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The maniac
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Sometimes I think he just liked world-building, and writing stories about his world came second.
From reading his biography, it seemed he mostly liked creating languages and then crafted stories and worlds based off them.
Tolkien's the GOAT.
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.
Philology Professor at Oxford, no less.
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.
He was truly a mad lad
They are called Paracosms. He was writting languages during his teens long before he got to stories.
Middle earth is the first item on the list of examples on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm
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.