J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord’s prayer and Hail Mary in Quenya: Syntactical and Etymological Analysis

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J.R.R. Tolkien was a man of faith, and in subtle ways his beliefs and philosophical notions were reflected in his narratives. "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," he noted in 1953, "unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision" (Letters:172). Still there are no direct or explicit references to Christianity or Catholicism in LotR, or for that matter in The Hobbit or The Silmarillion. It has, however, long been known that Tolkien made a Quenya translation of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13). This, of course, does not mean that he planned to insert this prayer into his invented world; the long ages of Middle-earth supposedly far predated the time of Jesus, so this would be historically impossible even within the fictional context. Rather we should see this translation as a confirmation of Tolkien’s statement that to him, it was the invented languages and not the fictional history that was the primary thing: "The invention of languages is the foundation. The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows" (Letters:219).

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