Tolkien on Gaelic

[Bugbear]

There was also a lot of mythology of that sort being created or imagined by academicians and projected on history around the turn and early half of the twentieth century. It was later overturned, but to put it in vaguely Hegelian terms, it was a bit like a spirit trying to come into being and took on a life of it's own... I'm not an expert in anything, so...

I guess he had a fondness for Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic languages going by the letters in the book; Beowulf, for example. His dislike of the Gaelic language was a little bit of a surprise to me, though.

[Morris at Heathfield]

As they say, "there's no accounting for taste". I see eye to eye with Tolkien on a lot of things, but I was attracted to the sound of Scottish Gaelic when I first became aware of its existence. On the other hand, while I share Tolkien's familiarity with the Spanish language, and readily acknowledge it as an important modern language, I'm not terribly fond of it otherwise, while Tolkien seems to have been quite interested in it. (I won't say that I'm not interested in it, but my interest in it is primarily "historical and philological", due to its descent from Latin, and not aesthetic.) And again, I believe it's a quite common opinion in some places that German is a harsh, ugly, "guttural" language, but I am rather fond of it, as I suppose Tolkien was as well.

I think it's important to note that Tolkien's aesthetic appreciation for various languages was not entirely based on genetic relations. Of course, his focus was the Indo-European languages, and particularly the Germanic languages. But he chose to base his two great Elven languages on a non-Indo-European language, namely Finnish, and a Celtic language, namely Welsh, of which he happened to be quite fond.