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argent —one should first approach it as a “sound only … in a poetic context” before thinking about its meaning. In “English and Welsh,” he writes of the phrase “cellar door” (long celebrated as a striking word combination) that “most English-speaking people … will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful,’ especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky , and far more beautiful than beautiful. ” He then adds that “in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.” Tolkien made similar declarations about Finnish, which he first encountered at Oxford, likening it to a wine cellar filled with bewitching new vintages. As these various cellar images suggest, languages became for Tolkien vaults of beauty and seeds for his fiction. He came to see language in mystical terms, claiming that each of us possesses a “native language” that is not our first tongue but rather our “inherent linguistic predilections,” something deep in the soul, or perhaps the genes. And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to “cellar door”: “Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me—‘cellar door,’ say. From that, I might think of a name, ‘Selador,’ and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.”
    Tolkien’s rapturous romance with words produced numerous offspring: his mythological fiction, of course, but before that, his invented languages. The first hint of things to come appeared in 1904, in an illustrated letter to Father Francis that uses the rebus principle, in which each syllable is indicated by a picture that suggests, without spelling out, its pronunciation (thus a map of France and a hissing snake add up to “Francis”). From now on, Tolkien would never approach words simply as dead lumps of information. At about the same time, he learned Animalic, a rudimentary language invented by his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon, in which the names of birds, fish, and animals replace standard English words. These early tastes of what he later termed his “secret vice” soon led to the invention of Nevbosh (i.e., “New Nonsense”), which he pieced together with Mary, and which included coinages like woc for “cow” and maino for “my.” The vice grew more entrenched at King Edward’s, where in 1907 he concocted Naffarin, a tongue heavily salted with Latin and Spanish and with, possibly, its own rudimentary grammar; it is difficult to assess, as only a snippet remains. A few years later he devised his first private alphabet, a mishmash of English letters, runic slashes, and “monographs” (i.e., ideographs), and inscribed its rules in a sixteen-page notebook written in English and Esperanto entitled “The Book of the Foxrook.” But all this was prelude to the sophisticated language-creation, complete with invented grammar and syntax, of his later Elvish tongues, and to the mythos that grew up alongside it. In a largely autobiographical paper Tolkien wrote in 1931 for the Oxford Esperanto Society (“A Hobby for the Home,” later entitled “A Secret Vice”), he would maintain that the making of a language necessitates the making of a mythology in which that language is spoken, that the two processes are intertwined, each giving rise to the other. People thought Tolkien was joking when he later said that he wrote The Lord of the Rings to bring into being a world that might contain the Elvish greeting, so pleasing to his sense of linguistic beauty, Elen s í la l ú menn’ omentielmo (“A star shines on the hour of our meeting”). The remark is witty—but also deadly serious.
    “Friendship to the Nth Power”
    The grammar of Tolkien’s outer life was evolving as well. He had lost both father and mother and needed, in loco parentis, more than art and wordplay. Father Francis helped to fill the void, counseling and consoling,