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Tolkien's connection to and development of Finnic languages and myths deserves its own topic.
Here's an article called The Finnicization of Quenya
LinkTHE DISCOVERY OF A FINNISH grammar had a profound impact on Tolkien. He said: “It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an ‘unrecorded’ Germanic language, and my ‘own language’ — or series of invented languages — became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure” (L 163:8). Thus was created Qenya, the Elf-latin1 of the High Elves. Qenya was the name of Tolkien’s Finnish-inspired Elven language from its conception until it was changed to Quenya by the end of the 30s. The change seems to be only ortographical, but there is also a slight change in pronunciation from q marking a double consonant to qu marking a single consonant (see under “Phonology” below). Neither does Finnish allow double consonants word-initially, so this can be seen as an example of continued Finnicization beside the original inspiration.
Here's a paper on Tolkien and the Kalevala, Identifying England's Lönnrot
DL linkTolkien’s fascination with the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, created by nineteenth-century physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot, is well recognized. Anyone who has read his collected letters knows this. In 1914, he wrote the following to his fiancé Edith Bratt: “Had an interesting talk with that quaint man Earp I have told you of and introduced him (to his great delight) to the ‘Kalevala,’ the Finnish ballads. Amongst other work I am trying to turn one of the stories—which is really a very great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between” (Letters 7).
Fifty years later he was still fascinated, as he revealed in a 1964 letter to Christopher Bretherton: “The germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala. It remains a major matter in the legends of the First Age (which I hope to publish as The Silmarillion), though as ‘The Children of Húrin’ it is entirely changed except in the tragic ending” (345).
That fascination went further and deeper than the single story idea of the hapless Kullervo, as I intend to show in this study. The attractiveness of the Kalevala, according to Michael Branch, in A History of Finland’s Literature, “lies in the grandeur and universality of its themes, the coherence of its plots, and the splendor of its poetry” (4), qualities that kept Tolkien engaged with the material for many years of his life.
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