The Peoples of Middle-earth (6 page)

$7. But there were other languages in the lands. There were the tongues of the Elves. Three are here met with. The most ancient of all, the High-Elven, which they used in secret as their own common speech and as the language of lore and song. The Noldorin, which may be called Gnomish, the language of the Exiles from Elvenhome in the Far West, to which tongue belong most of the names in this history that have been preserved without translation. And the language of the woodland Elves, the Elves of Middle-earth. All these tongues were related, but those spoken in Middle-earth, whether by Exiles or by Elves that had remained here from the beginning, were much changed.(2) Only in Gondor was the Elvish speech known commonly to Men.

$8. There were also the languages of Men, when they did not speak the Common Tongue. Now those languages of Men that are here met with were related to the Common Speech; for the Men of the North and West were akin in the beginning to the Men of Westernesse that came back over the Sea; and the Common Speech was indeed made by the blending of the speech of Men of Middle-earth with the tongues of the kings from over the Sea.(3) But in the North old forms survived. The speech of the Men of Dale, therefore, to show its relationship has been cast in a Northern form related distantly to the English which has been taken to represent the Common Speech. While the speech of the Men of Rohan, who came out of the North, and still among themselves used their ancestral language (though all their greater folk spoke also the Common Speech after the manner of their allies in Gondor), I have represented by ancient English, such as it was a thousand years ago, or as far back from us about as was the day of Eorl the Young from Theoden of Rohan.(4)

$9. The orcs and goblins had languages of their own, as hideous as all things that they made or used; and since some remnant of good will, and true thought and perception, is required to keep even a base language alive and useful even for base purposes, their tongues were endlessly diversified in form, as they were deadly monotonous in purport, fluent only in the expression of abuse, of hatred and fear. For which reason they and their kind used (and still use) the languages of nobler creatures in such intercourse as they must have between tribe and tribe.(5)

$10. The dwarves are a different case. They are a hard thrawn folk for the most part, secretive, acquisitive, laborious, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits), lovers of stone, of metals, of gems, of things that grow and take shape under the hands of craft rather than of things that live by their own life. But they are not and were not ever among the workers of wilful evil in the world nor servants of the Enemy, whatever the tales of Men may later have said of them; for Men have lusted after the works of their hands, and there has been enmity between the races. But it is according to the nature of the Dwarves that travelling, and labouring, and trading about the world they should use ever openly the languages of the Men among whom they dwell; and yet in secret (a secret which unlike the Elves they are unwilling to unlock even to those whom they know are friends and desire learning not power) they use a strange slow-changing tongue.(6) Little is known about it. So it is that here such Dwarves as appear have names of the same Northern kind as the Men of Dale that dwelt round about, and speak the Common Speech, now in this manner now in that; and only in a few names do we get any glimpse of their hidden tongue.

$11. And as for the scripts, something must be said of them, since in this history there are both inscriptions and old books, such as the torn remnants of the Book of Mazarbul,(7) that must be read. Enough of them will appear in this book,to allow, maybe, the skilled in such matters to decipher both runes and running hands. But others may wish for a clearer key. For them the Elvish Script (in its more formal shape, as it was used in Gondor for the Common Speech) is set out in full; though its various modifications used in writing other tongues, especially the High-Elven or the Noldorin, must here be passed over.

Another script plays a part both in the previous account and the present one: the Runes. These also, as most other things of the kind, were also an Elvish invention. But whereas the flowing scripts (of two kinds, the alphabet of Rumil and the alphabet of Feanor, only the later of which concerns this tale) were developed in Elvenhome far from Middle-earth, the Runes, or cirth, were devised by the Elves of the woods; and from that origin derive their peculiar character, similar to the Runes of the North in our days, though their detail is different and it is very doubtful if there is any lineal connexion between the two alphabets.

The Elvish cirth are in any case more elaborate and numerous and systematic. The Dwarves devised no letters and though they used such writing as they found current for necessary purposes, they wrote few books, except brief chronicles (which they kept secret). In the North in those regions from which the Dwarves of this tale came they used the cirth, or Runes. Following the general lines of translation, to which these records have been submitted, as the names of the North have been given the forms of Northern tongues in our own time, so the Runes were represented by the runes of ancient England. But since the scripts and runes of that account interested many of its readers, older and younger, and many enquiries concerning them have been made, in this book it has been thought better to give any runic inscriptions or writings that occur in their truer form, and to add at the end a table of the cirth, with their names, according to the usage of Dale, among both Dwarves and Men. A list of the names that occur is also given, and where they are taken from the ancient records the language to which they belong is stated and their meaning, or the meaning of their component parts, is added.

