Why I don't Really Like the Claim "Tolkien Wrote Lord of the Rings Because he Needed an Excuse for Making Fictional Languages"

This is something I see on the internet a lot. Or more, Tumblr, because that’s where I spend most of my time. I do realise this gives me a very distorted view of what the general discourse is right now, and gives me bone-snapping whiplash when I hit mainstream digital circuits, such as reading reviews of the latest Gaga album.¹ There’s some meme going around about eating nachos, or something?

Anyway, the claim is this: Tolkien’s main hobby was creating fictional languages, a hobby that was practically unheard of at the time. To explain why he was making these languages, he came up with the story of The Hobbit, and later Lord of the Rings, as a reasonable cover to explain it to people.

Which is… a half truth, and half enough that I wanted to break it down a little.

Let’s start with what we know for certain. In Tolkien’s teenage years he developed a great interest in mythology and linguistics, notably becoming infatuated with constructed languages he and his cousins would make together. As he grew older, this, in combination with general trends in Europe at the time, led him to a desire to create “a mythology for England”. One of the biggest influences was his reading of the Finnish epic Kalevala, and how it had such a significant impact on Finnish national identity, with the language itself making sweeping impacts to his own conlangs. Over the coming years, this would start to drift from a strict reconstruction of English mythology, his languages starting to become entwined in it, and then beginning to incorporate material beyond English folklore, which evolved into what we know as the legendarium. Notably, the first public piece of all of this, The Hobbit, didn’t originally start out as a part of the legendarium. Tolkien later realised it fit in, then becoming the key part of his world that we know today.²

This is also where the first part of our claim starts to fall apart. The Hobbit started to come together a decade after Tolkien started to develop the legendarium seriously, and wasn’t even originally connected to it. If he needed an excuse, ten years after he started feels a bit late, and I’m certain someone close to him in that period would have asked what the hell he was doing.

But, a need can strike anyone at any time, so let’s keep playing with this line. Let’s go back to how the legendarium came about in the first place. With the impact of Kalevala, Tolkien started to work on Quenya and Sindarin, which then led to further development as a fundamental part of the legendarium. Now comes the question: Why did he feel the need to develop the legendarium because of his languages, or fit them into a myth that already had certain pieces in place?

The easiest way to understand his view on this was his initial love, then distaste, of Esperanto.³ Esperanto is a constructed language created in 1887, intended to be an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language for global communication; it still has a sizable online and in-person communities to this day. Early on in his life, shortly after his first introduction to conlangs, Tolkien discovered the language and was enamoured. This even reached the point of writing notes in Esperanto.

Later on in life, however, his opinion of it soured. Rather than paraphrasing, I’ll quote the man directly:

“It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that ’legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ’legends’ which it conveys by tradition. … Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.”⁴

He was in apparent vocal support of Esperanto before this, notably an article written for The British Esperantist, which you see quoted a lot online. And, I’ll be honest, the article is not the great endorsement most people I’ve seen claim it to be. Obviously the people most excited about one of the most influential authors of all time talking about Esperanto would be Esperantists, with the bias you’d expect, but still. If you read the actual thing,⁵ the famous line to “Back Esperanto loyally” is directed to Esperantists and adjacent groups, not the general public. His great support of Esperanto was not for it to claim the spot of universal language because it was perfectly suited to it, but more: “Well, if you are going to keep this up, rally around the most popular one, and stop fractioning off like I kept saying you would. You really don’t like when I tell you this but I’ll keep saying it anyway.” A far cry from complete endorsement.

This does give us an interesting timeline here. The quote is from 1956, but refers to 1914 when he had this realisation, and this article came out in 1932. Perhaps he initially saw Esperanto’s goals as entirely different from the creation of artlangs as he was making, was happy with this divide, and later decided these were not distinct categories. His call to the Esperantists might have been his final plea to get their shit together, and by the 50s he realised that was never going to happen. Given my own personal experiences with Esperantists I’m probably projecting a little, but I doubt the community was that much different before the internet happened.

His views on Esperanto do, however, explain exactly why the legendarium came about from his conlanging, or became a suitable home for it. In Tolkien’s view, for a language to be a living, useful thing, it must have some kind of communal myth behind it to support its existence. I read⁶ that it remains unclear why he was calling for Esperanto-spinoff speakers to create Esperanto legends, but I feel the intent is pretty obvious. “Esperanto” legends doesn’t refer to writing strictly in Esperanto (as we saw before, Tolkien’s definition of “English mythology” was flexible enough to support the invention of conlangs), but creating a common folklore around Esperanto’s speakers, of which Volapuk et al. have deep community connections to. The great Esperanto myth cycle could soon be written in Ido, for all we know. That again probably cements the death of it as Tolkien defines, as every Esperantist online I’ve seen feels the answer to this is just writing an Esperanto romantasy trilogy.

So, now we have a pretty clear image of why Tolkien developed the legendarium alongside his constructed languages. To bring them to a level of completion, as a living piece of art, required a world and myth to support it. One could not exist without the other. That’s a very different set of circumstances from needing an excuse around why he was making up languages to tell polite society. It was an excuse, perhaps, but definitely not in the way people tell it.

Also, the idea of Tolkien being someone who needed an excuse feels off in itself, disregarding any of his methodology. This is the guy who regularly slacked off in his academic career to pursue his own interests and told nazis publishers to eat shit when they asked if he was Aryan. Does he sound like the kind of guy to do something so elaborate for the sake of his reputation? I’d say it was far more likely for him to just say “Fuck that. I don’t care what they think.” He probably didn’t say fuck, but he witnessed the moon landing so anything is possible.

This whole annoyance of mine is probably inconsequential in the long run, and you can argue in a way that Arda was “only” an excuse, but, I dunno. It just feels a bit weird to me to undersell one of the most important pieces of fiction as happening by accident. To then also imply that the reason for that was because of Tolkien being embarrassed about something he cared so much about. The story of Lord of the Rings didn’t come about from an excuse or happenstance of hobby, but instead from a deep and intrinsic understanding of how narrative lends power.