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A Secret Vice
''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". Content Tolkien's opinion of the relation of mythology and language is reflected in examples cited in Quenya and Noldorin, the predecessors of Quenya and Sindarin. The essay contains three Quenya poems, ''Oilima Markirya'' ("The Last Ark"), ''Nieninque'', and ''Earendel'' as well as an eight-line passage i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dimitra Fimi
Dimitra Fimi (born 2 June 1978) is a Scottish academic and writer and since 2020 the Senior Lecturer in Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research includes that of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and children's fantasy literature. Biography Early life From the island of Salamis in the Greek region of Attica, the daughter of teachers Pavlos Fimis and Theodora Papaliveriou-Fimi, she attended the 1st General Lyceum of Salamis from where she graduated in 1996. Fimi gained her BA degree at the University of Athens in 2000 before completing her MA in Early Celtic Studies (2002) and PhD in English Literature (2005) at Cardiff University. Career From 2009 to 2018 she was among the staff of Cardiff Metropolitan University as a lecturer in English after having previously lectured for Cardiff University and the Open University. In September 2018 she was appointed Lecturer in Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow, the first t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sindarin
Sindarin is one of the fictional languages devised by J. R. R. Tolkien for use in his fantasy stories set in Arda, primarily in Middle-earth. Sindarin is one of the many languages spoken by the Elves. The word is a Quenya word. Called in English "Grey-Elvish" or "Grey-Elven", it was the language of the Grey Elves of Beleriand. These were Elves of the Third Clan who remained behind in Beleriand after the Great Journey. Their language became estranged from that of their kin who sailed over sea. Sindarin derives from an earlier language called Common Telerin, which evolved from Common Eldarin, the tongue of the Eldar before their divisions, e.g., those Elves who decided to follow the Vala Oromë and undertook the Great March to Valinor. Even before that the Eldar Elves spoke the original speech of all Elves, or Primitive Quendian. In the Third Age (the setting of ''The Lord of the Rings''), Sindarin was the language most commonly spoken by most Elves in the Western part of Midd ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Essays By J
An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element (self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner), humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc. Essays are commonly used as literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g., Alexander Pope's ''An Essay on Criticism'' and ''An Essay on Man''). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's ''An Ess ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Routledge
Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and social science. The company publishes approximately 1,800 journals and 5,000 new books each year and their backlist encompasses over 70,000 titles. Routledge is claimed to be the largest global academic publisher within humanities and social sciences. In 1998, Routledge became a subdivision and imprint of its former rival, Taylor & Francis Group (T&F), as a result of a £90-million acquisition deal from Cinven, a venture capital group which had purchased it two years previously for £25 million. Following the merger of Informa and T&F in 2004, Routledge became a publishing unit and major imprint within the Informa "academic publishing" division. Routledge is headquartered in the main T&F office in Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Allen & Unwin
George Allen & Unwin was a British publishing company formed in 1911 when Sir Stanley Unwin purchased a controlling interest in George Allen & Co. It went on to become one of the leading publishers of the twentieth century and to establish an Australian subsidiary in 1976. In 1990, Allen & Unwin was sold to HarperCollins and the Australian branch was the subject of a management buy-out. George Allen & Unwin in the UK George Allen & Sons was established in 1871 by George Allen, with the backing of John Ruskin, becoming George Allen & Co. Ltd. in 1911 and then George Allen & Unwin in 1914 as a result of Stanley Unwin's purchase of a controlling interest. Unwin's son Rayner S. Unwin and nephew Philip helped run the company, which published the works of Bertrand Russell, Arthur Waley, Roald Dahl, Lancelot Hogben, and Thor Heyerdahl. It became well known as J. R. R. Tolkien's publisher, some time after publishing the popular children's fantasy novel ''The Hobbit'' in 1937, and its ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Monsters And The Critics
"''Beowulf'': The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by J. R. R. Tolkien on literary criticism on the Old English language, Old English heroic epic poem ''Beowulf''. It was first published as a paper in the ''Proceedings of the British Academy'', and has since been reprinted in many collections. Tolkien argues that the original poem has almost been lost under the weight of the scholarship on it; that ''Beowulf'' must be seen as a poem, not just as a historical document; and that the quality of its verse and its structure give it a powerful effect. He rebuts suggestions that the poem is an epic or exciting narrative, likening it instead to a strong masonry structure built of blocks that fit together. He points out that the poem's theme is a serious one, mortality, and that the poem is in two parts: the first on Beowulf as a young man, defeating Grendel and his mother; the second on Beowulf in old age, going to his death fighting The dragon (Beowulf), the dragon. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English And Welsh
