"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new edition contains previously omitted passages from the original essay, Tolkien's drafts and notes, and a hitherto unpublished work by Tolkien, "Essay on Phonetic Symbolism".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.