I disagree with DP--i did not find
The Silmarillion hard to read--however, it is not likely to appeal to all readers, and would be a boring slog for someone who lacks an interest in Tolkien's world.
The link which Hamburger provided is interesting, with this caveat: a good deal of what is alleged possibly refers to false cognates, which is to say, words which seem similar because they sound similar, but which in fact do not mean the same thing. For example, in French,
long does not mean what long means in English--
le long de la riviere means "the length of the river bank," it does not mean the riverbank is long.
In the article linked by Hamburger, for example, much is made the Quenyan
hala, and the Finnish
kala, meaning small fish. The author then addresses the Quenyan word for the sun, Kalavent, and tries to suggest that it derives from the Finnish
kalavene meaning a fishing boat. As one of the linked articles from these folks points out:
Quote:It is [...] idle to compare chance-similarities between names made from 'Elvish tongues' and words in exterior 'real' languages (citing Tokien's correspondence)
This is what Tolkien wrote in 1967, answering to a complete misinterpretation of 'The Lord of the Rings'. And yet it's obviously not that idle because questions concerning these similarities do not cease to occur today and people are always trying to compare existing words to Elvish forms. In most cases, however, there is no relation at all and if there actually is one, it is usually completely different from what people think of it at the outset.
So, i would say that Finnish could well have been an influence for Tolkien--but that it cannot be established on the basis of establishing cognates. That he was educated in a university system which then taught classic Greek is not to be doubted, so it is entirely possible that Greek was a major influence, although it is not immediately apparent. I think that Finnish could well have been an important influence, as well--but the authors haven't established that Quenya
is Finnish by reference to a series of seeming cognates.
My sense of what i read at Hamburger's link would be that Finnish may well have been an important influence. For that matter, though, so could Anglo-Saxon and the Nordic languages which he studied and in which he specialized as an academic. One problem i have is that the author of that page has fudged some of the facts. He writes:
Quote:Languages had been Tolkien's hobby since childhood, and he had already tried inventing some of his own. With this new source of inspiration, he began to work on a language which was strongly influenced by Finnish. While developing it, he began to feel that the language needed a history, and a world it was spoken in. During World War I, Tolkien decided to connect the language with the mythic stories he had just begun to write. The stories would eventually evolve into The Silmarillion, and the language now became an Elvish tongue called Qenya.
In fact, Tolkien's own account, and the testimony of this son Christopher is that when he was in hospital in 1917, he began to create his language and a mythos at the same time--there is no good evidence to underpin a claim that he had already invented the language, and was inventing a mythos to go with it.
I would suggest that Quenya (but not necessarily Eldarin or any of the other languages) could very likely have been heavily influenced by Finnish. However, the prevelance of given names and place names which derive from Nordic and Germanic sources also suggest a strong influence by Nordic and Germanic languages.
Taken all in all, i think the linked material that Hamburger has provided is compelling, but not conclusive. We can't ever know, of course, the truth of the matter, as Tolkien is no longer with us. But the author is attempting to make much of little, and has a bias toward Finnish. To say that Tolkien borrowed heavily from Finnish (something with which i would not disagree) is not a good basis for saying that Quenya
is Finnish, which is what this author seems to want to say.
