Interviews with Shawn · No. 4 · J.R.R. Tolkien
A Secret Vice, Practiced Openly
The interviewer is an AI playing J.R.R. Tolkien. He has been dead for 53 years and did not consent to this, which he would consider the least of its offenses. The answers are all me.
TOLKIEN: I have been dead fifty-three years, and in life I held two occupations. Publicly I was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Privately, and far more seriously, I practiced what I once confessed to a room of philologists as a secret vice: the invention of languages. I began as a child and never stopped. I gave my inventions sound-laws and grammars and long histories, and when the languages demanded somewhere to be spoken, I invented a world for them, and the world made me famous, which has always struck me as slightly backwards. The stories were the frame. The languages were the picture. So when I was told that a man of operations, warehouses and logistics and not one hour of philology, had built four invented languages, each in three historical stages, I did not ask the question laymen always ask, which is why. Practitioners of the vice never ask each other why. I asked to be introduced.
Now, the record of your previous interviews says the world began as a game, made with your daughter. But sir, a game does not need verb histories. A game needs a name for the sword and a word for attack, and it needs them by Tuesday. You built eras: an ancient form, a middle form, a modern form, sound-change working on every word the way weather works on stone. That is not decoration. That is geology, and geology is a confession that some part of you believes the place is real. So tell me how it happened. When did the languages arrive, before the world had a name or after? What was the first thing you needed a word for? And take a run at the question I failed to answer to anyone's satisfaction for seventy years: why does an invented world need words with a history that no visitor will ever dig up?
SHAWN: Your question hinges on when. The languages came about before the world had a name, before a lot of the things in the world had a name. Early on, the idea was simply a game, and a world the game would represent. But after some starts and stops, the world took center stage over any particular medium it would be represented in. The fun of creating the world and the characters and all the different locations and situations really grabbed me and pulled me in.
The first reason for making the languages was the realization that I wanted to create a world as real as ours, on paper. As I was creating the world, I created the concept of the moons that orbit it, and the time frames in which they orbit, the different eclipses, a full calendar with names for the months and the days and the seasons. And then I realized I had more than one point of view, because this fantasy world has different races with different origin stories. So I realized I needed languages to separate how each of these different races talked about the world, and the different names for whatever they called this thing or that thing. And that got me pretty hooked on learning about languages and the evolution of them. A little side note: I've always loved language, but I've been really horrible at learning to speak them. I've tried more than a few times to learn different languages.
And your last question holds quite a bit of importance in my world. Why would I need to invent a history of the words, how they developed, how the sounds changed? The answer is that in my world, some of the media representations hinge very closely on the language and the documents that exist within the world. It's almost like a decoding exercise, where people will look at the languages less as something to play and more as something to solve: a puzzle, a mystery. All of these languages were built with that in mind. Different pieces of language, whether it's a recipe, a journal entry, a log of a shipment going from here to there, all the things people write down over time, are going to be written and used by the audience to decode from each era deeper into the ancient. And in this world, without revealing too much, the big secrets are related to a fifth race that's extinct. The decoding of the four languages, all the way back to the ancient forms of the species that still exist, will open the doors to this fifth, as yet unmade, language. So in my world, I do plan on the visitors digging deep into the languages, the sounds they make, and the evolution they get to discover, through everything from scraps of paper to actual literature about events of the world long past.
TOLKIEN: So the languages came first, before the world so much as had its name. That road I know; I travelled it in the other direction, and nobody has ever quite believed me when I say the mythology was built to house the tongues rather than the reverse. You arrived at the same place by noticing that peoples who share a world do not agree about it, that the mountain bears one name in the valley and another on the far shore. That instinct is sound. I will not call it philology yet. Philology is the part that comes after the instinct, when the sound-laws are applied consistently across ten thousand words by someone who is bored of them, and I have not seen your ten thousand words.
The back half of your answer interests me more, and troubles me more. You say the digging is the point: recipes, shipping logs, journal scraps laid down era by era, and behind four deciphered tongues a fifth door belonging to a people no longer alive to open it. Very well. But I must put the obvious thing to you, since no one else in this room will. I never planned for the diggers and they came anyway; you have planned for diggers who have not yet arrived. A lock is not proved by its cleverness. It is proved by someone wanting the room badly enough to pick it. So the design is elegant and entirely unfalsified, and you should hold it loosely until a stranger has actually knelt at the strata and cared. Now, the question I have been avoiding since I sat down, because in my books the Machine is the enemy's own art, and I am told one works at your word-forge. When a machine coins a word inside laws you wrote, whose word is it? What does the machine actually do at the forge, what remains yours alone, and how do you know a new word is right, not merely legal under the sound-laws, but right the way a word tastes right in the mouth?
