Tolkien's Languages: How He Built Quenya and Sindarin

Most authors invent a world and then give it a few names. Tolkien did it the other way around. He was a professional philologist, someone who studies the history of languages, and he had been making up languages since childhood. Middle-earth grew up, in large part, as a home for them.

This guide covers Quenya and Sindarin, the two great Elvish languages: where they came from, the real languages that inspired them, and how Tolkien gave them a history of their own. No story spoilers here.

The languages came first

In a 1951 letter to the publisher Milton Waldman, Tolkien wrote that he had been inventing languages "since I could write." He explained that he gave the Elves two related languages, more nearly complete than his others, whose forms were deduced from a common origin. Nearly all the names in his legends were built from those two languages. That's why Middle-earth's names sound so consistent, as if they belonged to real peoples with real histories.

Tolkien language scholar and editor Carl Hostetter, writing for the Tolkien Estate's site, quotes Tolkien putting it even more strongly: "The invention of languages is the foundation." The stories, Tolkien said, were made to provide a world for the languages, not the reverse. Hostetter points out that Tolkien's earliest Elvish word lists already mention Elves, Orcs, the Valar, Balrogs and dragons, before the first tales of the mythology were written.

The Estate's timeline traces the early work:

• 1909–1915: After early experiments such as Nevbosh and the Book of the Foxrook (1909), he keeps inventing new languages.
• 1915: After new developments in 1914, Qenya, an early form of Quenya, is recorded in the Qenyaqetsa.
• 1916–1923: He works on Primitive Eldarin and on Gnomish, with grammars and word lists.
• 1923–1925: He compiles a Noldorin dictionary, an English-Qenya dictionary, and a Qenya phonology and grammar.

Meet Quenya and Sindarin

Hostetter describes Quenya, or High-elven, and Sindarin, or Grey-elven, as the two chief Elvish languages of Middle-earth. Nearly every Elvish poem, song, spell and invocation in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin is in one or the other. So are most of the non-English names of people and places.

Many readers first meet Quenya when Frodo greets a company of Elves in the Woody End, early in The Fellowship of the Ring. By the time that book came out in 1954, Tolkien had been developing his Elvish languages for nearly forty years.

Sindarin is all over The Hobbit too, even though readers in 1937 had no way of knowing it. John D. Rateliff notes that many names Bilbo hears after leaving Bag End, such as Elrond, Orcrist, Glamdring and Esgaroth, are Sindarin, which Tolkien called Noldorin at the time. The Dwarves' names come from somewhere else entirely. Tolkien took them from the list of dwarf names in the Old Norse Eddas. Put Elvish and Norse names side by side and you get the feeling of a lost world full of half-forgotten cultures.

The real languages behind them

Tolkien was open about his inspirations. In a 1955 letter to the poet W.H. Auden, he described finding a Finnish grammar in the Exeter College library as a student. He compared it to "discovering a complete wine-cellar" of a wine he had never tasted. After that, he wrote, his invented languages became heavily Finnish in their sound patterns and structure.

In the same letter he said Welsh names had fascinated him since childhood, when he saw them on coal trucks. Once he learned Welsh as an undergraduate, it gave him a lasting satisfaction.

Scholars connect these two loves to the two Elvish languages. A 2022 article by Paul Harry Barron in the journal Investigationes Linguisticae, published by Adam Mickiewicz University's Institute of Linguistics, notes that Quenya was based on Finnish and Sindarin on Welsh. Barron points to some Welsh-style features in Sindarin:

• Mutations. As in all Celtic languages, consonants at the start of a word change depending on the words around them. Barron notes that Sindarin has even more kinds of these mutations than Welsh does.
• Sounds. Sindarin uses a voiceless l and a voiceless r, two consonants Barron describes as typically Welsh.

A language family with a made-up history

Here's the part that delights linguists. Tolkien didn't just invent vocabulary. He invented how the languages changed over time.

Hostetter compares it to English, which descends from Middle English, which in turn grew out of Old English. Each of Tolkien's Elvish languages has a fictional history of the same kind. And just as English, German, French and Spanish all go back to one prehistoric ancestor, all the Elvish languages descend from a common ancient Eldarin tongue. The Estate's site shows a chart called "The Tree of Tongues" that maps how the languages of Middle-earth relate.

The history of Middle-earth and its languages shaped each other. When the writing of The Lord of the Rings added the Second and Third Ages, the Elvish languages suddenly had thousands of extra years of history. Hostetter explains that this led to a big rewrite. Sindarin, earlier called Noldorin and imagined as the language of the exiled Noldor, became the native language of the Grey-elves of Beleriand.

Tolkien never declared the languages finished. He kept revising them all his life and even changed some Elvish passages in the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. Still, Hostetter notes, the Qenya of the 1910s and the Quenya of the 1950s and 1960s are more alike than different.

Scripts for every occasion

Tolkien also invented writing systems, and scholar Arden Smith's overview on the Estate's site covers the main ones:

• The Alphabet of Rúmil, from 1919, is the earliest of his Elvish scripts.
• The Tengwar, Quenya for "letters," are the flowing script on the West-gate of Moria and on the One Ring. In the story, Fëanor invented them. There are 24 primary letters arranged in a grid of four columns and six rows, and accent-like marks called tehtar can stand for vowels.
• The Angerthas, Elvish runes called cirth, were angular letters designed for carving into wood or stone. The Dwarves of Moria used their own version, which shows up in Moria inscriptions in The Fellowship of the Ring.
• The runes on Thror's Map in The Hobbit aren't Elvish at all. They're the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet, adapted by Tolkien to write modern English.

Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings explains the Tengwar and the Angerthas in more detail.

Want to dig deeper?

• Start with the Appendices at the back of The Lord of the Rings.
• Tolkien's linguistic papers have been edited and published over many years. Hostetter names a team of editors, Christopher Gilson, Carl F. Hostetter, Arden R. Smith, Patrick H. Wynne and Bill Welden, working with the Tolkien archives at Marquette University and the Bodleian Library. Some of it, including early scripts, has appeared in the journal Parma Eldalamberon.
• One thing to know: the Tolkien Estate says the invented languages and scripts are protected by copyright. You're welcome to use them for your own private interest and amusement, but not to reproduce them in any publication or group activity.