Philology, the study of comparative and historical linguistics, had a major influence on J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth. He was a professional philologist, and made use of his knowledge of medieval literature and language to create families of Elvish languages and many details of the invented world. 

Among his medieval sources for Middle-earth are Beowulf, his philological study of the Old English word Sigelwara, and his research on an inscription at the temple of Nodens.

His use of his philological understanding of language in the construction of his Middle-earth legendarium was pervasive, beginning with his families of Elvish languages. From there, he created elements of story, including the history and geography of Middle-earth, the names of people and places, and eventually a complete mythology.

Context 

Tolkien was a professional philologist, a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics. He was especially familiar with Old English and related languages. He remarked to the poet and The New York Times book reviewer Harvey Breit that "I am a philologist and all my work is philological"; he explained to his American publisher Houghton Mifflin that this was meant to imply that his work was "all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic [sic] in inspiration. ... The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows."

The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Tolkien "did not keep his knowledge in compartments; his scholarly expertise informs his creative work." She states that he skilfully exploits different characters' language styles to situate them geographically as well as in their specific culture and their psychological makeup, commenting that "One can imagine a seventy-page essay centuries hence on 'Tolkien as a Philologist: The Lord of the Rings".

Medieval sources

Beowulf 

Tolkien was an expert on Old English literature, especially the epic poem Beowulf, and made many uses of it in The Lord of the Rings. For example, Beowulfs list of creatures, , "ettens [giants] and elves and demon-corpses", contributed to his creation of some of the races of beings in Middle-earth, though with so little information about what elves were like, he was forced to combine scraps from all the Old English sources he could find. He derived the Ents from a phrase in another Old English poem, Maxims II, , "skilful work of giants"; The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey suggests that Tolkien took the name of the tower of Orthanc (orþanc) from the same phrase, reinterpreted as "Orthanc, the Ents' fortress". The word occurs again in Beowulf in the phrase , "[a mail-shirt, a] cunning-net sewn, by a smith's skill": Tolkien used searo in its Mercian form *saru for the name of Orthanc's ruler, the wizard Saruman, "cunning man", incorporating the ideas of skill and technology into Saruman's character. He made use of Beowulf, too, along with other Old English sources, for many aspects of the Riders of Rohan: for instance, their land was the Mark, a version of the Mercia where he lived, in Mercian dialect *Marc.

Sigelwara 

Several Middle-earth concepts may have come from the Old English word Sigelwara, used in the Codex Junius to mean "Aethiopian". Tolkien wondered why there was a word with this meaning, given that the Anglo-Saxons had had little or no contact with peoples of Africa. Accordingly, he conjectured that it had once had a different meaning, which he explored in detail in his philological essay "Sigelwara Land", published in two parts in 1932 and 1934. He stated that Sigel meant "both sun and jewel", the former as it was the name of the sun rune *sowilō (ᛋ), the latter from Latin sigillum, a seal. 

He decided that the second element was *hearwa, possibly related to Old English heorð, "hearth", and ultimately to Latin carbo, "soot". He suggested, in what he admitted was a philological conjecture, that this implied "rather the sons of Muspell [a fiery realm in Germanic myth] than of Ham [Biblical Africans]". In other words, he supposed, the Sigelwara named a class of demons "with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks and faces black as soot". Shippey states that this "helped to naturalise the Balrog" (a demon of fire) and contributed to the sun-jewel Silmarils. Further, the Aethiopians suggested to Tolkien the Haradrim, a dark southern race of men.

Nodens 

In 1928, a 4th-century pagan cult temple was excavated at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Tolkien was asked to conduct a philological investigation of a Latin inscription there: "For the god Nodens. Silvianus has lost a ring and has donated one-half [its worth] to Nodens. Among those who are called Senicianus do not allow health until he brings it to the temple of Nodens." An old name for the place was Dwarf's Hill, and in 1932 Tolkien traced Nodens to the Irish hero Nuada Airgetlám, "Nuada of the Silver-Hand".

Shippey thought this "a pivotal influence" on Tolkien's Middle-earth, combining as it did a god-hero, a ring, dwarves, and a silver hand. The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia notes also the "Hobbit-like appearance of [Dwarf's Hill]'s mine-shaft holes", and that Tolkien was extremely interested in the hill's folklore on his stay there, citing Helen Armstrong's comment that the place may have inspired Tolkien's "Celebrimbor and the fallen realms of Moria and Eregion". The Lydney curator Sylvia Jones said that Tolkien was "surely influenced" by the site. The scholar of English literature John M. Bowers notes that the name of the Elven-smith Celebrimbor is the Sindarin for "Silver Hand", and that "Because the place was known locally as Dwarf's Hill and honeycombed with abandoned mines, it naturally suggested itself as background for the Lonely Mountain and the Mines of Moria."

Language

Inventing languages 

Tolkien took a special pleasure, described in his 1931 essay "A Secret Vice", in inventing languages. He invested a large amount of time and energy creating philologically-structured language families, especially the Elvish languages of Quenya and Sindarin, both of which appear in The Lord of the Rings. Their existence motivated his creation of a mythology; the languages needed people to speak them, and they in turn needed history and geography, wars and migrations. Tolkien stated as much in his foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings: "It was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues".

From language to story 

Tolkien devoted enormous effort to place-names, for example making those in The Shire such as Nobottle, Bucklebury, and Tuckborough obviously English in sound and by etymology, whereas the placenames in Bree contain Brittonic (Celtic) language elements. Shippey comments that even though many of these names do not enter the book's plot, they contribute a feeling of reality and depth, giving "Middle-earth that air of solidity and extent both in space and time which its successors [in fantasy literature] so conspicuously lack." Tolkien wrote in one of his letters that his work was "largely an essay in linguistic aesthetic". 

He made use of several European languages, ancient and modern, including Old English for the language of Rohan and Old Norse for the names of dwarves (initially in The Hobbit), and modern English for the Common Speech, creating as the story developed a tricky linguistic puzzle. Among other things, Middle-earth was not modern Europe but that region long ages ago, and the Common Speech was not modern English but Westron. Therefore, the dialogue and names written in modern English were, in the fiction, translations from the Westron, and the language and placenames of Rohan was similarly supposedly translated from Rohirric into Old English; therefore, too, the dwarf-names written in Old Norse must have been translated from Khuzdul into Old Norse. Thus the linguistic geography of Middle-earth grew from Tolkien's purely philological or linguistic explorations.

Language, peoples, and places 

Tolkien had a private theory on the way that the sounds of a language convey a feeling of beauty; he felt pure pleasure in the vocabulary of the Gothic language, and indeed of Welsh. Shippey explains that "He thought that people could feel history in words, could recognise language 'styles', could extract sense (of sorts) from sound alone, could moreover make aesthetic judgements based on phonology." Thus Tolkien has Legolas say, on hearing Aragorn singing The Lament of the Rohirrim in Rohirric (the language of Rohan), which Legolas does not understand: 

Shippey states that Tolkien liked to suppose that there really was such a strong connection between things, people, and language, "especially if the person who spoke the language lived on the thing." He notes that the effect of language appears again and again in The Lord of the Rings, such as when the hobbits hear the Elf Gildor singing and find that the blended sound and melody "seemed to shape itself in their thought"; when everyone at the Council of Elrond quails at the sound of Gandalf's voicing the Black Speech in Rivendell; or when Sam Gamgee responds "I like that!" when the dwarf Gimli sings about the dwarf-King Durin long ago.

True language, true names 

Shippey writes that The Lord of the Rings embodies Tolkien's belief that "the word authenticates the thing", or to look at it another way, that "fantasy is not entirely made up." Tolkien was a professional philologist, with a deep understanding of language and etymology, the origins of words. He found a resonance with the ancient myth of the "true language", "isomorphic with reality": in that language, each word names a thing and each thing has a true name, and using that name gives the speaker power over that thing. This is seen directly in the character Tom Bombadil, who can name anything, and that name then becomes that thing's name ever after; Shippey notes that this happens with the names he gives to the hobbits' ponies.

This belief, Shippey states, animated Tolkien's insistence on what he considered to be the ancient, traditional, and genuine forms of words. A modern English word like loaf, deriving directly from Old English hlāf, has its plural form in 'v', "loaves", whereas a newcomer like "proof", not from Old English, rightly has its plural the new way, "proofs". So, Tolkien reasoned, the proper plurals of "dwarf" and "elf" must be "dwarves" and "elves", not as the dictionary and the printers typesetting The Lord of the Rings would have them, "dwarfs" and elfs". The same went for forms like "dwarvish" and "elvish", strong and old, and avoiding any hint of dainty little "elfin" flower-fairies. Tolkien insisted on the expensive reversion of all such typographical "corrections" at the galley proof stage.

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