What I Learned about Lord of the Rings by Inventing a Language

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Confession: for a long time I never understood why Tolkien had to make up a language to go with The Lord of the Rings. It felt a little bit like trying to tell an adventure story while getting bogged down in the details of imaginary corn law. But when the Daily Wire asked me to invent a new language for the Pendragon series, I instantly understood Tolkien in a whole new way. So when a listener asked me to comment on the idea that world building essentially is language building, I was all in. Here's what I learned from my first time language building, or "conlanging."

Check out more behind-the-scenes footage from Daily Wire: https://x.com/dailywireplus/status/1717656941122461910

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, folks, it's Friday afternoon. I hope you've had a really beautiful week, and from my house to yours, I just want to say,
0:07.0	Elensi la Lumen omentielvo.
0:14.0	Okay, I really hope I got that right. I'm definitely no expert in Quenya, which is the high elvish language of Lord of the Rings, but I have dabbled in it for reasons that will soon become apparent on this episode of Words, Words, Words. On Fridays, if we've got nothing else going on on the schedule, I like to just take your questions about translation and languages and how languages work.
0:43.1	There's all sorts of fascinating byways that we can go down that are really revealing of more than just language.
0:50.6	Language touches on philosophy, it touches on history, it touches on our nature
0:55.2	as human beings, and I think it's also central to good theology as well, to think about how
1:00.6	language works and what it means that we are language using creatures. So as always, send me
1:06.5	your questions about language to rejoiceevermore.substack.com. You can DM me there. You can write back
1:14.5	in response to my Friday newsletters, but you've got to be a subscriber, either a paid or a free
1:19.1	subscriber to ask a question. And I welcome all questions of all kinds, but specifically, especially
1:26.1	questions about language and translation,
1:28.3	which is why I'm excited to take this question from Leo.
1:31.3	Leo watched last week's interview with Colin Gorey about Oswald Berra and this new,
1:38.3	exciting, I think, book for learning Old English.
1:42.3	I genuinely believe it will revolutionize old English learning. I know
1:46.9	that's kind of a niche subject, but it's an important subject, and Colin has done something
1:51.4	really fantastic with this book. You should go listen to that interview. I will link to the
1:55.3	pre-order for that book in the description of this episode. But you guys really seem to like Colin, and I don't blame you.
2:03.0	I got a lot of messages about how interesting that dialogue was and just what a cool guy he is.
2:09.4	And one thing I think that is awesome about what he's doing is he's really connecting with
2:16.6	incredibly difficult subjects, advanced linguistics, but he's doing it
2:21.3	in a way that connects so directly to our actual experience of real life. He talked about
	...

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