Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing by David Farland Read Free Book Online

dwells, Mark. (Note that in this instance, the word “mark” may have one of two archaic meanings behind it. A “mark” is a tract of land upon the frontier, which describes Theoden’s realm well. But the word “mark” also describes any tract of land owned communally by German peasants.)
     
    But what interests me so much isn’t Tolkien’s rather common use of poetic devices: it’s what happens when he begins creating names and languages. When he mentions the names Edoras , Meduseld , Theoden , Thengel , and Mark of Rohan —there is something exciting about his language, a sense that it sounds familiar and if you studied it sufficiently, you just might figure out where it came from.
     
    I mentioned that he used Germanic languages in creating much of this, but Tolkien went much further than creating just one language. He also developed languages for his various elven races, for Orcs, for the Dark Lord Sauron , and so on.
     
    Now, just how many “languages” Tolkien created is hard to know. He names twenty or thirty in his works, but naming a language and creating a fully functioning lexicon are not quite the same things. What Tolkien really did, I suspect, is create three or four languages, and then try to show how they would have evolved over time as new dialects arose and then morphed over the ages into entirely different languages. So listing thirty names for languages doesn’t mean that he had created full lexicons for each of them.
     
    T he important thing to note here, I think, is that Tolkien began to experiment with languages in some interesting ways. Some of Tolkien’s invented languages are rooted in our own. Thus his humans and his dwarves are given names that resonate with us. But among his elves, he does something different. Tolkien begins by trying to create a new language—a more elegant, musical, and beautiful language—than has ever existed before, a language of perfect poetry. Then for his Orcs, he create s a language that is more harsh and dissonant than others—a sinister and brutal language of grunts and hisses—that has interesting similarities to his elvish tongue.
     
    As Tolkien began creating his languages, about mid-way through The Lord of the Rings his work takes on new dimensions. You can go to various lands—the Shire, Rohan , Gondor , Lothlorien —and you’ll find that entire passages of description suddenly shift in style depending upon the land that you’re visiting.
     
    Years ago, when I wrote my first novel, On My Way to Paradise , I was dealing with a Panamanian doctor. In order to get it to sound natural, I often had to write most of the dialogue in Spanish, and then translate it into English.
     
    Tolkien was doing the same kind of thing, to a degree, with Old Norse, Old English, and so on. As a linguist, Tolkien became so attuned to words, that when he wrote, he began to try to create resonance through his choice of cenemes —the smallest units of language. That’s what separates him from the vast majority of writers, and that’s why even thirty-five years after I first picked up and enjoyed his work, I still respect what he did. Tolkien is definitely not a one-trick pony, a hack, or a fraud—as some modern critics might assert.
     
    Let me explain in more depth, since I’m sure that most of my readers haven’t studied linguistics. Normally when we talk about speech, we divide it into “phonemes,” small units of sound. We say that English, for example, has about 40 phonemes. Those phonemes are considered to be basic units of sound. Each of our consonants is a phoneme, as are a number of combinations— st , fr , th , gr, ch , wh , and so on. Then of course we have our vowels, which each have long sounds, short sounds, and various other forms, and we have semi-vowels like y and w that have a couple of possibilities.
     
    If you look at another language, say Navajo, you’ll find that it is built from a different set of phonemes, many of which are