"English and Welsh" is J. R. R. Tolkien's inaugural O'Donnell Memorial Lecture of 21 October 1955. The lecture sheds light on Tolkien's conceptions of the connections of race, ethnicity, and language. Publication It was first published in ''Angles and Britons'' in 1963 and was republished in ''The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays'' in 1983. Contents Tolkien begins with an overview of the terms "British", "Celtic", " Germanic", "Saxon", "English" and "Welsh", explaining the last term's etymology in ''walha''. Tolkien also addresses the historical language contact between English and Welsh since the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, including Welsh loanwords and substrate influence found in English, and conversely English loanwords in Welsh. Comparing the Germanic ''i''-mutation and the Celtic affection, Tolkien says: In the final part of the lecture Tolkien explores the concept of phonaesthetics, citing "cellar door" as a phrase recognised as sounding beautiful i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Constructed By J
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of methods, including spoken language, spoken, sign language, sign, and written language. Many languages, including the most widely-spoken ones, have writing systems that enable sounds or signs to be recorded for later reactivation. Human language is highly variable between cultures and across time. Human languages have the properties of Productivity (linguistics), productivity and Displacement (linguistics), displacement, and rely on Convention (norm), social convention and learning. Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between and . Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are speech, spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Helge Fauskanger
Helge Kåre Fauskanger (born 17 August 1971) is a Norwegian author and philologist. In Norway he is known as a crime novelist; elsewhere, he is best known as a Tolkien scholar with an interest in Tolkien's constructed languages. Education Fauskanger has studied both philology and religious studies, and has taken courses in classical Hebrew, Greek and Coptic. His main thesis ''The Bible in Norwegian'' (1998) compares selected texts from three widespread Norwegian Bible translations. He describes himself as an agnostic and skeptic. Career Fauskanger's satirical debut novel ''Fullmåne over Uroba'' ("Full Moon over Uroba" 2009) describes an alternative reality where a nation resembling the USA is located in Europe instead. Fauskanger's debut as a crime writer was the crime novel ''Skrinet'' in 2012, published by Baskerville. This is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche where Holmes comes to Norway in 1895, and tracks down the lost reliquary of St. Sunniva. The novel ''Skarlagenssal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sound And Language In Middle-earth
J. R. R. Tolkien was both a philologist and an author of high fantasy. He had a private theory that the sound of words was directly connected to their meaning, and that certain sounds were inherently beautiful. Scholars believe he intentionally chose words and names in his constructed Middle-earth languages to create feelings such as of beauty, longing, and strangeness. Tolkien stated that he wrote his stories to provide a setting for his languages, rather than the other way around. Tolkien constructed languages for the Elves to sound pleasant, and the Black Speech of the evil land of Mordor to sound harsh; poetry suitable for various peoples of his invented world of Middle-earth; and many place-names, chosen to convey the nature of each region. The theory is individual, but it was in the context of literary and artistic movements such as Vorticism, and earlier nonsense verse that stressed language and the sound of words, even when the words were apparently nonsense. Context ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Critical Edition
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons. The objective of the textual critic's work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants. This understanding may lead to t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Monsters And The Critics, And Other Essays
''The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays'' is a collection of J. R. R. Tolkien's scholarly linguistic essays edited by his son Christopher and published posthumously in 1983. All of them were initially delivered as lectures to academics, with the exception of "On Translating ''Beowulf''", which Christopher Tolkien notes in his foreword is not addressed to an academic audience. Essays The essays are: * " ''Beowulf'': the Monsters and the Critics" looks at the critics' understanding of '' Beowulf'', and proposes instead a fresh take on the poem. * " On Translating ''Beowulf''" looks at the difficulties in translating the poem from Old English. * " On Fairy-Stories," the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture at St Andrew's University, is a defence of the fantasy genre. *"A Secret Vice" talks about creating imaginary languages, giving background to Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin. *"''Sir Gawain and the Green Knight''" is a study of the medieval poem of the same name. *"English an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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