One of Tolkien's great innovations was the notion that, in his sub-created world, there would not only be sentient beings of other 'races' (elves, orcs, dwarves, etc.), but they would have their own cultures and languages.
Human beings have probably always imagined that there might be faeries, gnomes, goblins, bogles, and all the rest, and told stories about such beings. But in those stories these creatures generally exist as a series of those funny-shaped mirrors one encounters at fairgrounds or piers, which simply reflect our own features and characteristics back at us in distorted, exaggerated ways. They not only don't speak their own languages or develop their own cultures - it is actually necessary that they don't, because they are supposed to exist as a kind of commentary on ourselves. Despite their oddness they are essentially part of the culture from which the story itself springs.
Tolkien did his damnedest to give his fantasy races an independent existence. Thus, they speak their own languages and have their own apparently autonomous cultures. Since he wished to create a more genuinely freestanding other world, rather than write mere folklore or fairy tales, it was important to him that the creatures inhabiting that other world were themselves freestanding. Human beings are not at its centre, and the world does not revolve around them, as it does in for example the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.
Ultimately, of course, he fails in this endeavour, partly deliberately and partly not. We see this most clearly in the example of the orcs. Orcish speech, for all that it is apparently 'another language' to the common tongue, is apparently only actually an amalgamation of existing Middle Earth languages, borrowed by the orcs haphazardly. This reflects Tolkien's own ideas about what the orcs were - elves who were corrupted by Melkor - and also about the nature of evil as essentially parasitic on good. It is a very important feature of Tolkien's legendarium that although evil can manufacture, it cannot create. It can construct machines and weapons of war, but it can't build in the sense that a real city is built, or cultivate a countryside, or produce art. Just as Melkor could not make his own beings but could only mangle the already-created elves, so the orcs who resulted could not produce their own language, but only piece together an approximation of one from existing linguistic material.
The fundamentally parasitic nature of orcish speech is therefore consistent with how orcs themselves were imagined to have been created, in Tolkien's world. But it is also consistent with his own interpretation of Christianity and, particularly, his understanding of theodicy: evil is the prideful attempt to equal or better God's achievements through artifice - which can only ultimately fail, producing corrupt works that will in the end cause simply destruction and/or decay.
The failure of orcish speech to achieve an independent existence is therefore due to a choice on Tolkien's part that is consistent with the nature of his world. But it also demonstrates the ultimate impossibility of human beings actually imagining things that do not in some way relate to the author's ideas (conscious or unconscious) about the human condition. Even in our fantasy worlds - one is tempted to say, especially in our fantasy worlds - we are incapable of coming up with ideas that do not in themselves comment on our own nature and position in the universe. Orcish speech cannot have an independent existence because Tolkien could not escape his own perspectives and, in the end, his human nature. Whatever he created, in the final analysis, ended up being a commentary (however accurate or otherwise) on ourselves.
This is true of all of fantasy fiction since Tolkien was writing - meaning all fantasy fiction that was not self-consciously rooted in the real world in the manner of fairy stories and myths. Grasping for an independent existence, they end up reflecting ourselves back to ourselves in hall-of-mirrors fashion just like folklore - except perhaps in more attenuated, and strangely shaped, form.
Does this mean that we are better off not bothering? Since the goal of creating independently existing fantasy worlds is a quixotic one, should we, like CS Lewis or JK Rowling, limit our horizons to the amalgamation of the real world and the fantastical, thereby producing the modern equivalent of the fairy tale? Or should we continue to set our sights on that unrealisable ambition - the imagination of a world which bears no relation to, and does not comment upon, our own?
Oh, making truly non-human races is just... not that hard. It's just the sort of thing that you'd struggle with if you had no in-depth knowledge of biology or anthropology.
ReplyDeleteHere's a list of human universals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal
Choose one or more of them, and assume that it doesn't apply to elves or orcs or whatever.
