TIW: [Letter noting similarity between Tolkien's elven language and Finnish]

[page 8] _EARL E. EVERS_, RA 51 533 159, 269 Sig Co. (Svc) APO NEW York, NY 09041 Funny things happen to me, weird even by fannish standards. Various fans have pointed out the similarity of the Elven tongue to the Finnish language in written and phonic structure, but I paid little attention to this till last Christmas when I bought a typer. Guess what language the instruction manual was written in! Now there are some strange fannish legends about foreign-language instruction manuals coming with typers and dupers, but _Finnish_? [page 9] And the structure of Finnish on the printed page, both word-endings and general appearance, is strikingly similar to Tolkien's "artificial" languages. Now if I only had access to a Finnish-English dictionary to find out if Quenya and its derivitives are some form of Finnish in meaning as well as in structure, I'd be closer to figuring out just what JRRT is getting at with the twenty or so years of his life he's spent on the Ring and Middle Earth. The deeper I go into Tolkien, the more I suspect he's gone the way of Johnathon Swift and Tolkien's own friend C.S. Lewis. Not to mention Richard S. Shaver and Ray Palmer. I mean creating a fantasy so realistic you come to believe in it. Notice how, the whole Middle Earth background turned from pure fairy-tale fantasy in the _Hobbit_ to psi-oriented and fairly believable SF in the _Lord of the Rings_. And if Tolkien, as rumored, completely rewrites LOR, I'll bet he tries to make it even more realistic by eliminating the Ents and the Eagles and a lot of the other pure fantasy devices. I'm surprised how few fans have noticed the similarity between the Ring and the Shaver Mystery. As the Ring stands, it tries to tie in legend witn orthadox @orthodox@ science and Fortean science and produce a "True History of Man on Earth" , exactly as Shaver and Palmer tried to do. And Tolkien has done the more plausable if less comprehensive job of the two. If Elven is indeed Finnish, well, Finnish is the "mystery language" of the European language area. And I faintly recall hearing somewhere that Finnish legend or folk belief includes dark-haired, grey eyed "god-friends" among the original forebears of the Finns. Numenoreans, descended from the Rangers in times after the close of the LOR who migrated north with receding glaciers? Again, I haven't seen much mention of this in fannish conjecture on the actual location of Middle Earth, but there is actually no doubt if you study the Ring closely. Middle Earth was Europe from the latitude of Scotland south to North Africa during the last Ice Age. I've seen a map in a geology book which confirms this quite closely; the British isles were promentaries @promontories@ of the Continent cut by deep firths which later became tne Irish and English Channels, much of the Mediterranean was dry land, and there was even a great river in the position of Anduin. Notice how Tolkien uses legend to explain mysteries of science and vice versa. Most of the "magic" in the LOR sounds like an account of psionic warfare, with the psionically gifted Elves on one side and various telepathic alien BEMs on the other. Quite obvious behind the scenes are glimpses of his basic theory: the Elves, especially the Valar, represent a culture much advanced in the science of "mind over matter", using both native and artificially augmented psionics. Woven into this is a story of culture-control of the various races of men, and close behind, a war between the Elves and the Bad Guys for the right to shape the destinies of men. (In this context it becomes obvious that the Bad Guys won - why else did the Rings held by the Elven lords become visible? The men of the time may not have asked questions when the Elves said they were compelled to flee to the undying lands, but the Ring makes the reason obvious. They threw everything they had against Sauron, the "servant or emmissary @emissary@" and then got the Hell out before Sauron's master arrived.) [page 10] And notice how the Orcs resemble Neanderthal Men, the Hobbits "Little People" etcet @et cetera@. Tolkien develops this resembling quite fully and in a lot of detail so as to tie in a lot of loose ends. Note like-wise his incorporation of names from the various cosmologies of European myth. I'd like to see some debate on the above - it would make for a bit more interesting reading than a big hue and cry over the pitch of the Hobbits' voices or the original tunes for the songs in the Ring. A lot of research could be done on each point I brought up, but an Army library just doesn't include the material so I'll leave it to others if anyone is interested. -/ I am, the San Francisco Public Library does, and I have. I found a book on Finnish grammar, a book on Finnish mythology, a Finnish-English dictionary, and a book on how to learn Finnish. I must admit it does bear a resemblance to Elvish, though there seems to be a higher percentage of diacritical marks used, and I was unable to find any actual Elvish words. I did find a character in Finnish legend named Ilmarinen, however, and I'm looking for a copy of the Edda to read./-