J.R.R.Tolkien: Master of Fantasy

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (J.R.R.Tolkien) was a philologist in the very strict sense of the word. This term, philologist, comes from Greek [φίλος (philos) and λόγος (logos)] and literarily means ‘love for words’. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it is “the scientific study of the development of language or of a particular language”, which is precisely what Tolkien did all through his life. Tolkien was, as has been said, a profound lover of words, which he begun developing from a quite early age. In 1900, when he and his family had to move to Birmingham in order to be closer to King Edward’s School, Tolkien discovered Gaelic, a language toward which he showed a great interest and which “opened him to another linguistic world” (“le abrió otro mundo lingüístico”, Carpenter, 2002:37). When he returned to King Edward’s, after a year in St. Philip’s School, he started learning Greek; he already knew Latin as his mother had taught him at home. When his literature teacher read The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, in the original Middle-English “he decided to learn more about the history of the language” (Carpenter, 2002:39), “why languages are as they are” (“por qué eran como eran” Carpenter, 2002:46). His discovery of Anglo-Saxon was also an important element in his approaching to philology. As can be seen, his encounter with these ‘new-old’ languages was continuous: Old Norse, Gothic, etc. It was also the starting point of his creation of private languages (Naffarin).

Thanks to his deep study of these languages we have today works like The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, or The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien’s imagination came not from any other place but from language itself, as Segura (2008) states saying that “his imagination was...

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