• ikiru@lemmy.ml
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        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
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          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
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          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
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        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.

    • JoKi@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Not only the languages but also an etymology for them to explain, how they developed.

    • Sebeck0401@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      Wish he was better at naming characters though. Not every son needs a name that starts with the same letter as his father’s.