elcome to Miðgarðsmál, the language website of David Salo, Tolkien language student and translator/inventor of languages for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films. In this website, you’ll find David’s thoughts and discussions about his work on the films, as well as the new languages he created for The Hobbit.
Miðgarðsmál., n.: the language or speech (mál) of the middle area (Miðgarðr), i.e., the earth viewed as the stable center between the celestial and infernal regions, and in the midst of the encircling seas.
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avid Salo is a student of many languages, including those of J.R.R. Tolkien. He has worked on Tolkien-related gaming materials for the now-defunct Middle-earth Role Playing game, and has done translations and language construction for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. He has also written a book on one of Tolkien’s elvish languages, A Gateway to Sindarin, and has been the owner of the former online mailing list Elfling. Here is why he set up the Miðgarðsmál website:
“I know there are a lot of questions about my linguistic work on Tolkien’s languages, particularly in connection with the movies made by Peter Jackson. Instead of trying to write the same answers to a lot of different people, I thought it would be better to put some of these answers out where they can be publicly viewed. Creating languages to supplement the work of one of the best known language creators in the world is a daunting task. It might have been too daunting if I’d ever thought about it in those terms when I started out. Actually, I kind of got sucked into it gradually.
“When I worked on Quenya and Sindarin translations for The Lord of the Rings, over a decade ago, I had a fair-sized vocabulary to start with, and a general grammatical scheme. I tried to stick as closely as possible to what was known, and though I had to improvise at some points, it was less a question of invention than of extending or elaborating along known lines. To use an artistic metaphor, it was like retouching a mural from which some flakes of paint have fallen — from the existing lines and colors, it’s usually not too hard to guess what went in the gaps, though of course you can never be 100% sure.
“When I was asked to come up with some Dwarvish-language lines and lyrics for The Lord of the Rings, I initially balked. It wasn’t my first experience with constructing Khuzdul — I had invented some names for the Middle-earth Role Playing Game several years earlier — but that had been with the understanding that I was, in a sense, contributing to a new world, related to Tolkien’s but not quite the same. This felt a bit different. I pointed out that the amount of written Khuzdul could fit on a couple of pages (this is still basically true) and that almost nothing was known about its structure. I said that whatever I wrote in it would be largely a new invention, and that I wasn’t going to pass it off as Tolkien’s own work. I got the go-ahead anyway, and plunged in.”