Ben Domenech

But if you look at some of the

The really old materials there.

I've been going through the Quenya lexicon a lot recently, which is published in Parma 12.

And this is from 1915, 1916.

Wow.

I mean, this is like the earliest stages of Tolkien's linguistic development in the Quenya language.

And just going back and thinking about what his inspirations were.

Again, you know, Christopher Gilson, as the editor of this stuff, is sort of the authority.

And he's done some, he's written some papers on this, sort of like tracing the early development, tracing the early inspirations and how Tolkien was bringing in influences from, you know, Latin or obviously Gothic.

And, you know, and of course we know Finnish and we know Welsh was a big inspiration for the Noldoran language, which became Sindarin.

That's the stuff that I'm getting really interested in.

It's like, what was Tolkien thinking as he was developing these languages early on?

That's just super fun to me because a bit like Smeagol, I like digging and going and finding the roots of things.

And I think that's what attracted me to philology and doing etymological study in the first place.

I just love the roots of words and the histories of languages.

And with Tolkien...

Going back to his language development, we actually have records of his language development at various stages, which is something we don't get with a real world language.

It's pretty incredible.

Like how he was thinking about this.

And I love that kind of stuff.