literature] so conspicuously lack." Tolkien wrote in one of his letters that his work was "largely an essay in linguistic aesthetic". He made use of several European languages, ancient and modern, including Old English for the language of Rohan and Old Norse for the names of dwarves (initially in The Hobbit), and modern English for the Common Speech, creating as the story developed a tricky linguistic puzzle. Among other things, Middle-earth was not modern Europe but that region long ages ago, and the Common Speech was not modern English but Westron. Therefore, the dialogue and names written in modern English were, in the fiction, translations from the Westron, and the language and placenames of Rohan was similarly supposedly translated from Rohirric into Old English; therefore, too, the dwarf-names written in Old Norse must have been translated from Khuzdul into Old Norse. Thus the linguistic geography of Middle-earth grew from Tolkien's purely philological or linguistic explorations. Language, peoples, and places In addition, Tolkien invested a large amount of time and energy creating languages, especially the Elvish languages of Quenya and Sindarin, both of which appear, sometimes untranslated, in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien had a private theory on the way that the sounds of a language convey a feeling of beauty; he felt pure pleasure in the vocabulary of the Gothic language, and indeed of Welsh. Shippey explains that "He thought that people could feel history in words, could recognise language 'styles', could extract sense (of sorts) from sound alone, could moreover make aesthetic judgements based on phonology." Thus Tolkien has Legolas say, on hearing Aragorn singing The Lament of the Rohirrim in Rohirric (the language of Rohan), which Legolas does not understand: Shippey states that Tolkien liked to suppose that there really was such a strong connection between things, people, and language, "especially if the person who spoke the language lived on the thing." He notes that the effect of language appears again and again in The Lord of the Rings, such as when the hobbits hear the Elf Gildor singing and find that the blended sound and melody "seemed to shape itself in their thought"; when everyone at the Council of Elrond quails at the sound of Gandalf's voicing the Black Speech in Rivendell; or when Sam Gamgee responds "I like that!" when the dwarf Gimli sings about the dwarf-King Durin long ago. Moralisation from landscape Tolkien describes