The Peoples of Middle-earth by J. R. R. Tolkien Read Free Book Online

between the end of the Dominion of the Elves and the beginning of the Dominion of Men, when for a brief time the Hobbits played a supreme part in the movements of the world.
    $4. For the Inklings I add this note, since they are men of lore, and curious in such matters. It is said that Hobbits spoke a language, or languages, very similar to ours. But that must not be misunderstood. Their language was like ours in manner and spirit; but if the face of the world has changed greatly since those days, so also has every detail of speech, and even the letters and scripts then used have long been forgotten, and new ones invented.(1)
    $5. No doubt for the historians and philologists it would have been desirable to preserve the original tongues; and certainly something of the idiom and the humour of the hobbits is lost in translation, even into a language as similar in mood as is our own. But the study of the languages of those days requires time and labour, which no one but-myself would, I think, be prepared to give to it. So I have except for a few phrases and inscriptions transferred the whole linguistic setting into the tongues of our own time.
    $6. The Common Speech of the West in those days I have represented by English. This noble tongue had spread in the course of time from the kingdoms of Fornost and Gondor, and the hobbits preserved no memory of any other speech; but they used it in their own manner, in their daily affairs very much as we use English; though they had always at command a richer and more formal language when occasion required, or when they had dealings with other people. This more formal and archaic style was still the normal use in the realm of Gondor (as they discovered) and among the great in the world outside the Shire.
    $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