound different, however, and we’ll talk more about this—and about another “rustic”—a real one—in Part 2 of this posting, next week.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD