• ikiru@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      115
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      From reading his biography, it seemed he mostly liked creating languages and then crafted stories and worlds based off them.

      Tolkien’s the GOAT.

      • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        43
        ·
        1 year ago

        He was a philology teacher, so that’s indeed the case. You see it with how much details the language have, like real languages dialects and evolution. It was really his craft.

      • leftzero@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        34
        ·
        1 year ago

        He only wanted to create languages, for fun… but he wanted to do it properly, so he needed full cultural backgrounds for his languages, including epic poetic sagas written in said languages… and to do that properly he needed a whole history of the world said languages and cultures had developed in… so the maniac built that. And then he wrote a children’s book set in that world, for his kids, as one does.

    • Dojan@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s not impossible! It’s fairly niche and finding others who appreciate it before the age of the internet would’ve been tough.

      Modern Tolkien would’ve probably been part of the various conlang communities, doing challenges and whatnot.