Fascinating for Language Nerds
A Secret Vice by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I've heard about this essay, or presentation (it seems to be both) for ages, and had always wanted to read it. And it's finally in book form, accessible to anyone rather than only to those few scholars who can afford trips to the archives where the original copies are held.
However, having read it, I'm ambivalent. It's not really a popular work, although in many ways it's presented as one. Actually, it's two works in one -- the titular presentation, and a second, the "Essay on Phonetic Symbolism" -- both heavily annotated to show the development of them from the earliest drafts. All the strike-throughs and annotations make them heavy reading, even if the subject matter weren't already. In addition, there is a section on the manuscripts themselves, including some additional matter in the folio at the Bodleian, such as diagrams of consonant shifts, some of which have strike-throughs that indicate they were rejected but not discarded.
Quite honestly, the only part that's really of interest to the general public (as opposed to linguists and con-langers -- people who are into constructed languages as a hobby) is the Coda, in which the editors discuss the rise in interest in the systematic creation of functional languages as part of the worldbuilding of modern speculative fiction. Older authors would toss out words for alien species, or the equivalents to a few nouns and verbs in the imagined languages of their fictional peoples -- but only after Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings do we see people like Mark Okrand creating whole languages and fans voraciously seeking out every scrap of information on those languages, even seeking to learn them in order to converse on them.
(One additional note for Goodreads recordkeeping -- in addition to the numbered pages, which are credited as read by Goodreads, there is a Foreword and lengthy Introduction of almost fifty pages enumerated with Roman numerals, that are not counted by Goodreads. Both of them include enough interesting material on Tolkien's languages in the context of his Secondary Worlds that it's completely worth plowing through them, even if you don't get any credit for them).
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