How would you know?

[morwen edhelwen]

OK, let's pretend that Tolkien really did translate an old book into English and used this as the basis for "The Hobbit" and "LOTR". He was a linguist and philologist and knew a lot about words, languages and their origins. From the idea that The Hobbit, LOTR and Sil are translated... how would he know for sure that he was really dealing with an ancient language and not with an elaborate hoax? Does anyone have an idea how? -Morwen.

[PrinceOfTheHalflings]

Originally Posted by morwen edhelwen

OK, let's pretend that Tolkien really did translate an old book into English and used this as the basis for "The Hobbit" and "LOTR". He was a linguist and philologist and knew a lot about words, languages and their origins. From the idea that The Hobbit, LOTR and Sil are translated... how would he know for sure that he was really dealing with an ancient language and not with an elaborate hoax? Does anyone have an idea how? -Morwen.

Good question!

The answer is that to fool Tolkien the hoaxer would have needed to have known even more about ancient languages and philology than Tolkien himself did. Not likely, considering the amount of effort required to produce such an elaborate hoax in the first place!

Even assuming that someone with more knowledge than Tolkien existed, and we'd be talking about no more than a handful of people at most, the odds of any of them being able to create such an imaginative work in a made-up language is virtually zero. In my opinion, of course.

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by PrinceOfTheHalflings

Good question!

The answer is that to fool Tolkien the hoaxer would have needed to have known even more about ancient languages and philology than Tolkien himself did. Not likely, considering the amount of effort required to produce such an elaborate hoax in the first place!

Even assuming that someone with more knowledge than Tolkien existed, and we'd be talking about no more than a handful of people at most, the odds of any of them being able to create such an imaginative work in a made-up language is virtually zero. In my opinion, of course.

Interestingly, there are precedents in factual history. To my knowledge, the most famous one would be the Voynich manuscript - an illuminated codex presumably written in the 15th or 16th century, in an unknown, yet undeciphered script in a yet unidentified language. Philologists and scientists are still debating whether it is a cypher text, an elaborate forgery or the work of a dedicated renaissance conlanger. (For all we know, it could even be the Red Book of another Forgotten Age of Middle-earth!)

This raises another interesting question, if we go with the translator conceit: How was Tolkien the translator able to read and understand the Red Book (which must have been written in Tengwar and probably Adûnaic or some hobbit dialect thereof) without knowing the language and script beforehand? This is, as far as I remember, never explained.

Perhaps he'd had an experience similar to that of Alwin Arundel Lowdham in The Notion Club Papers, who 'discovered' the languages (and part of the history) of Middle-earth in a series of dreams, before he (=Tolkien again) came across his copy of the Red Book. In this case, the book and his foreknowledge would have validated each other. (This would actually reflect quite nicely the real development of the Legendarium - he first invented the Elvish languages and then the history of their speakers.) Imagine his surprise when he found
he could read this unbelievably ancient manuscript in a language known to nobody else! "All these years I've thought I'd probably made it all up, and now this proves it's all true and really happened!"

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

This raises another interesting question, if we go with the translator conceit: How was Tolkien the translator able to read and understand the Red Book (which must have been written in Tengwar and probably Adûnaic or some hobbit dialect thereof) without knowing the language and script beforehand? This is, as far as I remember, never explained.

Hm, perhaps there is a Middle-earth version of the Rosetta Stone....

[Galin]

Tolkien had changed the game a bit if Elfwine dropped out, for then he had Old English to help him with the Silmarillion.

Is Old English certainly out? Ach my memory...


I know the runes and letters in The Lord of the Rings explain that JRRT translated the Red Book of Westmarch, but I would have to look at Appendix F more carefully to see if it's explicit that the translation went from actual Westron (and the ancient scripts) to modern English, with no help from an Old English translation.

I don't remember any Old English version mentioned in the context of the later 'Numenorean transmission' (or 'Imladris tradition' or whatever one might call it compared to the Elfwine transmission in general), but I mean is there something explicit enough that certainly rules out an Anglo-Saxon copy at some point?

I'll refresh my memory but someone will probably beat me to checking that out

I think I recall someone (Verlyn Flieger? Charles Noad?) speculating that Elfwine could still play a part in the later transmission, at some point anyway, despite that he seemed to fall away, or ultimately seemed to give way to the Imladris and Bilbo notion.

[morwen edhelwen]

about that because I have an incredibly elaborate story idea based on this translator conceit about a fantasy writer much like Tolkien, a former academic who actually does translate an old book that no-one knew wasn't made up...
So this is kind of what I was thinking -Morwen.

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Galin

Tolkien had changed the game a bit if Elfwine dropped out, for then he had Old English to help him with the Silmarillion.

Is Old English certainly out? Ach my memory...


I know the runes and letters in The Lord of the Rings explain that JRRT translated the Red Book of Westmarch, but I would have to look at Appendix F more carefully to see if it's explicit that the translation went from actual Westron (and the ancient scripts) to modern English, with no help from an Old English translation.

I don't remember any Old English version mentioned in the context of the later 'Numenorean transmission' (or 'Imladris tradition' or whatever one might call it compared to the Elfwine transmission in general), but I mean is there something explicit enough that certainly rules out an Anglo-Saxon copy at some point?

I'll refresh my memory but someone will probably beat me to checking that out

I think I recall someone (Verlyn Flieger? Charles Noad?) speculating that Elfwine could still play a part in the later transmission, at some point anyway, despite that he seemed to fall away, or ultimately seemed to give way to the Imladris and Bilbo notion.

I can't recall any mention of a preceding Old English translation in Appendix F; and since it gives the 'underlying' Westron forms of some Englished names (like Meriadoc Brandybuck = Kalimac Brandagamba or Rivendell = Karningul), the impression is that the Red Book was translated directly from the original Westron (not Adûnaic, as I said in my last post - sorry for the mix-up.)

On the other hand, the Dangweth Pengolod (written between 1951 and 1959, according to Christopher) is still explicitly addressed to Ælfwine - so apparently he wasn't dropped for good immediately after LotR was written, maybe not even after it was published; Eru only knows how long he continued to haunt the back of Tolkien's head, and how the Prof meant to reconcile him with the Imladris/Númenórean tradition. (Interestingly, it concludes with the words Sin quente Quendingoldo Elendilenna "Thus spoke Pengolod to Elendil". Now probably Elendil is in this context just Ælfwine's name translated into Quenya (both meaning 'Elf-friend'), but it still makes me wonder whether Tolkien may have left open a back door to replacing Ælfwine of England with Elendil of Númenor as the transmittor of this text - do you remember whether the Eldar of Tol Eressëa still visited Númenor in Elendil's lifetime?)

morwen, you should definitely write that story! But I'd reconsider about the book being made up - it could be disappointing to the reader to find out that your protagonist was fooled by a hoax. Alternatively, he could start with the assumption that it's all made up and translate it with the sole intention of mining it for future novel ideas, and in the end find out (how?) that it's genuine. I'd find that more interesting than the other way round, but that's only because I dislike it when a character I've sympathized with is made to look stupid. But it's your story, so that's up to you, of course.

[morwen edhelwen]

Whoa! Thanks for all the replies! - Morwen.

[morwen edhelwen]

I wrote up a summary of the story idea in Word on my computer so I wouldn't forget it.