The Mind of the Dark Lord

David Salo — 24 June 2013
	Analytical Articles: These articles provide a detailed overview of the theme they cover. However, they require some prior knowledge of the main works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

ince I had so little direct linguistic information about Black Speech to go on other than what could be gleaned from the Ring-inscription (object suffixes -ul, -ulûk; verbal infinitive (perhaps) ending -at; abstract ending -um in burzum “darkness”, containing the same burz element seen in Lugbúrz “Dark Tower”; postposition -ishi “in”) I had to go on à priori notions of what a language such as Black Speech might be like — I had to get inside the mind of Sauron, and try to figure out what somebody like the Dark Lord of Mordor might put into his language.

As a matter of fact, this is something I had thought about some years before. As an undergraduate in college, I had contributed to a set of ongoing stories, where each participant wrote additional chapters and introduced characters and events as he or she pleased. Into one of these stories I introduced the character (played partly for humor, partly tragically) of a misfit Orc who, sometime after the fall of Mordor, had found himself transported through time and space into a new environment. On introducing this Orc, I thought it would add a touch of realism to let him speak in his own language; so I sketched the outline of what I imagined Black Speech might be like, and wrote a couple of paragraphs in it. I have no idea if any copy of this text survives somewhere in my files. At any rate, I made no direct use of it, except for one small element that I retained in memory, the 1^st person pronoun za — possibly suggested by Avestan azəm.

What I did retain, however, was the overall notion of Black Speech as a complex but consistent language, rich in affixation and inflection, but with a wholly transparent morphology. Indeed, the transparency of the morphology, the lack of any phonetic alterations between morphemes that could obscure the structure, would help explain the prevalence of clashing consonant clusters; morphemes ending in one consonant were jammed up against morphemes beginning in another, with nothing to ease the transition. Sauron, I imagined, was an enormously practical person, who would have made the Black Speech as “perfect” (according to his notions of perfection) as he could make it, with a rigorous consistency and logic, but without making any allowance for æsthetics. It would not eschew borrowings from other languages of Middle-earth, but it would adapt them to its own style. It would in fact have been, as my friend Helge Fauskanger terms it, Sauron’s Esperanto.

Whether I actually managed to capture this vision of Sauron’s mind in my version of Black Speech may be doubted. I largely lack that sort of mental rigor, and when it comes to language I often prefer sloppiness to tight organization. Nonetheless, I think I succeeded in making my version of Black Speech a bit more consistent than most of the other languages of this milieu, though not without its own quirks.

In sharp contrast to the relatively tight organization of Black Speech, the Orkish languages were to be simple, disorganized, and inconsistent, the result of years of rapid and ungoverned evolution. There would be grammar, of course, but also a fair amount of toleration of variation, and a continuous tendency to proliferate new words and abandon old ones. They would show a strong influence from Black Speech, at various stages in their development; but they would fail to adhere by its rules.

For The Lord of the Rings films I intended to come up with three Orkish dialects in addition to Black Speech: one, spoken by the Orcs of Mordor, would be closely based on Black Speech, but spoken in a more casual and clipped manner. The other two, the Orkish of Isengard and the Orkish of Moria, ideally should have been developed as wholly independent languages, touched by Black Speech only through borrowings. Faced with rapidly approaching deadlines, however, I cheated; I made all of them descendants of Black Speech, via a hypothetical Proto-Orkish, with the language of Isengard showing several distinguishing sound changes, and the language of Moria showing an even more advanced set of sound changes, intended to give the Moria-goblins a hissing, sibilant sound. The last was not actually my own idea; I received a message (February 20^th, 2001) from writers Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh, asking for the following characteristics of the Orcs:

Since “harsh and guttural” and “aggression and hatred” were likely to be associated with these languages in any case, I didn’t have to do much with regard to the dialects of Mordor and Isengard other than to render them distinct; but for Moria I had to implement sound-changes (of a somewhat improbable nature) that considerably increased the proportion of fricatives. By way of illustration, I copy a list of words which I wrote out at the beginning of this task. From *lutu- down in the second column, this is actually a rationalization of miscellaneous jottings, not necessarily consistent with the rest of this list or even with themselves; they were probably added later. You can also observe that I was not very consistent with my choice of symbols.

Isengard kūm is doubtless a mistake for kʰūm. There are likely other errors as well.

I did not write down any details of the sound changes, since I presumably made them up as I went along; nonetheless they appear to be fairly regular. Mordor-Orkish loses the final vowels in nouns, and adds an epenthetic vowel in some final consonant clusters. Isengard-Orkish aspirates initial voiceless stops and voices medial ones, while turning medial voiced stops to voiced fricatives (but -d- to -r-), drops preconsonantal r with compensatory lengthening, and has a variety of other assimilations. Moria-Orkish assimilates like Isengard-Orkish, but also turns almost all stops to fricatives.

• Langues :
  • Miðgarðsmál : Unutterable Words
  • Miðgarðsmál : Yrksk Orðabók
  • Miðgarðsmál : A Low Philological Jest