For biology, just choose something that some animal has as a feature, but that humans don't. Because human society is ultimately an elaborate wrapper for the human reproductive process (all human societies that haven't done a good job at being that have reproduced less than the ones that have, and been outcompeted) the easiest way to get weirdness out of biological changes is to choose a very different reproductive cycle. Naked mole rat eusociality, salmon-style spawn-and-die stuff, insect-style k-strategists, and so on -- of course, these aren't reproductive cycles likely to lead to sentience but a) neither is the human one, actually, if you look at all the animals that aren't sentient and b) this is fantasy, you can say that someone created elves.
Yes, I wrote about the cultural universal thing and its potential for deploying in fantasy gaming in, let me see - May 2009? A mere 14 years ago? https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2009/05/towards-theory-of-demihumans.html
DeleteThe point I am trying to make is that whatever the level of knowledge one has about biology or anthropology, the things that you imagine will only ever exist in contradistinction to humanity. What you are capable of imagining is defined by the fact that you are human. And what you create will chiefly be interesting because of what it suggests, however obliquely, about the human condition.
Oh, yeah. Sorry, I didn't get that.
DeleteI think that it's theoretically possible to make a world that doesn't comment upon our own. Maybe. It's just that, as you point out, if you succeeded, you'd have something that wouldn't be interesting.
Gonna go read the 2009 post, sounds interesting.
Tolkien specifies in his Appendix F to LotR that orcs speak 'jargons.' For a linguist like Tolkien in 1937 that word was a special linguistic term for a kind of language today known as a pidgin or a creole. (Today the word jargon is reserved in linguistics for the early genesis stage of a pidgin.) In those days, such languages were ill understood, but they were certainly disdained, even by linguists. They were also associated with dark-skinned colonial subjects thought to be inferior intellectually, people whose circumstances of servitude and relocation required them to generate a new and simple form of speech. This is, to me, where Tolkien's orcs become most transparently projections of the race concepts of his time. That said, Tolkien's idea was that these 'jargons' of the Orcs were generated to fill the need of a species bred for a purpose but lacking language of their own makes initial sense: humanoids capable of language would begin with ad hoc communication. The inherent 'malice' of Orcs, says Tolkien, meant that they formed separate groups with mutually incomprehensible dialects. That is why they resorted to Westron speech, which they apprehended badly. Notably, Sauron failed to impose his own conlang on his minions: the Black Speech.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the idea that evil is destructive and not creative may be used to explain Tolkien's choices here in hindsight, I think mostly it reflects his attempt at verisimilitude from the point of view of linguistics in the 1930s. It's science-fiction speculation. Where would a 'new race' get its language? The template he uses is incontestably--and inevitably--one from his own imperial and scholarly context.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that Tolkien may not meet the standards of today with regard to his views about race but this seems like a stretch. Are we really supposed to believe that Tolkien had no awareness that 'dark-skinned colonial subjects' didn't have their own fully-fledged languages that had nothing to do with the pidgins or creoles that some small number of them spoke?
DeleteI seem to remember reading in either Tolkien or C. S. Lewis (perhaps in one of their letters?) that there is no such thing as a "primitive" language, that each and every language is wondrously complex and is capable of communicating an essentially infinite number of things. Or perhaps it was in Barfield's book, Poetic Diction?
Deletenoisms, of course Tolkien knew how old Bengali literature was (for example) and that it was not a pidgin language. I was remarking about the connotations of "jargon" in the 1930s. Tolkien specifically described orc-speech as jargon in his Appendix F. My point was that this meant something specific, to him as a scholar, about how he imagined orc-speech to have been constituted. I don't have any stake in bashing English-using authors from the 1930s for their racism. Obviously, they were racist in ways we don't accept today. We agree, and I'm not wringing my hands about it. It's still legitimate to point out the racial implications in describing orc-speech as jargon in the 1930s. It's not in any way a stretch, unless you think Tolkien didn't know the linguistics of his time. The real "jargons" were the model of his fantasy, as I emphasized in the last part of my comment.
