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Fimi, Dimitra, and Andrew Higgins, eds. A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. London: HarperCollins, 2016. Ixv + 157 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-00-813139-5. $26.84.
On November 29, 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien delivered "A Secret Vice"-his first public exposition for his views on language, language creation, and sound symbolism-to the Johnson Society at Pembroke College, Oxford. Given the great importance of language in Tolkien's creative process, editors Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins hope that their new scholarly edition of Tolkien's lecture will help make that important text, a manifesto on Tolkien's language creation, as "equally indispensable" as "On Fairy-stories" has been for his art of writing (ix). To this end, A Secret Vice: Tolkien and Invented Languages provides a much-needed step forward. If Fimi and Higgins oversell some of their claims about the importance of this new volume, as indeed they seem to do, this nevertheless hardly undermines the solid contributions being made to the field by this volume.
The centerpiece of the book, of course, is "A Secret Vice" itself. Unlike many of Tolkien's other major academic works, "A Secret Vice" does not have the extensive drafts and textual variants that justified the previous scholarly editions done for Tolkien's works. Thus, Fimi and Higgins fill out their edition not only with rigorous and informative endnotes but also, for the first time, the complete and unabridged text of the 1931 lecture. In the original 1983 publication of "A Secret Vice" in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, Christopher Tolkien had decided to silently omit several passages, including one passage-over two pages in length-about Tolkien's invented language of Fonwegian. A natural enough question is why had Christopher Tolkien done so? Fimi and Higgins offer no guess, although Andrew Higgins admits in a different publication that they simply don't know (see Higgins, "Fonway" 1). Considering the omission, publishing the full, complete text in A Secret Vice constitutes a nice improvement. It should be mentioned, though, that the editors inadvertently create some confusion about the Fonwegian issue. Although they note that the Johnson Society minutes of Tolkien's lecture "record the name" of the "omitted" language (xxxiii), the minutes do not actually mention any languages by name. Instead, they mention two languages via description: a language that uses "the...