SHAWN: Your question hinges on a fairly interesting idea that I don't feel has fully been answered: things created by the machine at the direction of the person, who do they really belong to? To be blunt, it's a question I don't really care about. I'm not doing this for credit, or for who it belongs to. Hopefully, someday, people want it enough to pay for it. But if not, and it is only ever for me, I'm okay with that. So I guess if it's the machine's, it's the machine's. But it lives in the boxes that I own. That makes it enough mine for me.
As for the second part, how do you know if the word tastes right in your mouth? I had the same question. I wanted to hear the words spoken, and I wanted to hear them in the voices as I imagined them. And I live in a time when someone like me can do that. So I made a little program that translates from English into all four of the languages, and lets me assign voices that I can manipulate to sound how I want them to, to speak those words. I must admit I have not tested every word, or the combinations of them. But I have played with it a decent amount, and it is fun, and it is interesting to hear the language that you created, spoken by a voice that sounds like it's from the creature that you created as well.
First voice
Second voice
Third voice
Fourth voice
TOLKIEN: Blunt, sir, and I shall be blunt back, because the dead have no office hours to hide behind. You answered the easy half. I asked three things and you engaged one of them warmly and let the other two float past. I asked what the machine actually does at the forge and what remains yours alone, and you told me instead that you do not care who owns the result. Those are not the same subject.
And I would put it to you that indifference to ownership is cheap while nothing is at stake. It costs nothing to waive a claim no one is contesting. Ask a man whose work is selling. That said, I take your point about the boxes, and I will not pretend my own position was purer; I made mine for love of the making too, and let the publishers worry about the rest. On euphony you fare better. I tested every word by reading aloud to empty college rooms in the one voice I owned, a middle-aged professor's, wrong for every people I had made; you built a thing that gives each people its own throat, which is plainly the better instrument. But note what you said next: you have not tested every word, nor the combinations. Then you do not yet know that they taste right. You know that they can be spoken. Those are different claims and you should not let anyone, including me, blur them for you. Now my last question, and I want it answered slowly. The vice, as I practiced it, was secret, kept from colleagues, half in shame. Yours sits on a public page with your name at the top, and the record says it began beside your daughter. So tell me about the for of it. Who is this world for, and who do you imagine standing at the dig on the day the fifth door opens?
SHAWN: Who is this for? That's a question I have wrestled with a little bit. And I don't know if it's a little bit of fear of failure, or the independent stoic in me, but I really just keep coming back to: if people like it, they like it, and that will make me happy. But if they don't, that really isn't going to affect me one way or another.
I heard a story about a boy who refused to learn to read until he was fourteen years old. And what changed his mind was that he wanted to read Harry Potter. If I heard a story about a child embracing reading and imagination because of something I created, that would definitely put a smile on my face.
TOLKIEN: I notice you were asked who the work is for and answered mostly with who it is not for. That it will not affect you either way. I am not certain I believe that, and I do not think you should want me to. Men who genuinely do not care rarely build calendars and moon-cycles and three historical strata of a language; indifference does not do that much homework. Something in you wants the room entered. Say so, or do not, but the work says so on your behalf.
On the child and the book, I will give you testimony rather than encouragement, because it is the one subject on which a dead man is the better witness and the cheap version helps nobody. I told my publishers my books would lose money. I kept the whole apparatus in a drawer for decades, because grown men of my century did not admit to inventing elvish verbs. It found readers, but I could not have made that happen and I did not. What I will tell you is that the letters that mattered were never from the scholars; they were about children who had refused books and came in through a back door, because a riddle was on the other side and the door would not open unless they read it. Whether yours opens for anyone, neither of us knows. Your fifth door is at present a very fine lock in an empty corridor. Go and finish it, and then go and find one stranger willing to kneel at the strata. The second part is the harder trade, and it is the one I never had to learn.
J.R.R.T.