DeleteAs far as the number of creole speakers, there are plenty of countries, former colonies, in which these former "jargons" are now national languages. But that wasn't my point, just that you said there were some small number of them.
Following Geoffrey's remark, it wouldn't surprise me if one of the Inklings wrote that there is no primitive language. It's one of the debates that linguists were still hashing out in Tolkien's time, and in which context the term jargon was at play. Linguists are still at pains to point out the nonexistence of primitive languages in courses to this day, countering folk beliefs. The existence of "jargons" and other contact languages (as they are called today) challenged established methods of historical linguistics, and so philologists like Tolkien were required to have opinions about it.
Whoops - there was a double negative in my reply up there. Should have read: "Are we really supposed to believe that Tolkien had no awareness that 'dark-skinned colonial subjects' HAD their own fully-fledged languages that had nothing to do with the pidgins or creoles that some small number of them spoke?"
DeleteYou haven't convinced me it isn't a stretch. It seems most likely that Tolkien just used the word 'jargon' in the sense of a language assembled from other languages without any particular racial connotations.
And yet when the orcs' speech is put to print Tolkien can't help but reproduce the rough talk of the working-class Tommies he remembers from the trenches. Ghan-"Gunga"-Buri-"Din"-Ghan is a more accurate speaker of a pidgin, I think. Shagrat and Gorbag sound more like Kipling's Men who Would Be King, complaining about the officer corps and scheming on an ill-defined caper.
DeleteYes, that's a point often forgotten in the whole orcs-are-Tolkien's-veiled-racism narrative. When they speak, they sound like they're from the West Midlands (and you sometimes actually find yourself feeling a bit sorry for them - as one often does with people from the West Midlands).
Deletenoisms, you seem to be arguing against the view that "orcs are merely veiled racism." That's not what I said. You also fixated on one remark in the midst of my initial comment that I followed immediately with the qualifier, "That said, ..."
DeleteI think it's merely incidentally of note that Tolkien was what we would call racist today, because that is trivially ordinary for a author writing in the 1930s. How else would he have imagined a fantasy world? Why should anybody be shocked about this? I was, in fact, supporting part of your point (our fantasies can't be divorced from our experiences of the real world) but arguing against a part of your point (your suggestion that Tolkien's idea of orc-speech was about good and evil). My main remark, which is still there, was about Tolkien's concept of kinds of languages and his efforts at verisimilitude in fantasy in which a despicable new race comes into being. As for how linguists discussed jargon in the 1930s, and the peoples identified as using jargons, you can believe what you like or you can read the stuff yourself. Tolkien was not the ignoramus about linguistics you need him to be to say it's a stretch. Linguists are still arguing about the racial connotations of the related terms a hundred years later--often not in good faith, too.
About Tolkien's characterization orcs with the rough talk of working class Tommies and West Midlands speech, this does not contradict but supports my remark. Tolkien wrote that the Orcs "had long used the Westron as their native language, though in such a fashion as to make it hardly less unlovely than Orkish." If he likewise invokes a perverse pathos for crude working-class Orc lads with their unlovely speech, that's a nice literary effect, but it evokes Professor Tolkien's world of social class and hierarchy, again a fantasy reflecting his own world, and necessarily so.
I get the point you are trying to make. What I am fixating on is the banality of these kinds of observations (I'm very familiar with them from my undergraduate days as an English lit student) and how they tend to draw us away from what is actually in the text. Throughout Tolkien's work the same point is made time and again: creation is good, and evil cannot create, but only ape creation and ultimately destroy. That this is even true at the level of language is fascinating, and says a lot about Tolkien's worldview and even his theodicy (note, for instance, how the Black Speech was created before Sauron's complete corruption; note also that the Haradrim etc. have their own languages because they were once good but were corrupted subsequently). I'm interested in what Tolkien was driving at, not the ultimately obvious point that, guess what, authors have a social context.
