Tolkien started his worldbuilding from languages. Is it the thing that makes his legendarium so special...

Not really. Howard at the very least was doing worldbuilding as we would recognize it before him.

Yeah, pretty much. All fiction, but especially speculative fiction, benefits from a grounding in serious scholarship. Like the ecology of sandworms in Dune is preposterous, but it's written by someone who knows what an ecological study should look like and it makes the invented world that much more convincing.

Howard just used the odd name from the real ancient world to give a sense of reality to the places he invented as he went along. It wasn't anything like what Tolkien did, inventing a world by beginning with its languages and proceeding into myths before working out what the 'present' of his setting would look like.

Nobody does what Tolkien did, it's not an efficient way to write a fantasy story. The only people that come close are the odd RPG writer like Greg Stafford and the guy that did Tékumel.

go to bed, Michael

Well... no.

I realize this isn't at all his doing, but he certainly already characterized countries and shit. Personally I think his approach, while naive and aborted by his death, was why better and livelier.

I mean, this already makes me see those people clearly:

>They came into these countries as Aryans. But there were variations among these primitive Aryans, some of which are still recognized today, others which have long been forgotten. The blond Achaians, Gauls and Britons, for instance, were descendants of pure-blooded Æsir. The Nemedians of Irish legendry were the Nemedian Æsir. The Danes were descendants of pure-blooded Vanir; the Goths — ancestors of the other Scandinavian and Germanic tribes, including the Anglo-Saxons — were descendants of a mixed race whose elements contained Vanir, AEsir and Cimmerian strains. The Gaels, ancestors of the Irish and Highland Scotch, descended from pure-blooded Cimmerian clans. The Cymric tribes of Britain were a mixed Nordic-Cimmerian race which preceded the purely Nordic Britons into the isles, and thus gave rise to a legend of Gaelic priority. The Cimbri who fought Rome were of the same blood, as well as the Gimmerai of the Assyrians and Grecians, and Gomer of the Hebrews. Other clans of the Cimmerians adventured east of the drying inland sea, and a few centuries later mixed with Hyrkanian blood, returned westward as Scythians. The original ancestors of the Gaels gave their name to modern Crimea.

(oddly enough I think Tolkien was way better at designing landscapes, so to speak, than cultures. Lorien is way more a place to me than a specific culture, really different from Rivendell. Kinda strange considering he was a linguist and all)

>Tolkien was way better at designing landscapes, so to speak
I think that makes a lot of sense, actually. Tolkien spent years building the Legendarium as a sort of private project before he even considered writing LotR. I wouldn't be surprised if he took his familiarity with the world for granted.

Tolkien didn't just come up with a fictional backdrop, he essentially created a pocket world with its own languages, cultures, and history, and then wrote Lord of the Rings as a legend that came out of that world after his publisher suggested he write a sequel to The Hobbit.

That wasn't exactly what I meant: the stories are good, it's just that I don't really feel that sindar are that different from silvan elves, etc. Hell, I think it wasn't his goal, but still, I dunno, I have the feeling he could've done it.

(actually, aside from hobbits, I don't really think races are that different from each other in general...)

I think that may be because Middle Earth is smaller in scope. Middle Earth is essentially Europe, because it all grew out of Tolkien's fascination with European legends and mythology. Whereas if you look at the map you posted, it's pretty easy to see where it's just a map of Europe, Africa, and Asia with the proportions stretched and skewed. So Howard's Hyborian writing was something of a fictional take on the different races of the world, while Tolkien's races are more similar to European tribes and nations.