Week 1: Starting with the language, not the story
Tolkien built his languages first and the world afterwards. What that order of work asks of you, and the four questions your design brief has to answer
22 February 2027
In a 1955 letter to his publisher, Tolkien said the invention of the languages was the foundation, and that the stories were made to provide a world for the languages rather than the other way round. Quenya and Sindarin existed for decades before the events of the novels were written. On his own account, Middle-earth exists to give those languages somewhere to be spoken.
Almost every screen language since has worked the opposite way. A production needs alien dialogue at short notice, someone is hired, and the language is built to fit a script that has already been written. Both methods produce languages. The slower one produces a language worth examining closely, and it is the method this course uses.
So you do not begin with vocabulary. You begin with a brief: who speaks this, how many of them there are, what they use it for, and which sounds their anatomy and their history rule out. A species without lips cannot have /p/ or /b/, and that single fact will still be shaping your words in week eight.
Outline#
- what Tolkien actually claimed, and why it sounds back to front
- languages built before their worlds, and languages built to a deadline
- the four questions a design brief has to answer
- what constraints give you, and why you want more of them than you might expect
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor