tolkien letters about middle earth

The Letters of Middle-earthI Thıw Ennorath

i T�iA enoraT

Ostadan

January 4, 2001

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The Runes 2The Futhark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2The Cirth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

3 The Tengwar 5Full Modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Tehta Modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Numerals and Punctuation . . . . . . . . 9Lettering Styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

4 A Final Example 10

5 Computer Resources 11Fonts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

References 12

Answers to the Exercises 13

1 Introduction

In a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden[1], Tolkien wrote,

. . . languages and names are for me inex-tricable from the stories. They are andwere so to speak an attempt to give abackground or a world in which my ex-pressions of linguistic taste could have a

function. The stories were comparativelylate in coming.

As we learned in the companion article, Cent oHedhellem, the history of Tolkien’s languages islong and complex, and the study of Tolkien’s lin-guistic inventions in their entirety — or even ofthe Elvish languages as they existed when TheLord of the Rings set them into a more or less ‘fi-nal’ form — can literally fill a book.

This article will focus on a single aspect ofTolkien’s invention, from a ‘practical’ rather thantheoretical standpoint: the writing systems thatappear in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.As we will see, even this relatively narrow area iscomplex, and a short list of references for furtherresearch by the interested reader appears at theend of this article. The vast majority of the infor-mation here can be deduced from The Lord of theRings, especially Appendix E, but like the Hob-bits, sometimes we like to read articles ‘filled withthings they already knew, set out fair and squarewith no contradictions’.

The writing systems in The Hobbit and TheLord of the Rings fall into two broad classes: theangular runes (k i r � ), which appear prominentlyon Thror’s map in The Hobbit and atop the titlepages of The Lord of the Rings; and the Teng-war (�tgR), the flowing letters that appear on thebottom of the Lord of the Rings title pages andthe illustrations of the Ring inscription and theWest-gate of Moria. Although Tolkien is careful

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to distinguish these two forms of writing, carelesspeople sometimes will use oxymoronic phraseslike ‘Tengwar Rune’ to describe some mysteriousglyph. As often as not, the characters being de-scribed are simply runes; and it is to the runesthat we will first turn our attention.

2 The Runes

The Futhark

In the historical world, the 24-character runic al-phabet (known as the futhark1, an acrostic namebased on the sounds of its first six letters) ap-peared in Northern Europe in the 2nd or 3rd cen-tury. Its origins are debatable; it may be de-rived from the Roman, or Greek, or even Etr-uscan alphabets. Runes were used to make mag-ical inscriptions, to inscribe the owner’s nameupon a weapon or other article, or as an ar-tisan’s signature. For example, a horn datingfrom ca. 400 bears the inscription EKHLEWA-

GASTIX:HOLTIJAX:HORNA:TAWIDO “I, Hlegestof Holt, made the horn”, quite reminiscent of theinscription on the West-gate of Moria. Most com-mon are memorial or funereal inscriptions, suchas might be seen on a tomb.

The futhark spread rapidly throughout the Ger-manic world, and Anglo-Saxon migration broughtit to England, where it was adapted to the soundsof Old English. This form of the runic alphabetremained in use throughout the Anglo-Saxon pe-riod.

In the introduction to The Hobbit, Tolkienwrites:

Runes were old letters originally used forcutting or scratching on wood, stone, ormetal, and so were thin and angular. . . . [the Dwarves’ ] runes are in this bookrepresented by English runes, which areknown now to few people. . . .

I and U are used for J and V. There wasno rune for Q (use CW); nor for Z (the

1or fuiark, with ‘i’ representing the th sound in ‘thin’

dwarf-rune Z may be used if required).It will be found, however, that some sin-gle runes stand for two modern letters:th, ng, ee; other runes of the same kind. . . were also sometimes used.

Table 1 shows the runic alphabet as adapted byTolkien. Everyone will remember the appearanceof these runes in the inscription on Thror’s map:

FIUE-FOT-HIGH-xE-DoR-AND-xROMAY-WALK-ABREAST:

“Five feet high the door and three maywalk abreast.”

Tolkien’s use of the runic alphabet is prettystraightforward, but there is some variation be-tween a strictly letter-for-letter transliteration (asin FIUE (‘five’) in which the silent ‘e’ is preserved)and a more phonetic approach (for example, DoRfor ‘door’ rather than DooR). Also notable in themoon-letters is the use ofHWEN (‘hwen’) for ‘when’,which follows Old English usage.

Exercise 1 (from a letter to Katherine Farrer,1947[2]):

oF-CoURSE-I-WILL-SIGN-YoUR-CoPY-oF-xE-HoBIT:

Exercise 2 How would you inscribe ‘DEATH TOORCS’ on your painting of the (far more forbid-ding) East-gate of Moria, using the runes from TheHobbit?

Just as the ordinary Roman-alphabet lettering onThror’s map, in English, can be considered to bea representation of the ‘real’ Middle-earth letter-ing (presumably Tengwar) in the Common Speech,the Anglo-Saxon runes stand in for ‘authentic’Dwarvish lettering, also in the Common Speech.However, it was not until the publication of TheLord of the Rings that readers received their firstglimpse of these Dwarvish runes, Tolkien’s owncreation.

