Fonwegian: On the invention of languages

A Secret Vice

I remember that long before I became well acquainted with Middle-earth, I knew only two things about Tolkien. First, that it all began almost accidentally, with a sentence scribbled on the back of one of his student’s exam papers. Second, that his work was, in some essential way, a world built to house a language rather than the other way around.

The Blank Page

The story behind that sentence has been told many times. While marking exam papers at the University of Oxford in the early 1930s, J. R. R. Tolkien came across a blank page in a student's script. On that empty space, almost absent-mindedly, he wrote a line that would later become foundational to modern fantasy.

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

Tolkien himself described the moment as unplanned and inexplicable. In one of his letters, he recalled that the candidate had mercifully left one page blank, and that he wrote the sentence without knowing why.

Somewhere to live

Tolkien did not invent languages to serve stories. He invented stories to give languages somewhere to live.
He was explicit about this. In a 1955 letter, he wrote:

“The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.”

This philosophy underlies all of Middle-earth. Quenya, Sindarin, and the lesser tongues came first.
Geography, history, and narrative followed as scaffolding, necessary but secondary.

It was only much later, during a visit to Oxford in 2017, that I encountered A Secret Vice and began to understand how openly Tolkien reflected on this impulse.
The essay is not about Middle-earth at all. It is about the private pleasure of language invention, a habit Tolkien once considered too personal to defend publicly.

In A Secret Vice, Tolkien speaks about phonetic aesthetics, grammar, and the intimate relationship between language and culture.
He argues that invented languages matter not because they are useful, but because they satisfy a deep human urge.
In the midst of this argument, he inserts a brief and curious example. The language is called Fonwegian. It is said to come from an island named Fonway.
Tolkien mentions it only once, in passing, offering no grammatical system and only a handful of illustrative words.

A Handful of Words

The vocabulary is sparse. Examples such as agroul (field) and nausi (sailor) appear without context or explanation.
They exist to suggest texture rather than structure, evoking antiquity while resisting classification.
Even in their brevity, Tolkien's attention to rhythm and sound reveals how much phonetic shape mattered to him.
The words carry echoes of Greek, perhaps reflecting his classical education or simply his instinct for what an old language should sound like.

What matters most is not the vocabulary itself, but how Tolkien presents it. Fonwegian is framed as if it were discovered rather than invented, as though it were known only through surviving documents.
This rhetorical choice plays with the idea that a fictional language can imitate the feel of real linguistic discovery.
The ambiguity is deliberate. Tolkien wanted to show how languages acquire the weight of history through presentation as much as through grammar.
What matters most is not the vocabulary itself, but how Tolkien presents it.

Editors and scholars have long disagreed about what Tolkien intended. When A Secret Vice was first published posthumously, the Fonwegian material was not included.
The lecture survives in multiple manuscript forms, and it was not initially clear how the Fonwegian passages related to the main text.
Tolkien delivered the lecture in 1931 to the Johnson Society at Oxford, marking the first time he publicly discussed his private practice of language invention.

Some view Fonwegian as an abandoned experiment, an early and minimal conlang set aside in favour of his more elaborate linguistic systems.
Others see it as a rhetorical flourish, a fictional illustration designed to make a point about how languages feel rather than how they function.
The name itself does not resemble Tolkien’s usual linguistic patterns, and its abrupt appearance makes it difficult to place alongside Quenya or Sindarin, with their extensive histories and grammars.

To me it gave even more depth to reading and interpreting the Lord of the Rings and related works and can highly recommend A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages.