A Linguist First

J.R.R. Tolkien was big into studying languages; how they worked, how they were enunciated, and who spoke them. He was considered a master of language to most. He was fluent in Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Icelandic, and Gothic. Throughout his journeys, he also learned a bit of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Welsh. As a man with many languages under his belt, Tolkien was most interested in the one's he knew not much of. Finnish for example, being the main influence for the languages he created such as Quenya, Irish Gaelic for Sindarin and Hebrew for Khuzdul. His love for language, words, and creating languages went on to be the main reasoning for creating Middle-Earth because he claimed he needed people with histories and their own stories to speak the languages he made.