Connections

J.R.R. Tolkien once said that he had written The Lord of the Rings to create a world ‘in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo, and that the phrase long antedated the book’.  - Tolkien Estate.com.

"A Secret Vice": Off the Wish List and Into the Library

Whatever has popped into your head, the 'secret vice' is making up languages.

   "A Secret Vice is the title of a talk written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1931, given to a literary society entitled 'A Hobby for the Home', in which he first publicly revealed his interest in invented languages. Some twenty years later, Tolkien revised the manuscript for a second presentation. It deals with constructed languages in general and the relation of a mythology to its language. He contrasts international auxiliary languages with artistic languages constructed for aesthetic pleasure. Tolkien further discusses phonaesthetics, citing Greek, Finnish and Welsh as examples of "languages which have a very characteristic and in their different ways beautiful word-form".

A Secret Vice was first published in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (1983), together with six other essays by Tolkien, edited by his son Christopher.

A new, extended critical edition was published by HarperCollins in 2016, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins. The new edition contains previously omitted passages from the original essay, Tolkien's drafts and notes, and a hitherto unpublished work by Tolkien, "Essay on Phonetic Symbolism".

-Wikipedia.

Thus far, the facts. But why did I wait so long (from 2016 to 2021) to get it, when I usually buy any new Tolkien that comes along right away? Well, I already had "The Monsters and the Critics and other Essays" and I wasn't sure this little book (apart from the Appendixes there's only about 130 pages of material) was worth the price; also I was desperately poor. Still poor, by the way, but not so desperate.

I finally got the book on Friday and read it right away. In it, Tolkien almost bashfully reveals his penchant for making up languages, from using the childish 'Animalic' of his cousins, to interest in Esperanto (an international auxiliary language), to his own various 'Elvish' creations. He hopes in the examination of the drives and the techniques of such activity to find deeper insights into philology and language itself.

The essays are fairly technical but not to the point of impenetrability. If you go into the book looking for a magical literary experience, you will not find it. But you will find a fascinating look into the personal and technical roots that flowered into Tolkien's whole Legendarium.

Robertson Davies: The Well-Tempered Critic

After having first received by mistake (the vendor's mistake, not mine) the similarly titled "The Well-Tempered Critic" by Canadian critic Northrop Frye (published in 1963, and thus my exact contemporary), today I finally got "The Well-Tempered Critic: One Man's View of Theatre and Letters in Canada", written by Robertson Davies (or Robertson Gravies, as my nephew hilariously refers to him) and edited by Judith Skelton Grant, who later went on to write his monumental biography. How's that a sentence for you?

This book came out in 1981 (and so the year I first heard about Davies, although I paid little attention to his work until years later); this is it's 40th anniversary. It is an ex-library book from California. It's also the last Davies' book I'm likely to buy unless another volume of his diaries comes out. There are more obscure, specialist books of his, but they are rare and priced out of my range. Even the 1964 reprint of his first book, "Shakespeare's Boy Actors" (1st edition 1939) is going for $1331.30.

I am only a few pages into it and I have already found this, from a 1949 entry of Davies writing in his persona of the crusty curmudgeon, Samuel Marchbanks:

"Saw The Glass Menagerie this evening, very well acted, but it did not move me to tears or laughter because, I think, I am temperamentally unsympathetic to such pieces. The plot was about a group of people who were in terrible fixes of one sort or another, with no hope of getting themselves straightened out. Now when I encounter such situations in real life my instinct is to run, for I know that if I remain among such people I shall not be able to help them, and they will only succeed in involving me in their troubles, and dragging me down to their own hopeless level. One of the bitterest realizations which life offers us is the knowledge that there are some people who are doomed, either through ill luck or their own unsatifactory character, to be always in trouble; it is necessary to be kind to such people, of course, but it is dangerous to try to straighten them out, for their genius for misfortune is far greater than my genius for assistance. When I see them on the stage I do not have to take a humane attitude towards them, and I reflect that it would have been far better if they had all committed suicide before the curtain went up."

Tolkien's Library: An Annotated Checklist

 

If you are like me, whenever you see a picture of someone in front of a bookcase (especially if it's your favorite author), you wonder "What are those books?" Well. Oronzo Cilli does too, and instead of just letting it go at that, he spent years researching what was in Tolkien's library, much of which was donated to and catalogued by various colleges, sold to booksellers, or inherited by his family. As a result, "we know more about J. R. R. Tolkien than about almost any other author, from any period" - and now, thanks to this book, more about his reading habits.

This is, of course, more of a reference book than a reader, and many of the volumes listed are very scholarly works related to Tolkien's pursuit of philology. But even that gives you an insight into his life and interests. There are fairy tales and 'popular literature'. Included are works by his fellow Inklings, presents from his family, and notes from his own letters and diaries about his opinions of what he's read. There are even, in separate sections, lists of his lectures, the student theses he examined, and interviews that he gave. It gives us a fascinating insight into the furnishings of his mind.

This is a beautiful book, of interesting and somehow (to me) appealing dimensions (6 3/4 x 9 3/4). It has a foreword by famed Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey and a cover by Jay Johnstone in his engaging medieval/Greek icon style. My copy is only slighly marred by a sort of pinch on the spine where I am convinced an Amazon robot gripped it from off a shelf in one of their cavernous warehouses.