The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien is a selection of J. R. R. Tolkien's letters published in 1981, edited by Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter assisted by Christopher Tolkien. The selection contains 354 letters, dating between October 1914, when Tolkien was an undergraduate at Oxford, and 29 August 1973, four days before his death. The letters can be roughly divided in four categories: The last category is especially of interest to Tolkien fans, as it provides a lot of information about Middle-earth which cannot be found anywhere in the works published by Tolkien
Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien The philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien created a number of constructed languages, including languages devised for fictional settings. Inventing languages (called "glossopoeia" by Tolkien, from Greek γλῶσσα glôssa, "language, tongue" and ποιῶ poiô, "to make" paralleling his idea of "mythopoeia" or myth-making) was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens. An early project of Tolkien was the reconstruction of an unrecorded early Germanic language which might have been spoken by the people of "Beowulf" in the Germanic heroic age. The most-developed project of Tolkien was his Elvish languages. He