Sound and language in Middle-earth

Scholars believe he intentionally chose words and names in his constructed Middle-earth languages to create feelings such as of beauty, longing, and strangeness.

"[2] Human sub-creation, in Tolkien's view, to some extent mirrors divine creation as thought and sound together bring into being a new world.

Fimi further observes that in the late 19th century, nonsense poets such as Lewis Carroll with his Jabberwocky and Edward Lear sought to convey meaning using invented words.

[4][5] The linguist Allan Turner[7] writes that "the sound pattern of a language was the source of a special aesthetic pleasure" for Tolkien.

He intentionally chose words and names in his constructed Middle-earth languages to create feelings such as of beauty, longing, and strangeness.

Shippey gives as one example Tolkien's statement that he had used such names as Bree, Archet, Combe, and Chetwood for the small area, outside the Shire, where Hobbits and Men lived together.

[8] Tolkien allows his characters to listen and appreciate "in highly Keatsian style",[20] enjoying the sound of language, as when the Hobbit Frodo Baggins, recently recovered from his near-fatal wound with the Nazgûl's Morgul-knife, sits dreamily in the safe Elvish haven of Rivendell:[20] At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them.

Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above the seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world.

Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him.

[T 3]When the Hobbits meet Gildor and his Elves while walking through the Shire, they get the feeling, as Turner comments, that even though they do not speak Elvish, they "subliminally understand something of the meaning".

[6] When Gandalf declaims the Rhyme of the Rings in the Black Speech of the evil land of Mordor at the Council of Elrond, his voice becomes "menacing, powerful, harsh as stone" and the Elves cover their ears.

[6] The linguist Joanna Podhorodecka examines the lámatyáve, a Quenya term for "phonetic fitness", of Tolkien's constructed languages.

She notes that Tolkien's inspiration was "primarily linguistic"; and that he had invented the stories "to provide a world for the languages", which in turn were "agreeable to [his] personal aesthetic".

[21] She notes, too, that Tolkien commented that in his 'Elven-latin' language Quenya, he chose to include "two other (main) ingredients that happen to give me 'phonaesthetic' pleasure: Finnish and Greek"; and that he gave Sindarin "a linguistic character very like (though not identical with) British-Welsh: because that character is one I find, in some linguistic moods, very attractive; and because it seems to fit the rather 'Celtic' type of legends and stories told of its speakers".