dzurlady | Tolkien and the creation of LOTR (Reply)

From ABC Radio National's Lingua Franca, a program about Tolkien's Elvish and the creation of LOTR.
David Solo is a a linguist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who expanded Tolkien's Elvish languages for the Lord of the Rings movies.

David Salo: And this [the need for his constructed languages to be embedded in a culture, history and story] is a motivating factor for him as he continues to invent and elaborate the languages, it's like I'm not going to let these languages be dead abstractions, I'm not even going to insist that they be modern up-to-date languages that can be used by people all around the world the way Esperanto is, I'm going to take these languages and I'm going to give them a depth, I'm going to give them a structure that speaks of them having had thousands and thousands of years of history. These are going to be languages which look like the ancient languages of Europe, like Latin, like Greek, like Finnish, like Welsh, and they are going to have a mythology, they're going to have a legendarium which embodies the qualities from those inspirations and gives them back to the reading public in ways that reflect what I find to be important and of lasting value about those combinations of language and literature and mythology.

Prithvi Varatharajan: What an enormous project.

David Salo: It was, it was a huge project. He eventually came to realise how much bigger it was than himself, and when he was young and had this vision of vistas of storytelling opening up in front of him, he thought, wow, I can invent these languages, I can write these stories, maybe I can get other people to come in and they can write music and draw pictures and we can have this big flowering tree of all kinds of stories and artwork that will reflect this, and later on he began to think, you know, I've kind of overreached here. But at the same time he kept on aiming at the big thing, this whole cycle of mythology, which in its way is as big as the Greek or Finnish mythology, with the caveat that of course it's the invention of one man. In his lifetime he really didn't get that kind of collaboration and cooperation with other people, except to a very small extent; he did have people writing music for some of his poems at a late date in his life. But on the whole it was all his own work and his own project.

Nowadays of course we've got things that are a little bit different. We do have films and we do have artwork and we do have all this collaborative work that goes on on the internet, so in a way his project, this dream of his, is coming to fruition, probably not in a way that he could have foreseen and, as is the nature of things, would necessarily agree with all of the ways in which it's been elaborated, but it has become this great inspiration for an awful lot of people.