Elven-Latin and Semitic Adûnaic: Linguistic, Religious, and Political Strife in Tolkien's Island of Númenor

Abstract

Tolkien's island of Númenor is a window on the classical tradition and its depiction of ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Persia, and Carthage. It connects Tolkien with two nineteenth-century trends: the attempt, fashionable among British intellectuals, to search for the ‘Semitic’ roots of their culture, and the negative association, established by hostile European countries, between the British empire and Carthage. Like Carthage, Númenor is a thalassocracy, engaging in the reviled practice of human sacrifice in honour of Melkor (a name strongly reminiscent of the Phoenician god Melkart), and its language, Adûnaic, has a ‘Semitic colouring’. But this language coexists with another, Quenya, described by Tolkien himself as ‘Elven-Latin’, used for ‘ceremony, and for high matters of lore and song’. Those two languages create a symbolic divide that harkens back to something that affected Tolkien personally: the centuries-long strife between Anglican Protestantism and Catholicism in his own country. This creates an interesting parallel with the original fable used by Tolkien as point of departure: Plato's story of the rise and fall of Atlantis, interpreted by modern scholars as a tale of Athens and its gradual slide into what the philosopher believed to be the wrong path.