Name: Tolkien's Secret Vice | Escape Into Meaning
Uploaded: 2026-01-22T17:09:16.000Z
Duration: 2 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A young JRR Tolkien experimented with invented languages.

The earliest was animalic, a language fabricated by his cousins out of animal names.

He was never fluent in it, but recalled to a prestigious literary society at Oxford.

That dog nightingale woodpecker, 40 meant you are an ass.

Next came Nev Bosh, also created by a cousin, but more complex then Napherin, which was his own.

Constructing new languages was Tolkien's secret vice.

And even after he made the study of real languages his career as a philologist and professor of Anglo Saxon.

And at Oxford, he continued to do it, enchanted by the beauty of words.

As his own languages grew more sophisticated, he realized that for the perfect construction of an art language, it is found necessary to construct, at least in outline, a mythology to go with it.

Your language construction will breed a mythology.

If Tolkien's Middle Earth feels many times more solid than most fantasy worlds, this is why at its core is language the seed from which its mythology grows.

Tolkien searched his languages for the stories they contained.

He would have written the Lord of the Rings in Elvish if given the choice.

Many millions of fans are glad he didn't.

Even in English, the history and environment of Middle Earth feel discovered rather than invented.

It's so real you half expect an archeologist to stumble across a Gondorian helmet in the English countryside.

For the keen escapist, Middle Earth is the premier destination.

It never breaks the illusion every river and ruin, every poem and sword.

Every place the Fellowship visits on its journey through the story can be traced back ages to the earliest days of the world, and

even before that to the moment of divine creation by ERU Iluvatar, the supreme being of this universe.

It's all infused with a feeling of deep history and the effect of that on the reader.

At least the effect on this reader is overwhelmingly immersive.