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A B C D E F G HA B C D E F G HI J K L M N O PI I K L M N o PQ R S T U V W XCW R S T U U W XY Z TH NG EE EA ST EOY Z x Q O a s e

Table 1: Anglo-Saxon Runes from The Hobbit

The Cirth

In The Treason of Isengard, Christopher Tolkienquotes a letter dated 1937 that referred indirectlyto the runes of Middle-earth, and adds,

. . . he was thinking of his own runic al-phabets, already at that time highly de-veloped, and not in any way particularlyassociated with the Dwarves, if associ-ated with them at all. It is conceivable,I think, that it was nonetheless Thror’sMap . . . that brought that close associa-tion into being . . .

In Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, we aretold that runes were first used for inscribing let-ters in stone and wood by the Grey Elves of Bele-riand during the First Age to represent their Sin-darin language. A single carved rune was called acerth, from a root word meaning ‘to cut’2; the plu-ral form is Cirth (Quenya certa, plural certar).

Daeron, loremaster and minstrel of Doriath, re-organized the primitive Cirth into a more sys-tematic arrangement (under the influence of theFeanorean letters that we will see later). His al-phabet, or Certhas Daeron was later extended andsomewhat reorganized by the Elves of Eregion, tobecome the ‘long rune-rows’, or Angerthas. TheDwarves adapted the Angerthas to their own useduring the Second Age (mainly due to the friend-ship of the Dwarves and Elves of Eregion), pro-ducing the form of the alphabet known as the

2compare Calacirya, the ‘light-cleft’ of Valinor

Angerthas Moria. Note the distinction in termi-nology: the Cirth (plural) are the several runes;the Angerthas is the runic alphabet.

The development of these runic alphabets, andthe phonetic values of each of the Cirth in boththe Sindarin and Dwarvish versions, is well sum-marized in Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings. Itis interesting to note that in both the ‘real world’and the world of Middle-earth, the Dwarves in-herited the runes from the Elves for whom theyoriginally were devised. In a late essay[3], Tolkienwrote that by the Third Age, the runes

. . . were forgotten except by the loremas-ters of Elves and Men. Indeed it wasgenerally supposed by the unlearned thatthey had been invented by the Dwarves,and they were widely known as ‘dwarf-letters’.

In fact, Tolkien himself seems to have used therunes very rarely, if at all, to write Sindarin (norits predecessor, Noldorin). In one manuscript(apparently dating from just before the writingof Lord of the Rings[4]), he wrote that “Owingto the ruin of Beleriand, before the departureof the Noldor to Eressea, no actual Elvish in-scription or book in this script was preserved,”perhaps to reflect this fact. However, thereare many published examples of Tolkien’s useof the Angerthas to write English (representing,in some cases, the Common Speech). In Lordof the Rings, the prominent examples are thetitle-page inscription and Balin’s tomb in Mo-

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A B D E F G H Ia b d e f r h i

J K L M N O P Rj k l m N o p n

S T U V W Y Z &S t u v w y � &

TH DH CH SH OO ND NG U

� � � � O � z � �

Table 2: The Angerthas for English

ria: b a l i N S � N o v f u � i N l o n d o v m o n i a — “Balin Son ofFundin Lord of Moria”. Tolkien also made illus-trations of the pages of the Book of Mazarbul thatGandalf reads, but these were unpublished un-til they appeared in Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien[5](now out of print) and J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist andIllustrator[6]. To this we can add other examples,such as a 1948 letter to Hugh Brogan[7].

From these examples and the information in theAppendix, we derive Table 2. Comparing theserunes to the Anglo-Saxon runes, we see that manyof the shapes are the same, but we see that thereare more Cirth — a total of 60 are given in the Ap-pendix, compared to 30 in the Anglo-Saxon runicalphabet. The similarity of shapes is explained asbeing a result of both alphabets being used pri-marily for carving into stone or wood. The Cirthare a bit more systematic in their shapes. In a1963 letter [8], Tolkien wrote that “The signs usedin the cirth are nearly all to be extracted from thebasic pattern, � . . . ” There can be seen a certainamount of phonetic relationship between similarletters, such as p (p) and b (b), or t (t) and d (d).This is, as we will see, a result of the influence ofthe Feanorean Tengwar on Daeron’s organizationof the Cirth.

