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Jörg Rhiemeier's Conlang Pages
Jörg Rhiemeier's Conlang Pages
This document consists of several brief notes on Quendian, i.e. Tolkien's Elvish languages. It was these marvelous conlangs which really brought me into the Secret Vice, and my own main project - the Albic languages - started as a descendant of Sindarin, Nur-ellen. I now consider Nur-ellen to be poorly made, and doing injustice to Tolkien's creation; back then, my knowledge of either Tolkien's languages or the ways languages change was insufficient. Since then, I have learned a lot about language change, and also something about the Quendian languages.
Yet, some gaps in the knowledge of Sindarin could not be closed; moreover, after my Elves ceased to be Tolkien's Elves, it felt like theft to use Tolkien's languages for them. Also, I had some ideas about what my Elvish languages should be like which differed substantially from Tolkien's; so I decided not to pursue the path of Nur-ellen any further and to start anew. I also discovered that I could reify my ideas within the framework of the Indo-European family and that the Elves, if they originated in the Bell Beaker Culture, should speak an Indo-European language; for these reasons, the Albic languages are now Indo-European.
But my interest in Tolkien's languages did not disappear after the separation of Albic from Quendian; they still are the best fictional languages I know of, and continue to be a source of inspiration for the Albic project. I cannot say, though, that I was an expert on them; but I wish to present some brief thoughts on them, which is the purpose of this document. In the following, I use the word "classical" to refer to the time of the events of Lord of the Rings, i.e. the end of the Third Age of Arda. Hence, the Quendian languages showcased in the novel are Classical Quenya and Classical Sindarin.
It is often claimed that Quenya resembles Finnish. I never really felt that way, rather I compared it to Latin, but that was of course mostly because I simply did not know Finnish yet, and of the few languages I knew, Latin was the most "Quenya-like". But I still feel there are considerable differences between Quenya and Finnish.
First, Quenya has a good deal more consonant phonemes than Finnish, most notably a palatal (the tyelpetéma) and a labiovelar series (the quessetéma). This is indeed a trait that resembles Proto-Indo-European more than Finnish. On the other hand, Quenya has nowhere near that many geminates as Finnish. In Finnish, geminates are all over the place; in Quenya, while they do occur, they are not particularly frequent. The Finnish geminates also tie in with a consonant gradation system that is absent from Quenya.
The vowel systems are also quite different. Both distinguish between short and long vowels. Finnish has eight vowel qualities, Quenya only five - it lacks /æ ø y/ which are common in Finnish. Also, Finnish has vowel harmony which Quenya lacks (not that Quenya words violated Finnish vowel harmony rules - actually, all Quenya words would be in the "back" class). On top of this, Finnish is replete in diphthongs - there are many of them, and they are quite frequent. Quenya has fewer and less frequent diphthongs. Again, Quenya resembles a typical ancient Indo-European language more than it does Finnish.
Where Quenya is more like Finnish are phonotactics and morphological typology. The syllable and word structure rules of Quenya are actually not far remote from the Finnish ones, and there are quite some Quenya words that could be Finnish words (but also many Quenya words that could not, and Finnish words that could not be Quenya words). Both Quenya and Finnish are richly inflected (e.g., Quenya has ten noun cases - more than most Indo-European languages - while Finnish has 15; also, both Quenya and Finnish have possessive suffixes), and halfway from an ideally agglutinating language like Turkish to a typically fusional language like Latin.
Over all, Quenya does resemble Finnish in some ways, but not in others, and the resemblances should not be overrated.
Classical Sindarin typologically differs substantially from languages such as Quenya: it has lost the old word endings, and developed consonant lenitions which resulted in the emergence of initial mutations which form an important part of the Sindarin morphology. One could think that most of the changes would have happened in the ca. 7,000 years from the Exile of the Noldor to the War of the Rings, while the language changed much less in the shorter and more tranquil time from the arrival of the Sindar to the Exile of the Noldor.
But that apparently was not the case. I cannot point at Tolkien's original remarks, but all the sources I consulted say that at the time of the Exile of the Noldor, Sindarin was already closer to Classical Sindarin than to Common Eldarin. This puzzled me for a long time - until I realized that something similar is the case with the language Tolkien modelled Sindarin on: Welsh. When the Romans ruled Britain, the Britons spoke a language nearly identical to Gaulish, with word endings similar to those of Latin. But in 700 AD, Old Welsh was more like Modern Welsh than like Roman Era British (the same holds, mutatis mutandis, for the other Insular Celtic languages)! It had lost its old endings and developed initial mutations in the few centuries that passed between the departure of the Romans and the earliest known Old Welsh texts. This seems rather surprising, but on closer inspection, it turns out that this profound typological change is the result of just three major sound changes that could come to pass in a few centuries - and the same is true for Sindarin.
Tolkien, as is well known, was not only a Germanic philologist but also a lover of the ancient Germanic languages. So why, then, did he not create an Quendian language with a Germanic-like phonology, with a consonant shift paralleling "Grimm's Law" and all that? The answer is that he did, though the language never rose to prominence in his legendarium. In the early 1920s, he entertained the notion that Ilkorin, the language spoken by the Elves left behind in Beleriand (the later Sindar), was just such a language (see also this article by Roman Rausch).