DeleteIt was clearly not merely the fact that Tolkien had a social context (as you say, obvious), but something specific about Tolkien as a linguist: his conception of orc-speech was informed by his contemporary linguistics. That's not obvious to his readers who don't know 1930s linguistics. But I think we have hashed it out sufficiently.
DeleteComplete and utter tangent here, but talk of jargons and pidgin cannot fail but make me think of all I've learned from Ken Campbell and his "Wol Wantok" attempt to get Pidgin (Tok Pisin I think, I'm riffing off the top of my head) established as a global language (because, he says, it only has a couple of hundred words and you can learn it in an afternoon).
DeleteI'm thinking specifically of the (possibly apocryphal) tale of the origin of the word "killim", which means "hit", because the Irish guards at the camps where Pacific Islanders were forced to work and wear trousers would say "I'll kill 'im" before they administered a beating. To translate the English phrase "kill him" you have to say something which (again from memory) sounds more like "killim up dead altogether finish yeah".
What has this got to do with RPG races? No idea, but if you were a Tolkienesque linguistic obsessive then I'm sure you could have a lot of fun shoehorning coinings such as these into your fantasy world, perhaps enjoying the chaos that ensues when PCs interpret pidgin phrases as though they still carried identical meanings to those of their parent language.
(Even further off-topic, I was with Ken's daughter Daisy last week, sat round a fire in an Anglo-Saxon roundhouse, and she performed the "to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" [or rather "narra-folla-day narra-folla-day narra-folla-day] speech from Macbed, her dad's pidgin translation of Macbeth, and it was electric. Wish I could find it online, but here she is doing Lady Macbeth, features the killim ded line plus the classic "Satan, tekka mi handbag": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3DsphfAg58 )
It does take a bit longer than an afternoon to learn Tok Pisin, and English speakers have a huge advantage over others, so I doubt its utility as a world language. The origin of Tok Pisin kilim that you cite is probably apocryphal but one can readily see why kil- (plus transitivizing -im) would be adopted to mean hit or strike. In Tok Pisin one must say "i kilim i dai" to say "He is killing him" (as opposed to merely striking him). To make it past perfective you'd say "i bin kilim i dai," "he has killed him." Other Melanesian pidgins of English have slight variations.
DeleteNarafala de is more typical of Bislama (spoken in Vanuatu), a close cousin of Tok Pisin, but you could hear it in PNG too. Thanks for the link! Her accent sounds more Jamaican than Papuan--strange.
I have a game rule about a widespread jargon in my fantasy setting, so there is room for application of this stuff to games. The point is that it should be fun not boring or potentially embarrassing. Maybe one day it will get a blog entry. I enjoyed the tangent (with apologies to noisms).
I'm not sure where one might track it down these days (I have a recording... somewhere) but Ken's CD "Wol Wantok" is well worth a listen - an hour's lecture on pidgin from one of the world's greatest raconteurs.
DeleteHe also talks about pidgin in others of his monologues, in particular Pigspurt's Daughter. The segment in here about the guy Ken sent on a mission to New Caledonia (he assumed it was in Scotland), who then ended up spending 6 months touring the islands as a pidgin Ken Dodd impersonator... priceless:
https://kencampbell.urbandrum.co.uk/2019/01/23/pigspurt-part-two/
(I mean... all of Ken's monologues are worth the price of admission, that podcast series is great)
I love me a good off-piste off-topic (with glad but light-handed deference to noisms for allowing such things here). One day I'll tell you about the time we steered a conversation with M John Harrison about The Lord of The Rings into a debate on the potential of kebab-powered spacecraft... 🙃
There was a time between maybe 2000 and 2010 where I felt a lot of RPG settings went out of their way to try and do something like you're asking in the last paragraph, create a truly original, imagined world, with original races and culture, not based on folklore, or established tropes...
ReplyDeleteI feel they invariably failed as fantasy, even to the extent, or especially to the extent they succeeded at this.
