Black Speech

The Black Speech is one of the more fragmentary languages in The Lord of the Rings. Unlike Elvish, Tolkien did not write songs or poems in the Black Speech, apart from the One Ring inscription. He stated that:[1]

The Black Speech was not intentionally modelled on any style, but was meant to be self consistent, very different from Elvish, yet organized and expressive, as would be expected of a device of Sauron before his complete corruption. It was evidently an agglutinative language. ... I have tried to play fair linguistically, and it is meant to have a meaning not be a mere casual group of nasty noises, though an accurate transcription would even nowadays only be printable in the higher and artistically more advanced form of literature. According to my taste such things are best left to Orcs, ancient and modern.

From a fan, Tolkien received a goblet with the Ring inscription on it in Black Speech. Because the Black Speech in general is an accursed language, and the Ring inscription in particular is a vile spell, Tolkien never drank out of it, and used it only as an ashtray.[2]

Sauron attempted to impose Black Speech as the official language of the lands he dominated (ultimately, to include all of Middle-earth) and all his servants, but he was only partially successful. The Nazgûl, the Olog-hai (the elite Battle Trolls of Mordor), and several of Sauron's major lieutenants and officers (e.g. the Mouth of Sauron) learned and used the Black Speech, but it never really caught on with the Orcs, or the various groups of Men from the east and south that Sauron conquered. The Orcs tended to corrupt and debase any language they were exposed to, so while Black Speech strongly influenced their vocabulary and perhaps grammar, it soon mutated into the myriad Orkish dialects, which are not mutually intelligible. By the end of the Third Age, while Orc vocabulary was peppered with certain terms from Black Speech, even they generally communicated using Westron, albeit heavily debased. The Elves refuse to utter Black Speech, as it attracts the attention of the Eye of Sauron.

The only example of "pure" Black Speech is the inscription upon the One Ring:

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,

ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

Translated into English:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

These are the last two lines of a verse about the Rings of Power. This corresponds to the following table as explained by Tolkien.[1]

A few Black Speech words are given in Appendix F of The Return of the King. These include Lugbúrz, meaning "Dark Tower" (Barad-dûr), snaga, "slave", and ghâsh, "fire". The name Nazgûl is a combination of "nazg" meaning "ring" and "gûl" meaning "wraith(s)", hence "ringwraith".[3] The only known sample of debased Black Speech/Orkish can be found in The Two Towers, where a "yellow-fanged" Mordor Orc curses the Isengard Uruk Uglúk:

Uglúk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob búbhosh skai!

In The Peoples of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien gives the translation: "Uglúk to the cesspool, sha! the dungfilth; the great Saruman-fool, skai!". However, in a note published in the journal Vinyar Tengwar, it is translated: "Uglúk to the dung-pit with stinking Saruman-filth, pig-guts, gah!”

For The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the linguist David Salo used what little is known of the Black Speech to invent two phrases:[4][5]

Gû kîbum kelkum-ishi, burzum-ishi. Akha gûm-ishi ashi gurum.

("No life in coldness, in darkness. Here in void, only death.")

The word burzum-ishi ('in darkness') is taken from the Ring Verse, and three other abstract nouns are invented with the same ending –um. The word ashi, meaning 'only', is taken from ash ('one') in the Ring Verse. The other words were made up by Salo.[4]

The Russian historian Alexander Nemirovski claimed a strong similarity to Hurrian,[3] which had recently been partially deciphered at the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, E. A. Speiser's Introduction to Hurrian appearing in 1941.[6]

• Fictional languages
• Constructed languages

• Orkish and the Black Speech - base language for base purposes
• Black Speech analysis by Craig Daniel