Languages of Middle-earth

The philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien created a number of constructed languages. Inventing languages (called glossopoeia by Tolkien, from Greek γλώσσα glôssa, "language, tongue" and ποιώ, "to make" paralleling his idea of mythopoeia or myth-making) was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens. An early project of Tolkien was the reconstruction of an unrecorded early Germanic language which might have been spoken by the people of Beowulf in the Germanic heroic age.

The most developed project of Tolkien was his Elvish languages. He first started constructing an Elvin tongue in c. 1910–1911 while he was at the King Edward's School, Birmingham. He later called it Quenya (c. 1915), and he continued actively developing the history and grammar of his Elvish languages until his death in 1973.

In 1931, he held a lecture about his passion for constructed languages, titled A Secret Vice. Here he contrasts his project of artistic languages constructed for aesthetic pleasure with the pragmatism of international auxiliary languages. The lecture also discusses Tolkien's views on phonaesthetics, citing Greek, Finnish, and Welsh as examples of "languages which have a very characteristic and in their different ways beautiful word-form".

Tolkien's glossopoeia has two temporal dimensions: the internal (fictional) timeline of events described in the Silmarillion and other writings, and the external timeline of Tolkien's own life during which he continually revised and refined his languages and their fictional history.

Tolkien was a professional philologist of ancient Germanic languages, specialising in Old English. He was also interested in many languages outside his field, and developed a particular love for the Finnish language. He described the finding of a Finnish grammar book as "entering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before".

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