Languages

Languages are one of the themes of the author's life. This showed throughout his life. To understand him, one must understand this. When he was a boy he played around with languages for fun. Once he grew up and went to university he discovered that he could do new things with this same love. As a consequence he pursued studies that caused him to be a philologist. Perhaps it is worth noting that linguistics was just being born, and so those who would have done this, might have become philologists instead.

This ability shows in a number of ways. This led to JRR Tolkien becoming a professor of philology, of English, of Anglo-Saxon and of "Middle English" first at the University of Leeds and then later the University of Oxford. Another way this showed is that the author played around with creating languages, especially forms of Elven. The...