Hi Dan and group,

>
>Your speculations sound like a variation on "I like Eastern
>mythology. Good stuff. I like Tolkien. Good stuff. Therefore,
>Tolkien's ideas must be Eastern."

The ideas I proposed have varying degrees of plausibility ranging from the 'very likely' to the 'just for fun'. I'm interested in gauging their relative likelihood. Why not at least actually consider my strongest case:

Have you checked out appendix E of Lord of the rings, in particular the Tengwar (feanorian alphabet)? Look at the structure of the 4x6 array of the main letters, and how the orthography is systematically articulated there. Also look at the explanation on the following pages, and in particular how various points of phonetic articulation came to be associated with certain horizontal rows in various elvish dialects. Compare this then to the 5x5 phonetic array of the Sanskrit consonant system. Tolkien has even borrowed the idea of the 'varga', which in elvish is called 'téma', so the dental series (sanskrit tavarga) is called 'tincotéma' and the gutteral series (sanskrit kavarga) is called 'calmatéma' and so on.

Reading that explanation, I believe there is no way that an early twentieth century Oxford philologist would have devised that system without having been directly and consciously influenced by Sanskrit grammar. The odds against it happening approach some of the more unlikely intermezzos in Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Britain's colonial ties to India, and the centrality of Sanskrit to philology and comparative linguistics make it altogether too likely that Tolkien was familiar with the system. It's so obvious to anyone familiar with Sanskrit that I wouldn't even claim it as a discovery. It's an inside joke that any philologist would immediately grok.

If anything, Tolkien is (playfully) undercutting one of Sanskrit's main claims to fame, by giving it an earlier, western, elvish origin. This knits together his mythology directly with the 'east' by showing how a later development in India (one of India's most well-known linguistic achievements) was a descendent of an elvish (i.e. western) invention. Similarly, later runes could be seen as developments of dwarvish writing. It's part of the play of the work.

This is such a clear cut case of one of 'Tolkien's ideas being eastern' that we really ought to at least give further such correspondences a chance, and not dismiss them offhand.

best regards,

/Rett