How would you know?

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by PrinceOfTheHalflings

Good question!

The answer is that to fool Tolkien the hoaxer would have needed to have known even more about ancient languages and philology than Tolkien himself did. Not likely, considering the amount of effort required to produce such an elaborate hoax in the first place!

Even assuming that someone with more knowledge than Tolkien existed, and we'd be talking about no more than a handful of people at most, the odds of any of them being able to create such an imaginative work in a made-up language is virtually zero. In my opinion, of course.

Interestingly, there are precedents in factual history. To my knowledge, the most famous one would be the Voynich manuscript - an illuminated codex presumably written in the 15th or 16th century, in an unknown, yet undeciphered script in a yet unidentified language. Philologists and scientists are still debating whether it is a cypher text, an elaborate forgery or the work of a dedicated renaissance conlanger. (For all we know, it could even be the Red Book of another Forgotten Age of Middle-earth!)

This raises another interesting question, if we go with the translator conceit: How was Tolkien the translator able to read and understand the Red Book (which must have been written in Tengwar and probably Adûnaic or some hobbit dialect thereof) without knowing the language and script beforehand? This is, as far as I remember, never explained.

Perhaps he'd had an experience similar to that of Alwin Arundel Lowdham in The Notion Club Papers, who 'discovered' the languages (and part of the history) of Middle-earth in a series of dreams, before he (=Tolkien again) came across his copy of the Red Book. In this case, the book and his foreknowledge would have validated each other. (This would actually reflect quite nicely the real development of the Legendarium - he first invented the Elvish languages and then the history of their speakers.) Imagine his surprise when he found
he could read this unbelievably ancient manuscript in a language known to nobody else! "All these years I've thought I'd probably made it all up, and now this proves it's all true and really happened!"