The alphabet of Utopia: Thomas More's invented letters

When, in December 1516, the printer Dirk Martens produced the first edition of Utopia in Louvain, the book contained something more than the tale of a perfect island. Among the preliminary pages appeared an invented alphabet, with the letters of the language of the Utopians, and a short poem written in that language, accompanied by a transliteration and a Latin translation. It was a learned joke, but also one of the first printed examples of an imaginary alphabet in a literary fiction.

A book among friends

Utopia is the work of the English humanist and statesman Thomas More, born in London in 1478 and executed in 1535 for opposing Henry VIII. The book, written in Latin, describes an island governed according to reason, recounted by the imaginary traveller Raphael Hythloday. The title itself is a play on Greek words: Utopia can mean no place, but it also recalls the idea of a good place.

More's friends contributed to the preparation of the volume, among them Erasmus of Rotterdam and the Antwerp humanist Pieter Gillis, who also appears as a character in the book. The invention of the alphabet and of the Utopian quatrain is usually attributed to Gillis, although the attribution is not entirely certain. The circle of friends joined in the literary game with letters, verses and notes that strengthened the illusion of a real island.

Twenty-two geometric letters

The Utopian alphabet has twenty-two signs, built from simple geometric shapes: circles, semicircles, squares, triangles and lines. Each sign corresponds to a Latin letter. The effect is that of a rational, orderly script, consistent with the spirit of the island described in the book, where social life too is organised according to clear rules.

The quatrain accompanying the alphabet begins with the words Vtopos ha Boccas peula chama, and is presented as if written by the Utopians themselves. In the Latin translation the island speaks in the first person and relates that it was made so by King Utopus, who had separated it from the mainland. Some Utopian words seem built on Greek and Latin roots, in a linguistic amusement that cultivated readers could appreciate.

A model for imaginary languages

The alphabet of Utopia inaugurated a tradition destined for a long life. In later centuries many authors of imaginary voyages and utopias gave their worlds languages and scripts of their own, to make them more credible and more remote from ordinary experience. One need only think of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, in which words of invented languages attributed to the peoples visited by the protagonist appear.

In later editions of Utopia the alphabet was redrawn several times, with variations in the form of the letters. This detail shows how far printers regarded that page as an integral part of the book, and not a mere ornament. In the Basel edition of 1518, prepared with Erasmus's collaboration and illustrated with woodcuts, the page with the alphabet and the map of the island helped to fix the appearance of Utopia in the European imagination.

Compared with the magical alphabets of the Renaissance, that of Utopia claims neither sacred origins nor special powers. It is a declared invention, born of the humanist taste for play and fiction. Yet it shares with them a fundamental idea: that a new script can open the doors of a world different from the one in which we live.