Writing works of fiction always includes the creation of a literary world to make them seem more plausible, more realistic to the reader. Although every kind of story needs some context and a backstory, this specific process of “world-building” is mostly used in fantasy and science fiction literature, where there is the creation of a whole new world in which the story takes place. Especially for fantasy literature, one cannot think about literary world-building without immediately thinking too about J.R.R. Tolkien and his Middle-earth (or Arda, as he called it), one of the most famous fictional worlds ever created – and most successfully.
Tolkien himself addressed world-building as an academic. In his essay “On Fairy Stories”, he argued that “sub-creation” i.e. the invention of an “enchanted world” just follows naturally from human imagination and language. This might not correspond to our initial idea of world-building, which appears to be rather laborious. However, for Tolkien, this was actually the case as his Middle-earth was created rather casually, almost as a by-product of the constructed languages and mythology he invented out of pure interest. Or, as this meme accurately relates: Tolkien, a passionate philologist, just “creates a language, feels like it needs a story and writes a book.”
Where The Hobbit was initially created merely as a story for his children, The Lord of the Rings came into being after his publishers asked Tolkien to write a sequel to his successful first novel. To this work, that made him in the eyes of many the founder of modern fantasy literature, his previous creations were more than essential. One need only think of the different languages of the Elves, such as Quenya and Sindarin, the Dwarves’ speech Khuzdul or the Black Speech, most famously used in the Ring Verse (“One Ring to rule them all…”).
Of course, Middle-earth is so much more than just language. The published versions of The Lord of the Rings include the maps Tolkien devised himself to familiarise the reader with the geography, the languages are of course spoken by the different peoples inhabiting his world, and further works like The Silmarillion expand on the mythology and history of Middle-earth. Nevertheless, language is at the heart of it all, which explains the popularity of creating fictional languages nowadays, thinking of Star Trek or Game of Thrones. For Tolkien, it was “a name [that came] first and then the story follows.”
“A Hobbit lives here” by traceyodea is licensed under CC BY 2.0.