The Qenya Lexicon

Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings that it was primarily linguistic in inspiration, begun to provide a background of history for Elvish tongues. The Qenya Lexicon is the plainest evidence for that claim. It is a bound notebook of 172 pages holding a phonology, a dictionary of roughly 3,000 entries and a short history of the language; its editors place its beginning no earlier than the spring of 1915 and find at least half of it finished before the end of 1916. In November 1915 Tolkien wrote Narqelion, a poem of twenty lines in the language. The Fall of Gondolin — which he later called the first real story of this imaginary world — was written during sick-leave at the end of 1916. The word-list came first and the world followed it, which is the reverse of how invented languages usually arise. The Qenya of the notebook is not the Quenya of the published books: Tolkien kept the name and the sound of the language and discarded a great deal of the rest.