Having been studying Welsh for a while, this video about how it informed J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation of Elvish languages for his fiction was fascinating.

The fact that he uses the word Nazgûl [~““35:51] from the Irish (nasc) and Scots Gaelic (nasg) words meaning “ring” to take a linguistic dig at Irish is notable. He was probably motivated by his political views of the time rather than celebrating (as one should) the value and diversity of all languages.

Tolkien once termed Welsh ‘the elder language of the men of Britain’; this talk explores how the sounds and grammar of Welsh captured Tolkien’s imagination and are reflected in Sindarin, one of the two major Elvish languages which he created.

Via https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/medieval-welsh. For those interested on Tolkien, they’ve got a huge list of other scholarly content on his work: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/keywords/tolkien.

📖 Read pages 58-77 of The Celtic Myths by Miranda Aldhouse-Green

📖 Read pages 58-77, Chapter 3: A Plethora of Irish Spirits of The Celtic Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends by Miranda Aldhouse-Green (Thames & Hudson, , ISBN: 978-0500252093)

A synopsis of the Irish gods and stories.

There was an unexpected note on page 66 that indicated that J.R.R. Tolkien may have been fascinated by a cursed ring described on a lead tablet in Lydney and a very similar (the same?) gold ring found at the Roman city of Silchester in Hampshire. The text posits that perhaps the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings were potentially inspired by these archaeological finds from Irish myth.