Later, he abandoned that notion: the Ilkorin entries in "The Etymologies" (c. 1937) show a phonology without "Grimm's Law", but quite similar to that of Noldorin, the language that would later become Sindarin. Why? The reason can be found in "The Lhammas" (1937), where in §8 it is said that the language of the exiled Noldor changed much under the influence of the Ilkorin language; in other words, Ilkorin acted as a substratum in Noldorin. Substratum theories of this kind then were very popular in historical linguistics, especially in Celtic and Romance studies, and Tolkien himself entertained the notion of an Elvish substratum in Insular Celtic in his novel fragment "The Lost Road" ("The Lhammas", "The Etymologies" and "The Lost Road" are all found in The Lost Road and Other Writings, volume 5 of the History of Middle-earth series). Today, such substratum theories have fallen out of favour, as more research has shown that the Romance languages show no good typological relationships with the pre-Roman languages, and much damage has of course been done by the nonsensical idea of a Semitic substratum responsible for the "aberrant" typology of the Insular Celtic languages. In order to act as such a substratum, Ilkorin had to have undergone similar sound changes as Noldorin, and this close resemblance between the two languages is indeed shown in "The Etymologies" (and allowed Tolkien later to merge them into one language, namely Sindarin).
Another reason to abandon the Germanic-like shift was probably that in most stages of his creation, Tolkien envisioned Proto-Quendian as a language without voiced aspirated stops - it had only voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated and voiced unaspirated stops - which would have meant that the shifted language would have lacked voiced stops (unless it also had the equivalent of Verner's Law, of course). He apparently was not particularly pleased with that result.
Yet, the idea of a "Germanic-like" Quendian language did not disappear from Tolkien's mind. A sound change chart dated to "c. 1940" reproduced in the volume "Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth" (Catherine McIlwaine, ed., 2018) shows that Tolkien pondered such a shift for Danian (the later Nandorin), but abandoned it again. (The few Danian entries in "The Etymologies" show no such shift, either.)
But the idea of a Quendian language with "Grimm's Law" lived on even after that. In the essay "Quendi and Eldar", posthumously published in The War of the Jewels (volume 11 of the History of Middle-earth series), Tolkien gives the names of six Avari tribes, one of them being Hwenti - which is just what one would expect the cognate of Quendi to resemble in such a language. So the notion of a Quendian language with Germanic-like sound changes never died in Tolkien's mind, it just never rose to prominence, perhaps because that would have necessitated changing many names in the legendarium, or simply because, as said above, Tolkien was not pleased with the result of this experiment.
While Sindarin owes much to Welsh and could be characterized as a "P-Quendian" language because it has undergone the shift /kw > p/ analogous to Welsh (and the other "P-Celtic" languages), Quenya could be characterized as a "Q-Quendian" language as it does not have undergone that shift and kept its labiovelars intact; but apart from that, Quenya owes nothing in particular to the Goidelic languages. It is well-known that Tolkien did not like the latter much, and thus did not use them as a model for any Eldarin language. He did, though, think of modelling an Avarin language on them (see this article), and the Avarin tribe name Cuind (in the essay "Quendi and Eldar") may be from such a language.
Many people feel the desire to write their own texts, or translate texts from other languages, in Quenya or Sindarin; they usually soon reach the limits of attestation - many words and word forms are simply not known. Hence, people have tried to "reconstruct" the unattested items, sometimes by free invention, but sometimes by using linguistically informed methods such as applying known paradigms to words, or known sound correspondences between Quenya and Sindarin in order to construct Quenya cognates of known Sindarin words or vice versa.
Such practices, however, are controversial. They are not considered legitimate scholarship in the study of extinct ancient languages, where unattested forms remain unknown until new texts are discovered, and the scholars whom Christopher Tolkien entrusted with the edition of his father's writings on his language creations are among those who maintain that such expansions of Tolkien's languages are illegitimate, as they have pointed out in their FAQ. Yet, a kind of "ceasefire" has been achieved by adopting the convention of referring to the Quendian languages expanded by linguistically informed methods as "Neo-Quenya" and "Neo-Sindarin".
The linguists entrusted by Christopher Tolkien are often referred to as the "Elfconners", after a conference called "Elfcon" organized by them, but it also resonates of expressions like "con-men"; and it is often claimmed that they don't publish fuller accounts of the languages for malicious reasons. But this is a conspiracy theory, similar to that concerning the Qumran scrolls, which were likewise edited slowly. Of course, the Qumran scrolls were edited so slowly because they were to a large part in bad shape, often in fragments the size of a fingernail. Likewise, Tolkien's notes on his languages apparently were highly disordered, and we know that he constantly revised his languages, which makes it very difficult to find out what the "canonical" versions of the languages are.
Of course, the events narrated by Tolkien never happened, and of course, there never were any immortal Elves. But the languages look plausible enough, and it is not very hard to imagine that Quenya and Sindarin once were - or still are - spoken somewhere in our world.
In 2024, I was contacted by a person who had developed the idea that Tolkien's Elvish languages once were spoken somewhere in Europe by real people, and related to Tolkien by ghosts. I replied that I don't believe in ghosts but the languages could have existed, and Tolkien found them in old manuscripts. Later in the conversation, I made a suggestion where and when Proto-Quendian may have been spoken: my idea was that given the similarities to Indo-European and Uralic languages, Proto-Quendian would not have been spoken far from Proto-Indo-Europan and Proto-Uralic, perhaps in the area where now are the Baltic countries and adjacent parts of Russia and Belarus, making the Baltic Sea the "real Cuiviénen", at about the same time as Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic, i.e. about 3000 BC. The Quendian languages could then have expanded westward together with Indo-European and Uralic, with Sindarin ending up in Britain, and Quenya Eru knows where.
Alas, that are all idle mind games, and there can be no doubt that the languages are fictional.
© 2025 Jörg
Rhiemeier
Last update: 2025-12-19