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2 results

  • I - The Cats of Queen Berúthiel

  • Giuseppe Pezzini, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
  • Book:
    Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025, pp 22-83

  • Summary

    Chapter I elucidates Tolkien’s puzzling claim that The Lord of the Rings should be primarily considered as “an essay in linguistic aesthetic”. It first analyses a passing reference to the “cats of Queen Berúthiel”, described by Tolkien as the only element in The Lord of the Rings “which does not actually exist in legends written before it was begun”. This example introduces a discussion of a typical pattern of composition of Tolkien’s works: this begins as an experience of purely aesthetic fascination for a linguistic entity, which is then expanded into a narrative item, and later developed into a full, meaningful tale, through a heuristic process of ‘sub-creative discovery’. The second part of the chapter investigates the theoretical implications of such an approach, reconstructing Tolkien’s perceptions on the value and heuristic potential of a ‘gratuitous’ aesthetic event, and especially of a linguistic one, given the ‘divine’ inspiration of language and its original expression of both wonder at and knowledge of created reality.

  • A methodological proposal for conlang evaluation

  • David Peterson, Jessie Peterson
  • Journal:
    Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    20 May 2024, pp. 1-7

  • Intentional language creation is a mainstay of the modern world, having gained widespread notoriety in popular television shows and films, and even finding a home in academia in the form of undergraduate courses on invented languages. In this paper, we argue that constructed languages deserve more careful consideration than they currently receive either inside or outside academia. We provide guidelines for developing evaluative criteria to be used with constructed languages of various types and ask readers, whether academics or not, to consider the role they play as audience and critics in the unfolding of a new art form: the art of language invention.