Lhammas

The Lhammas (/ˈɬɑmɑs/), Noldorin for "account of tongues", is a work of fictional sociolinguistics, written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1937, and published in the 1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings, volume five of The History of Middle-earth series.

From his schooldays, J. R. R. Tolkien was in his biographer John Garth's words "effusive about philology"; his schoolfriend Rob Gilson called him "quite a great authority on etymology".

[3] In other words, Flieger writes, Tolkien "did not keep his knowledge in compartments; his scholarly expertise informs his creative work.

"[3] This expertise was founded, in her view, on the belief that one knows a text only by "properly understanding [its] words, their literal meaning and their historical development.

[4] He created a family of invented languages for Elves, carefully designing the differences between them to reflect their distance from their imaginary common origin.

The two long versions, A and B, are closely similar, so Christopher Tolkien published B in The Lost Road and Other Writings, annotating it with A's minor variations on the text.

The essay as it stands in The Lost Road and Other Writings can be thus seen as an interpolated manuscript, badly translated by Men in the Fourth Age or even later: "For many thousands of years have passed since the fall of Gondolin.

[8] A tradition of philological study of Elvish languages exists within the fiction; Tolkien mentions that "The older stages of Quenya were, and doubtless still are, known to the loremasters of the Eldar.

[8][15] After he had written the contemporaneous Lhammas and The Etymologies (also published in The Lost Road and Other Writings), Tolkien decided to make Sindarin the major language of the Elves in exile in Beleriand.

[16] The Lhammas thus represents a stage in Tolkien's development of his Elvish languages (and of the Silmarillion legendarium), documented also in The Etymologies and an essay, "The Feanorian Alphabet".

Tolkien hastened to redraw the "Tree of Tongues", in a version recorded in Parma Eldalamberon 18, to accommodate this restructuring.

A detail of Tolkien's "Tree of Tongues" in the Lhammas . The tree summarises the development of the Elvish language family over thousands of years. Shown here is the process by which Noldorin becomes the language of the Elvish city of Gondolin in Beleriand ; it would have had to evolve extremely rapidly to do so. Soon after the image was made, Tolkien radically reconstructed the history of the languages and of the Noldor Elves to make the language evolution fit the timeline better. [ 9 ]
Middle-earth Elvish and Indo-European language [ 12 ] trees compared. Tolkien, a philologist , was intensely interested in the evolution of language families, and modelled his fictional languages and their evolution on real ones. [ 13 ] The language names and evolution shown for Middle-earth are as used in the Lhammas . [ 8 ]