The more they were divorced from precedent and archetype and tradition and reflecting or commenting on our world, and the more they tried to stand alone as some "objective" self consistent construct, the less they felt meaningful.
Consider the settings you yourself are apparently drawn to: isn't "fantasy Tibet" or "fantasy Northumberland" immediately more meaningful than "fantasy Klbxiog" and "fantasy Inegzm"?
Yes - I basically agree with this.
DeleteAll I would add is that ironically those 'truly original imagined worlds' actually tend to end up being much more directly parasitic on real-world concerns than those which are more closely tied to precedent and archetype, as you put it.
Shimrod has made the point. We communicate on a deeper level with those who share our understanding, those who don't have to learn a new jargon (which is intended to keep the uninitiated out).
ReplyDeleteA Clockwork Orange is a very interesting example of how a brilliant writer was better off inventing a hip-juvenile slang rather than using an existing one which would date quickly. But *my* point is that the *content*, stylized brutal juvenile delinquency and original sin, is at everyone's fingertips, so much so that we barely need a glossary to follow Alex's story.
That is the way to go. Keep the content close to home *and* make sure you are skilful with future, elizabethan or exotic argot.
I can imagine someone taking a Burgess style language approach to the kurosawa samurai genre. Because it is so sympathetic to the cowboy westerns it is easily understood, but then imagining a Japanese language domination of teenage gang *English* could be as fruitful as Burgess's CO.
I am wondering if it was intentional, that, in your discussion touching on Tolkien's Christian worldview of the impossibility of creation apart from God (that is, a truly original creation), you ended with the conclusion that truly original creation is impossible (or at least, meaningless)?
ReplyDeleteIt, at the very least, follows my experience that the more time and desperate effort one spends trying to create their own world, the less skillfully it is done. Conversely, the more one observes our own world and avoids such total escapism, the better one's worlds are. A truly original world is a purposeless world. Make, if you will and can, a world devoid of trees, of deserts, of men, of virtue, of civilizations, of mammals, of insects, of atoms... Replace these all with the sublime things you can surely imagine to make it the equal of our world. If you can come up with one thing so interesting as Trees that bears no resemblance to anything in creation, I shall eat my hat (and then, I think, I shall have to attend your funeral).
You can only give your creations independent existence of the same type as something found in our creation. Tolkien knew this, I think, at least at the root. Elvish, I have heard, resembles finnish and welsh. If he managed to make the elvish language like no other language on earth, it would not be a language at all! And as much as he made his world to "stand on its own", I am sure he made it also to reflect what he saw as the beauty of our world. Elvish beauty is the beauty he saw, orcish evil is the evil he saw, mannish valor is, probably, the valor he hoped to see. He sought to make old things new, because, like the elves, the most ancient things never truly grow old. We only have to see them by moonlight.
t. Pilgrim on the Long Road
Yes - nice comment.
DeleteAgreed. By using our world as a starting point, you're benefitting from eons of evolution, and millennia of civilisation. How could a creator emulate even the tiniest fraction of that?
DeleteTaking the broader argument a step further, I don't think we, ensconced as we are in our own milieu, could even recognise a truly independent world if one was created.
We are creatures in thrall to pareidolia. If the not-a-tree looked at all like a tree, our brains would make the connection. All that creator's effort wasted.
I'm also very sympathetic to the idea that, when creating a fantasy world, you can't just change surface parts without reasoning through the consequences. To build a truly independent fantasy, you might have to start with imaginary fundamental forces and particles.
It is possible to go quite far and create marvels that are radically different from our own experiences and assumptions. Consider some science fiction. The goal is to create wonder, and sometimes horror. But these are concepts, often the story itself uses a traditional form.
ReplyDeleteBut fantasy is the precise opposite. Fantasy is rooted in myth which is the most fundamental to the human experience. One journeys outward, the other goes inward. This is the problem of the deconstructialists. It is not possible to make something wholly independent of the human experience. In trying to reject traditional values that allude to truths they must invert them, creating a distortion, far more unpalatable then tales of righteous kings, dashing heroes and comely maidens.
