Why Learn Elvish?

[Anne Aìwëhì]

Elvish

I have always leaned toward things northern. Language, art, music, or literature; if I found that the author had been Scandinavian, that the tune was an Irish reel, or that a word I found came from Old Icelandic, I loved it. Thus it wasn’t a surprise to me when I became enamored of Elvish. After studying it for some time, I started advertising lessons online. As soon I mentioned my intentions of teaching Elvish I was often asked: why learn Elvish? Many times people said it wasn’t a real language, as though the questioner worried about my sanity; a real people never spoke it. Why would anyone want to learn it? Understanding the nature of Elvish answers this.
J. R. R. Tolkien invented Elvish, and he originally called it ‘Eressèan.’ It became a project he worked on all his life. From the age of eight, he made sketchy outlines of it and in college finally gave it a name. But it wasn’t until he started writing The Hobbit that he realized his ‘Eressèan’ was to be Elvish. When Tolkien graduated from Oxford, he knew nineteen languages. From this depth of knowledge he interwove characteristics of each language into Elvish, predominately using Finnish and Welsh. The intricacy and completeness of Elvish with its endless supply of vocabulary makes it possible for two people learned in it to actually carry on a conversation.
But why learn it? It isn’t a spoken language. Latin isn’t a native tongue for anyone today, but why do scholars still learn it? For the simple and very good reason that you learn things from it. Reading astronomy charts or historical records, we can discover what it was like to live in ancient Rome. We have whole books and poems in Latin as well as writings from some of the great philosophers. Of course no philosopher wrote in Elvish. However, with so many qualities from different languages woven into this one language, learning Elvish can lead to better understanding of the workings of languages. Professors at Oxford, recognizing the value of learning Elvish, used a book, The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth by Ruth S. Noel (published 1974), for the purpose of teaching students interested in linguistics. I myself have been studying Elvish for five years, before I even knew films of the books would soon be released. Slow going at first with few sources, the hunt for new words and interesting grammar became a constant joy for me. In recent months, I have been experiencing the pleasure of teaching a class on Elvish. These students have found, as I did years ago, that learning another language (no matter if it is an invented one) is a skill well worth having. Constantly making new discoveries, we trace verb stems, suffixes, prefixes, and diphthongs to other northern languages. I even picked up a travel book on Finland and understood the meanings of all the place names. One of my students knows Russian and was tickled with the pronunciation similarities. Old Icelandic is extremely close, and the Elvish conjugations work the same way as they do in Latin.
Scrabble players enjoy the challenge of word games. I enjoy making Elvish for the same reason. Hmmmm, do you suppose if enough of us learned Elvish that Parker Brothers might market Elvish Scrabble? The game would need some modifications; Elvish has a thirty-six-letter alphabet. Probably a bigger board and longer letter racks would be needed. And, oh my, a dictionary! Yes, we need The Complete Dictionary of Elvish by A. K. Robinson. Or better still, A Concise Lexicon of Middle-earth, maybe with an Elvish nom de plume. Certainly it would have to be written in Sindarin, the common tongue of Elves, but with an appendix explaining Quenya, the Elf-Latin, complete with pronunciation guides for both languages. I must ask Mr. Jones, he of the nimble red marker, to help edit. Perhaps Mr. Callihan would write a preface for the hard cover edition. Oooh, I envision black, no grey! Grey, soft leather tied with leather strips in the medieval fashion, with gold, no, silver lettering. It should be illustrated, of course, and I want runes. Runes down the spine, runes along the border, and on the title page of that introduction by Wes Callihan…<br>