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The Developers of The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria Created Tolkien’s Secret Dwarven Language
29.08.2023 - 09:51 / ign.com
The developers of The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria took a frankly over-the-top approach with their Fourth Age-set Dwarven-focused survival-crafting game: they created the entire secret Dwarven language just so players can hear their characters use it in-game.
While Tolkien fans have worked to develop the Dwarven language, called Khuzdul, over the years, the developers at Free Range Games went one step further and worked with a linguist to create a full Khuzdul grammar.
That linguist is David Salo, who worked on the languages of Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies, expanding the languages (particularly Sindarin, one of the languages spoken by the Elves) by building on vocabulary already known from published works, and defining some languages that previously had a small published vocabulary.
This collaboration created a full lexicon and a full grammar of Khuzdul, game director Jon-Paul Dumont told IGN in an interview at gamescom 2023. Free Range Games used this to recreate Khuzdul in-game. It means that when you create your dwarf, you can choose to tell it to always speak Khuzdul.
Khuzdul extends to Return to Moria’s eye-catching singing mechanic. Sometimes your dwarf will have ‘inspiration’ and burst into song, a buff that may, for example, lighten the burden of mining. Some songs were written by Tolkien himself. Some are sung completely in the dwarven language.
According to Dumont, the inclusion of the Dwarven language started out as “just a fun idea”, but quickly snowballed. “There are some people on the internet that have built their own versions of the language and we were like, ‘oh, maybe we could use these.’ And then we realised they weren't based as authentically on Tolkien's work as we wanted.
“We went out to find somebody that could help us write it. And in the act of making it, it became more important than just that cool idea at the beginning. So we were like, ‘it’d just be neat if we could say some Dwarven phrases.’
“But as we started to get the first deliveries back from the linguist, and as I started to dig deeper into Tolkien's life, he did what we inadvertently did. He started by building the language and then thinking about, 'who are the people that have this language?' Then every delivery that came back from the linguist became, 'how can we use this?' This word sounds like it could be a creature that maybe doesn't exist anymore. Let's invent that creature and get it into the game.”
Dumont admits his enthusiasm around the recreation of Khuzdul perhaps went a little too far. He theorised that because the dwarves are miners it would be extremely loud in Moria, so they would have developed a sign language to help communicate.
“That became a little too far,” Dumont
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