There are stories with different physics, different states of being, different worlds. Egan's the Clockwork Rocket, Asimov's The Gods Themselves, or Flatland, or the eerie occultic world of The Voyage to Arcturus. These are places we inhabit for a while, as flights of fancy, to see how far our mind can range. But in the end we always return to more familiar ground to find deeper meanings.
By contrast, using a familiar milieu means you have at your disposal a world of almost infinite complexity and a vast wealth of details that can be called on to render it highly believable. It is much easier to create a world that is in many ways like our history, with a few mythological elements taken as fact, then it is to create entire human cultures from wholecloth. There will always be historical analogies, approximations, appraoches. They are still men. Writers like P. Rothfuss slip up here in trying to create a matriarchical nation state of mercenaries with the Anoine. The thing feels artificial because its contradictions would cause it to evaporate in a real scenario.
I will never understand the tendency to morally evaluate ancient writers by modern pseudo-standards that would have been considered a sign of pathology in those times and I consider any discussion on the subject to be essentially vestigial. I suppose for some it is a welcome diversion from having to try their hand at actual gaming.
There is no more banal assault on beauty than applying political morality to a work of art that has become canonical. By its very nature, these "thoughts" are not about the art-as-art, but about the culture to which it is canon. The parallels between the inability to create evidenced by the deconstructionists, and the creative impotence of evil forces of Tolkien's mythos (as described by noisms above), are left to the reader.
DeleteEvil as a motivation is a curious contemporary blindspot. Yet it is swiftly becoming the only possible motivation. If the promised truth does not appear after the deconstruction, but instead an ugly creative moon-scape of banality, the deconstructionalist should be expected to recoil in horror and repent. But instead you find in him a spiteful solace, a hideous and barely concealed glee. He is comforted by the destruction. The destruction was his real goal all along.
DeleteSo it is with fantasy, so it is with DnD, and so it is with larger things. The urge behind it is the same.
A big topic - you might find this useful: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2023/02/on-good-and-evil-law-and-chaos-limits.html
DeleteI don't think Tolkien ever wondered how his orcs/goblins eat ( or his dwarves for all that matters )… which should be part of an independent existence
ReplyDeleteNow I feel like I ought to go back through the Two Towers to see if that is true...
DeleteI guess that the attempt to create explicitly non-human cultures - attempting to skirt the "they're a lot like us" aspect of fairies etc - is the cause of much of the handwringing (both justified and un-) about race in RPGs - fairies have (I imagine) analogues in all cultures, but as soon as we pretend we are talking about something genuinely *other* we're forced up against the fact that our world does not contain non-human species with humanish levels of cultre. And so we're forced back onto our nearest analogue, which is "people not like us".
ReplyDeleteProbably the most interesting attempts at creating non-human cultures which I've come across are Adrian Tchaikovsky's books. Dunno whether you're familiar with these, but his schtick is basically taking an existing species, sending it into space over some vast evolutionary timescale, and then bringing it back into contact with humanity. I only know the first two books, in which he does this with spiders and cephalapods - I got a little bored with the second (probably my own fault, listening half-attentive on audiobook) but in the first I was completely gripped by how well he manages to make a culture which is intelligent and social but so so very arachnid.
I'm also reminded of the fantasy book which perhaps (to my shame I've still not read it) pushes furthest from what it is to experience the world as a human, while (again I'm postulating) being entirely about experiencing the world as a human: Edwin Abbot's Flatland.
Another thing I'm reminded of in relation to invented languages (and something I've touched on recently in my Substack) is that, while we may think of a fantasy language as something which can be conjured up out of nowhere, we're actually utterly tied to biology and physics. It's no coincidence that the first two letters of so many alpha-bets are the newborn baby's open-throated "A", then the "B" that they produce once they learn to close their lips. Every sound has meaning baked into it.