Lhammas
linguistic work by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Lhammas (/ˈɬɑ.mɑs/; Noldorin for 'Account of Tongues') is a work of fictional sociolinguistics, written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1937, and published in the 1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings, volume five of The History of Middle-earth series.
Tolkien, a philologist, became fascinated by constructed languages, and invented stories to provide his languages with a suitable world, Middle-earth. This resulted in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. He peopled Middle-earth with Elves and other races, and in the Lhammas presented the theory that all Middle-earth's languages had a shared origin. In the document, he diagrammed the resulting "Tree of Tongues" and described the fictional history of the evolution of some 30 Elvish languages.
Scholars have noted the realism of Tolkien's family of Elvish languages, analogous to the Indo-European family, as well as his changing views of their linguistic history, which he shifted radically soon after creating the Lhammas. The result was that the Noldorin language described in the document and in the contemporaneous The Etymologies, soon became the Sindarin found in The Lord of the Rings, while the new Noldorin became just a dialect of Quenya; Tolkien redrew his "Tree of Tongues" accordingly.
Context
Tolkien's philology
From his schooldays, J. R. R. Tolkien was in his biographer John Garth's words "effusive about philology"; his schoolfriend Rob Gilson called him "quite a great authority on etymology". Tolkien was a professional philologist, a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics. He was especially familiar with Old English and related languages.
“Lhammas” enters the record as linguistic work by J. R. R. Tolkien. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lhammas, linguistic and work can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6538493. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1937 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lhammas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.