$12. The word Gnomish is used above; and it would be an apt name, since whatever Paracelsus may have thought (if indeed he invented the word), to the learned it suggests knowledge. And their own true name in High-Elven is Noldor, Those that Know; for of the Three Kindreds of the Elves in the beginning, ever the Noldor were distinguished both by their knowledge of things that are and were in this world, and by the desire to know yet more. Yet they were not in fact in any way like to the gnomes of our learned theory, and still less to the gnomes of popular fancy in which they have been confused with dwarves and goblins, and other small creatures of the earth. They belonged to a race high and beautiful, the Elder Children of the World, who now are gone. Tall they were, fairskinned and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, and their voices knew more melodies than any mortal speech that now is heard. Valiant they were and their history was lamentable, and though a little of it was woven with the fates of the Fathers of Men in the Elder Days, their fate is not our fate, and their lives and the lives of Men cross seldom.(8)

$13. It will be noted also that in this book, as before, Dwarves are spoken of, although dictionaries tell us that the plural of dwarf is dwarfs. It should, of course, be dwarrows; meaning that, if each, singular and plural, had gone its own natural way down the years, unaffected by forgetfulness, as Man and Men have, then dwarf and dwarrows we should have said as surely as we say goose and geese. But we do not talk about dwarf as often as we talk of man, or even goose, and memories are not good enough among men to keep hold of a special plural for a race now relegated (such is their fate and the fall of their great pride) to folktales, where at least some shadow of the truth is preserved, or at last to nonsense tales where they have become mere figures of fun who do not wash their hands.

But here something of their old character and power (if already diminished) is still glimpsed; these are the Nauglir (9) of old, in whose hearts still smouldered the ancient fires and the embers of their grudge against the Elves; and to mark this dwarves is used, in defiance of correctness and the dictionaries - although actually it is derived from no more learned source than childhood habit. I always had a love of the plurals that did not go according to the simplest rule: loaves, and elves, and wolves, and leaves; and wreaths and houses (which I should have liked better spelt wreathes and houzes); and I persist in hooves and rooves according to ancient authority. I said therefore dwarves however I might see it spelt, feeling that the good folk were a little dignified so; for I never believed the sillier things about them that were presented to my notice. I wish I had known of dwarrows in those days. I should have liked it better still. I have enshrined it now at any rate in my translation of the name of Moria in the Common Speech, which meant The Dwarf-delving, and that I have rendered by The Dwarrow-delf. But Moria itself is an Elvish name of Gnomish kind, and given without love, for the true Gnomes, though they might here and there in the bitter wars against the Enemy and his orc-servants make great fortresses beneath the Earth, were not dwellers in caves or tunnels of choice, but lovers of the green earth and of the lights of heaven; and Moria in their tongue means the Black Chasm.

But the Dwarves themselves, and this name at any rate was never secret, called it simply Khazad-dum, the Mansion of the Khazad, for such is their own name for their own race, and has been so, since their birth in the deeps of time.(10) The opening remarks of this text certainly suggest that the narrative of The Lord of the Rings had been completed; and this in turn suggests that it was not far removed in time from the renewed work on the Foreword: Concerning Hobbits (i.e. the Prologue). Though it is not much mom than a guess, I incline to think that when my father began it he intended it as a personal and dedicatory 'preface', entirely distinct in nature from the account of the Hobbits, which was a prologue expressly relating to the narrative; but that involuntarily he was soon swept into writing about those matters of languages and scripts that he felt needed some introduction and explanation at least as much as did the Hobbits. The result was, clearly, a combination wholly unsuitable to his purpose, and he put it aside. I would also guess that it was the writing of this text that gave rise to the idea of a special Appendix on languages and scripts (ultimately divided into two); and this is why I place it at the beginning of this account of the evolution of what came to be 'Appendix F', The Languages and Peoples of the Third Age. Since I shall number the texts of this Appendix from 'F 1', it is convenient to call this anomalous 'Foreword' F*.

My father did not lose sight of this text, however, and later used elements from it, both in Appendix F (11) and in the Foreword that accompanied the First Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, published in 1954. Since copies of the First Edition may not be easy to come by, I print the greater part of it again here (for the concluding section see p. 12 with note 15).

This tale, which has grown to be almost a history of the great War of the Ring, is drawn for the most part from the memoirs of the renowned Hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo, as they are preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch. This chief monument of Hobbit-lore is so called because it was compiled, repeatedly copied, and enlarged and handed down in the family of the Fairbairns of Westmarch, descended from that Master Samwise of whom this tale has much to say.

I have supplemented the account of the Red Book, in places, with information derived from the surviving records of Gondor, notably the Book of the Kings; but in general, though I have omitted much, I have in this tale adhered more closely to the actual words and narrative of my original than in the previous selection from the Red Book, The Hobbit. That was drawn from the early chapters, composed originally by Bilbo himself. If 'composed' is a just word. Bilbo was not assiduous, nor an orderly narrator, and his account is involved and discursive, and sometimes confused: faults that still appear in the Red Book, since the copiers were pious and careful, and altered very little.

The tale has been put into its present form in response to the many requests that I have received for further information about the history of the Third Age, and about Hobbits in particular. But since my children and others of their age, who first heard of the finding of the Ring, have grown older with the years, this book speaks more plainly of those darker things which lurked only on the borders of the earlier tale, but which have troubled Middle-earth in all its history. It is, in fact, not a book written for children at all; though many children will, of course, be interested in it, or parts of it, as they still are in the histories and legends of other times (especially in those not specially written for them).

I dedicate the book to all admirers of Bilbo, but especially to my sons and my daughter, and to my friends the Inklings. To the Inklings, because they have already listened to it with a patience, and indeed with an interest, that almost leads me to suspect that they have hobbit-blood in their venerable ancestry. To my sons and my daughter for the same reason, and also because they have all helped me in the labours of composition. If 'composition' is a just word, and these pages do not deserve all that I have said about Bilbo's work.