Dr. Marc Zender, Lecturer on Anthropology, Harvard University
Thu Apr 1, 7:00pm, CAS 326
“Why Study Elvish?”
Beyond popular accolades and prestigious positions at powerful research institutions (which unfortunately are not at all involved), there are some practical benefits to a study of JRR Tolkien’s invented languages and scripts. For one thing, they provide a challenge: poorly attested, highly restrictive in genre, and without comprehensive dictionaries and grammars. Like scholars of Gothic, Tocharian, and other fragmentary tongues known primarily (or solely) from disconnected manuscripts, students of Tolkien’s languages employ the methods of comparative linguistics to decode these tongues, all of which are (carefully designed to appear to be) historically related.
Further, although a philologist of distinction, it is frequently lamented that Tolkien did not publish nearly as many theoretical papers as some of his contemporaries; nonetheless, he worked for some sixty years perfecting the histories and relationships of his invented languages. In recent years, Tolkienian linguists have shown that these languages became the repositories of some of his most profound reflections on linguistics, philosophy, and the theory of translation: ample reward indeed for intrepid decipherers.
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