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frostanon t1_ja27wt0 wrote

Reply to comment by Nixon4Prez in TIL Tolkien assisted on the Oxford Dictionary's first edition, focused on 'W' words waggle to warlock. He "learned more in those two years than in any other"; and certain etymologies continued to puzzle him for years, with many pages of notes written later on 'walrus' for a lecture at Leeds by PianoCharged

Yeah he invented a language, but he also knew language can't exist without culture/history/mythology so he started working on that.

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Admetus t1_ja2vzff wrote

He realised that language is so closely related to those things he basically developed his own Norse/Celtic epic to carry his invented language!

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ThePrussianGrippe t1_ja3xddy wrote

And to make up for the fact there wasn’t much in the way of surviving Anglo myths since the saxons introduced themselves on the island.

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E_Snap t1_ja2p3t2 wrote

That dingus went about it all backwards, what was he thinking?

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Wurm42 t1_ja2sk5t wrote

"I need to do something SERIOUSLY escapist if I'm going to stay sane in the trenches of Flanders."

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Card_Zero t1_ja369xt wrote

For a certain value of sane.

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Wurm42 t1_ja3a7t1 wrote

Granted, it took a certain pre-existing level of obsessive nerdiness to set out to create an elvish language from scratch in a bomb shelter.

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