 While working on "Lord of the Rings", Tolkien found himself searching for an explanation of the Eddaic names of the Dwarves of Dale that he had chosen to use in "The Hobbit".Old Norse was a language that did not exist in Middle-earth at the time he was imagining.Tolkien, a philologist, with a special interest in Germanic languages, was driven to pretend that the names and phrases of Old English were translated from Rohirric, the language of Rohan, just as the (modern) English used in The Shire was supposedly translated from Middle-earth's Westron or Common Speech, and the Old Norse of Dale was translated from the secret language of the Dwarves, "Khuzdul".