Re: tolkien?

Well, Tolkien was my major inspiration.

But I also read Bodmer's "The Loom of Language" extensively before I first
read Tolkien, and he talks a lot about auxlangs, and in particular, Dr. L.L.
Zamenhof and his Esperanto.  (Bodmer's one of those perennial Universal
Englishmen of the first part of the Twentieth C.; Bertrand Lord Russell is
another - CND was one of his major efforts, and Lancelot Hogben - author of
"Mathematics for the Million" seems to be the quintessential one.)

(I'm not dissing the Universal Englishmen, not at all - Olaf Stapledon was one
of the greatest of them, and he was a major influence on me, keeping me sane
during a troubled adolescence with "Nebulamaker", "Starmaker" and "First and
Last Men".)

After I got into Tolkien, Bodmer seemed a little dated in many ways and so
forth - my first conlang actually dates to 1982, when I was eighteen and was
trying to learn Latin for the first time and thought that making my own
languages might be fun.

Then I read "Morgoth's Ring" and thought a lot about Tolkien's statements that
the Druedain - Ghan-buri-Ghan and the Wild Men in Druadan Forest - were
somehow related to orcs, each viewing the other as traitors to their essential
selves, and had an idea for a short story one day in 1998, and puzzled long
over Vheratsho's troubling statement, "I am Vheratsho of the Lakhabrech and
the North Vineyards; who else?"

Who were the Lakhabrech?  (The North Vineyards were easy - they are the
vineyards that cover well over one hundred kilometres from West to East in the
north of the city; at least the width of the South Island from Greymouth to
Christchurch.)  And what did it mean?  What did Vheratsho mean?

I had to work all that out, and decided early on that I couldn't allow
Lakhabrech to be pale wolfmen imitations, so they became GE/M-ed human
abductees living in Alpha Centauri; their predatorial antecendants wound up
being the Spotted Hyaena (Crocuta Crocuta as in that famous blues song,
"Crocuta crocuta, where'd you stay, last night? x2 Woke up this morning, sun
was shining bright.)  Which eventually meant that their tribal leaders had to
be the midwives, since the Spotted Hyaena's a matriarchal society.

Wesley Parish

Quoting "<Wilhelm Ulrich Schlaier>" <SMITHV637@...>:

> i was wondering who many of you were in spired by tolkien? thats why i
> started all this in the first place. and if you werent inspired by
> tolkien who or
> what made you start?
>


"I me.  Shape middled me.  I would come out into hot!"
I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the
other horizon.

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