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‘A Secret Vice’ is widely considered to be the principal exposition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s art of inventing languages. In this essay, Tolkien charts his first ventures in language creation during childhood and adolescence through to the development of his first ‘artistic’ imaginary languages, which later became the heart of his mythology. It includes samples of these languages in the form of poetry and outlines Tolkien’s theories on the aims and purposes of composing imaginary languages within a fictional setting. The essay also outlines and interrogates important views and theories about the nature of language itself, and delineates Tolkien’s own bold ideas on language as art, as well as language change and language preferences.

This volume makes available for the first time all the drafts of, and attendant notes for, ‘A Secret Vice’ currently deposited in the Bodleian Library as part of their holdings labelled MS Tolkien 24. In Part I of this ‘extended edition’ we present Tolkien’s lecture, ‘A Secret Vice’, delivered in 1931, including new sections not printed before. Part II contains a brief essay by J.R.R. Tolkien on Phonetic Symbolism, which appears here for the first time. Part III presents Tolkien’s hitherto unpublished notes and drafts associated with both essays. The present edition, therefore, contains significant new material by J.R.R. Tolkien and shows that the previously published text of ‘A Secret Vice’ that is printed in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays was the product of an extended series of notes and drafts, including an entire related essay. Published together, the papers provide an expanded view of Tolkien’s thoughts and ideas on language invention and related linguistic notions, especially as they pertain to the relationship between language and art. This additional material also places the essay firmly within the intellectual context of the 1920s and 1930s: the tail-end of the fin de siècle vogue for international auxiliary languages (languages constructed to aid international communication, such as Esperanto); the empirical research and theoretical work of linguists such as Edward Sapir and Otto Jespersen on sound symbolism; and the Modernist experimentation with language. Tolkien’s ‘secret vice’ of devising imaginary languages (languages invented for works of fiction) enriched the long tradition of fictional languages and fantasy literature, while simultaneously offering a considered and studied response to intellectual trends of the time. This extended edition situates ‘A Secret Vice’ within its immediate and larger historical, cultural and intellectual context, and provides extensive notes on both essays and the rest of the new material that is presented here for the first time.

For this expanded edition of ‘A Secret Vice’ we have tried to be faithful to the text while making it as readable as possible, with minimal editorial intrusion. We have adhered to the conventions below:

 Tolkien was not consistent in using single or double quotation marks, and this text reflects his inconsistency

 Words or phrases which defy decipherment are marked as {illeg}

 Words written above other words where neither is cancelled are divided by a slash: /

 Where Tolkien used abbreviations (e.g., ‘Gmc’, ‘&c.’, ‘OE’) we have spelled out the words in full (‘Germanic’, ‘etc.’, ‘Old English’)

 We have regularized some punctuation and (when called for) inserted Tolkien’s marginal notes in the appropriate places in the main body of the text

 Tolkien occasionally wrote abbreviated thoughts instead of full sentences, and while this has sometimes resulted in a syntactical incoherence, we have preferred to let these stand rather than to intrude editorially

 Curly brackets are used to denote editorial material, while square brackets are Tolkien’s own

 A superscript following a word or phrase in Tolkien’s text signals that there is an endnote on this material

Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson have justly named ‘On Fairy-stories’ as Tolkien’s ‘manifesto’ on the art of writing fantasy (TOFS, p. 9). This volume aims to confirm that ‘A Secret Vice’ is an equally indispensable manifesto for the parallel (and – for Tolkien – coeval) art of language invention, deserving of its rightful place in the Tolkien canon. ‘A Secret Vice’ (and Tolkien’s language invention itself) has often been neglected by critics. One of the aims of this edition is to re-open the debate on the importance of linguistic invention in Tolkien’s mythology and the role of fictional languages in imaginative literature in general. At the same time, the wealth of new material by Tolkien uncovered and presented here affords readers the opportunity to truly appreciate the original ideas on language and art postulated by one of the most innovative academic and creative linguistic minds of the twentieth century.

We are grateful to the Tolkien Estate for entrusting us with this project and for permission to use Tolkien’s manuscripts. A special thanks to Cathleen Blackburn of Maier Blackburn for her support. We are indebted to Catherine Parker and Colin Harris at the Bodleian Library for their generous assistance. For access to the Exeter and Pembroke College Archives we thank Penny Baker and Amanda Ingram. Extracts from the minutes of the Johnson Society are reprinted by kind permission of the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Pembroke College, Oxford. Many thanks also to Andrew Honey at the Bodleian and Simon Bailey at the University of Oxford Archives. We are grateful for invaluable help and advice from Douglas Anderson, Mark Atherton, Carmen Casaliggi, Verlyn Flieger, Nelson Goering, Alaric Hall, John Hines, Carl Hostetter, George Kotzoglou, Philip Leube, Carl Phelpstead, John Rateliff, Claire Richards and Patrick Wynne. Our colleagues Kathryn Simpson, Meryl Hopwood, Kate North, and Michelle Deininger were a constant source of support during this project. Thanks also to Chris Smith, editorial director of HarperCollins, for encouragement and advice; and to Charles Noad for his scrupulous editing and eagle eye. For this paperback edition we would also like to thank John Garth, Harm Schelhaas, and Arden R. Smith.

We would also like to express our thanks and gratitude to all the members of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship whose diligent and focused academic editing and analysis of Tolkien’s linguistic papers have given us and all students and scholars of Tolkien’s invented languages an invaluable corpus of work to study and analyse. Many thanks to Christopher Gilson, Patrick Wynne, Bill Welden, Arden R. Smith and Carl F. Hostetter.

Last but not least, we would like to thank our respective husbands, Andrew Davies and David Thompson, for bearing with us during countless late nights and weekends working on this project.

DIMITRA FIMI and ANDREW HIGGINS