These made-up lingos don’t just add atmosphere and authenticity to Tolkien’s fiction, they’re crucial to the passion that led him to write it in the first place. As he explained in a letter to his son, Christopher, in 1958, “Nobody believes me when I say that my long book [The Lord of the Rings] is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true. An enquirer (among many) asked what the L.R. was all about, and whether it was an allegory. And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen si-‘la lu-‘menn omentielmo [‘A star shines on the hour of our meeting’], and that the phrase long antedated the book”.

Literary devices

Languages are communities; they embody the soul of the culture that spawned them, capturing a people’s history and dreams and none knew this better than Tolkien. In The Lord of the Rings, the Elves are disappearing from Middle-Earth, taking with them High and Common Elvish and thousands of years of Elvish culture.

Few writers have created a language quite as fully realised as Tolkien’s, but plenty have flavoured their fiction with invented tongues. Sometimes it’s to underscore a point. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance, George Orwell introduces Newspeak to show just how totalitarian the state of Oceania is. Newspeak’s vocabulary is purposefully limited, there are no synonyms or antonyms, and nuance is eradicated. All undesirable words have been eliminated, others stripped of unorthodox secondary meanings. Most sinisterly of all, its staccato rhythms and ease of pronunciation are intended to keep thought at bay. ‘Unperson’, ‘crimethink’, ‘bellyfeel’ – such words are crucial to Orwell’s dystopian vision.

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange is written in English and Nadsat, the vernacular favoured by the novel’s teens. As literary devices go, it’s crucial, not only signalling where Alex and his pals fit into the social pecking order, but also blurring our initial understanding of his brutality and distancing it from our own world. Without this, we’d likely be so morally repulsed that we’d abandon the book within chapters. Instead, a kind of rapport develops.