Words of Turkish Origin in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien

Abstract

J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly one of the most widely read epic fiction writers, translated into almost forty world languages. His works describe the entire history of an imaginary world, from the very beginning of its creation until the creation of man, and are imbued with a constant struggle between good and evil. On the opposite sides, there are different races of humanoid creatures, among which are: elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, trolls, etc. They all have elaborate genealogies and cultural characteristics. The extremely rich philological education of the author himself contributed to that. The connections between Tolkien’s work and Nordic myths have been shown in detail in science so far. This is most obvious when choosing mythological symbols and names. The author even created an elven language inspired by the Finnish language, for which he used runic alphabet. However, the names of the places where orcs, goblins, and other servants of evil live, as well as their personal names, were not created after the example of elves. According to their phonetic characteristics, these names are significantly different from elven and human ones. In this paper, attention will be focused on such names, considering that they possess phonetic and semantic characteristics of the Turkish language, especially its older variants, and that they carry certain meanings that still exist in the modern Turkish language.

Keywords

• epic fiction
• tolkien
• elven language
• runes
• orcs
• goblins
• phonetic characteristics
• old turkish