A Secret Vice by J.R.R.Tolkien

Author:J.R.R.Tolkien [J.R.R.Tolkien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-05T06:00:00+00:00

There are of course various other interests in the hobby. There is the purely philological (a necessary part of the completed whole though it may be developed for its own sake): you may, for instance, construct a pseudo-historical background and deduce the form you have actually decided on from an antecedent and different form (conceived in outline); or you can posit certain tendencies of development and see what sort of form this will produce. In the first case you discover what sort of general tendencies of change produce a given character; in the second you discover the character produced by given tendencies. Both are interesting, and their exploration gives one a much greater precision and sureness in construction - in the technique in fact of producing an effect you wish to produce for its own sake.

There is the grammatical and logical - a more purely intellectual pursuit: you can (without perhaps concerning yourself so closely, if at all, with the sound-structure, the coherence of the word-form) consider the categories and the relations of words, and the various neat, effective, or ingenious ways in which these can be expressed. In this case you may often devise new and novel, even admirable and effective machinery - though doubtless, simply because the experiment has been tried by others, your human ancestors and relatives, over such a large area for so long a time, you are not likely really to light on anything that in nature or in accident has never anywhere before been discovered or contrived; but that need not bother you. In most cases you won’t know; and in any case you will have had, only more consciously and deliberately, and so more keenly, the same creative experience as that of those many unnamed geniuses who have invented the skilful bits of machinery in our traditional languages, for the use (and too often the misunderstanding and abuse) of their less skilful fellows.

The time has come now, I suppose, when I can no longer postpone the shame-faced revelation of specimens of my own more considered effort, the best I have done in limited leisure, or by occasional thefts of time, in one direction. The beautiful phonologies, thrown away or mouldering in drawers, arduous if pleasant in construction, the source of what little I know in the matter of phonetic construction based on my own individual predilections, will not interest you. I will offer some pieces of verse in the one language which has been expressly designed to give play to my own most normal phonetic taste - one has moods in this as in all other matters of taste, partly due to interior causes, partly to external influences; that is why I say formal’ - and which has had a long enough history of development to allow of this final fruition: verse. It expresses, and at the same time has fixed, my personal taste. Just as the construction of a mythology expresses at first one’s taste, and later conditions one’s imagination, and becomes inescapable, so with this language.

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