114 points
From reading his biography, it seemed he mostly liked creating languages and then crafted stories and worlds based off them.
Tolkien’s the GOAT.
43 points
He was a philology teacher, so that’s indeed the case. You see it with how much details the language have, like real languages dialects and evolution. It was really his craft.
15 points
33 points
He only wanted to create languages, for fun… but he wanted to do it properly, so he needed full cultural backgrounds for his languages, including epic poetic sagas written in said languages… and to do that properly he needed a whole history of the world said languages and cultures had developed in… so the maniac built that. And then he wrote a children’s book set in that world, for his kids, as one does.
