Dorothea Salo
Dorothea Salo (born c.1980), a member of the University of Wisconsin Tolkien and Fantasy Society, was the founder of Elfling, a mailing list of Tolkien-invented languages[1].
Dorothea Salo lives with her husband David Salo, a Tolkien linguist, in Madison, Wisconsin.
[edit] From an interview with Dorothea Salo[2]
Brag about your husband David a little… you blogged about the Oscar possibilities for the Tolkien movie. What did David do on that?
Well, he has an IMDB entry, but it’s wrong. He wasn’t anybody’s assistant.
JRR Tolkien was himself a historical linguist (only they mostly called it “philology” back then). As a hobby, he invented languages out of whole cloth — not just the immediate spoken/written language, either, but the *development* of the languages from earlier forms. Several of these languages are woven into LotR.
When Peter Jackson got the LotR gig going, he knew he had to do the languages right. It mattered to Tolkien a lot, if the copious notes he wrote for LotR translators are any indication. If nothing else, one of the commonest criticisms of the cartoon version is that the names are totally mangled. A film like LotR risks the Wrath of the Geeks at its peril.
It is not easy, however, to find people with the requisite chops in linguistics who have spent enough time on Tolkien’s languages (and it does take time and work — much of the evidence is fragmentary at best, and Tolkien changed his mind about the languages throughout his life, adding yet another layer of complexity to the analysis) to be able to compose new sentences in them. I happen to be married to somebody who can do that better than just about anybody.
Back in 1998 he started putting out feelers, looking for people who could get his name in front of Jackson. It worked. We got back from househunting one day in October dead tired and ready to crash when the phone rang. I picked up, and spoke with this very nice gent with a very odd accent — not American, not Brit, not *quite* Aussie — and then I knew what it had to be and chivvied David out of bed to take the call. It turned out to be then-producer Tim Sanders.
David translated lines into Sindarin and Quenya (the two major Elvish languages Tolkien invented) for them. (Arwen’s spell that brought down the waters of the Bruinen on the Ringwraiths? He wrote that.) He wrote stuff to be sung in the (Oscar-winning) score. He wrote inscriptions for some of the weapons; the most prominent one is on Bilbo and Frodo’s sword Sting (which I bought him a replica of for his birthday). He did odds and ends of calligraphy for the designers, just as examples — they redid it all; David has a hard time doing fine calligraphy because he’s left-handed. Toward the beginning of the movie shooting, I videotaped him saying names and lines so that the dialect coaches (Andrew Jack and Roisin Carty) could get a handle on pronunciation.
One night the phone rang at two in the morning or thereabouts because they were shooting a big battle scene and needed something suitable for the Orcs to yell. I kid you not. I shouldn’t give the impression that the movie people were rude, though; they have been without exception utterly delightful to deal with (and I have taken a lot of calls from them).
[edit] References
- ↑ University of Wisconsin Tolkien and Fantasy Society wep page
- ↑ Interview with the Text Artisan: Dorothea Salo February 10, 2008, on the blog Listics, as of July 2010