The ‘values’, or assignments to English lettersand sounds, are basically those of the AngerthasMoria, with some adaptations to English. Notethat Gandalf ’s familiar G-rune (g) belongs to theearlier Elvish angerthas, and was not so usedby the Dwarves of Moria. As with the futhark,Tolkien’s use is not always consistent, being ba-

sically phonetic, with frequent excursions to fol-low English spelling. For example, in the Book ofthe Mazarbul, the word ‘bridge’ is spelled bn i j � ,‘brijU’, with � being used for a silent e, but ‘j’ beingused for the dg sound. In a letter to Hugh Brogan[7], the name ‘Hugh’ is spelled ‘hu � ’ even thoughthe rune � represents an aspirated g sound (whichTolkien normally writes as ‘gh’ as in ghash, theOrkish word for ‘fire’). The symbol for z is some-times used for the plural when it is so pronounced,but we also see the symbol for s in the word ‘rings’(n i z S ) on the title-page inscription. The lessonhere is: if you use these runes to write English,don’t worry too much about the details; spell theway you think it ought to be spelled, without los-ing readability.

Some explanation of certain characters may behelpful. Extensive use is made of the runes �

and � for the th sounds in ‘the’ and ‘thin’, respec-tively (Tolkien indicates the former sound as ‘dh’throughout his writings). The schwa (U) is the un-stressed vowel sound that is so common in spokenEnglish, such as the sound of the letter ‘e’ in ‘spo-ken’. Tolkien uses the symbol � for this sound inwords like ‘the’ (� � ) on the title-page, but as wehave seen, he also uses it for silent e. In one placeon the title page, this is reduced to a simple strokein the word ‘translated’. The doubled ‘o’ rune (O)is used for the double-‘o’ in words like ‘book’; inother contexts it represents a long o as in nameslike Loni. One interesting use is the addition ofthe half-rune c to the rune k to produce kc for theaspirated-K sound in ‘Khazad’ but also for initial

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Figure 1: Detail of Conversa-tion with Smaug, an illustra-tion by J.R.R. Tolkien for TheHobbit. The inscription reads,“Gold Th . . . Thrain. Accurseddie the thief.”

‘Ch’ in the Christmas letter to Hugh Brogan.

Exercise 3 In an early dust-jacket design forThe Fellowship of the Ring [9], Tolkien includedthe inscription, i N - � c - l a � - o v - s a d o v S - � �nc - � c - m o n d o n -

l i � Aside from a couple of unusual uses for some ofthe runic symbols, what is the major error here?

Exercise 4 ‘The Dwarves are Upon You!’ is atranslation of the Khuzdul (i.e., Dwarvish) battle-cry, Khazad Aimenu!. Using A for ‘a’ and E for‘e’, how would you inscribe this name on the boxin which you keep your carefully painted 25mmminiature Dwarf army?

Exercise 5 What does the top half of the Lord ofthe Rings title-page say?

3 The Tengwar

While the runes can be used to convey some ofthe (especially Dwarvish) ‘flavor’ of Tolkien’s work,it is the flowing letters of the other Middle-earthwriting system, the Tengwar, that most peopleparticularly associate with Tolkien’s world. Thetext at the bottom of the Lord of the Rings ti-tle page, the illustration of the Ring inscription,

and the West-gate of Moria — all in different lan-guages and lettering styles — are for many read-ers the strongest and most immediate signs of therichness and depth of Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth. Yet the first published appearance of theTengwar was not in The Lord of the Rings, butin an easily missed part of an illustration in TheHobbit, as seen in Figure 1. As we will see, evenin this fairly early example, the usage of the Teng-war was very similar to the forms later used inThe Lord of the Rings and all the Tengwar writ-ings of Tolkien’s later career.

The earliest letters used by the Elves of Vali-nor were the sarati of Rumil, the Sage of Tirion[10]. Little is known about this alphabet, althoughsome fragments written by Tolkien in 1919 areknown [11]. Feanor devised a completely new, andfar more systematic arrangement of letters whichhe named the Tengwar3. The Tengwar were de-signed to be useful for writing the sounds of dif-ferent languages; for this reason, the table dis-playing the Tengwar in Appendix E of Lord of theRings does not specify particular equivalents forthe symbols; their use — also called their phoneticvalues — when writing Quenya, the language ofthe Noldor of Valinor, is very different from their

3singular tengwa, Sindarin tew (singular), tıw

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enyR duriR araR woriaEnnyn Durin Aran Moriapedo welloR a wino

Pedo mellon a minnoiw Rarvi h�aR eSatIm Narvi hain echant

Celebri�bor o erejioR t�eTat i TiA hiRCelebrimbor o Eregion teithant i thiw hin

Figure 2: The West-Gate of Moria

use in writing Sindarin, the language of the GreyElves of Beleriand. Still other values apply whenthe Tengwar are used to write Westron, the BlackSpeech of Mordor, or English. Complicated as itsounds, it is really not very different from the Ro-man alphabet, in which the letters ‘ll’ are pro-nounced very differently in English, Spanish, andWelsh. The Tengwar Summary Sheet gives theQuenya, Sindarin, and Westron (English) values,including many vowel symbols and diacriticals.

Looking over the first six rows, the astutereader will observe how Feanor arranged theTengwar into phonetic columns. By doubling the‘bow’ portion of a basic letter, ‘voicing’ is added,changing, for example a t to a d. By raising thestem, ‘aspiration’ is added, changing a p to an f.‘Nasal’ consonants are in the rows with no stem.Thus, a whole series of consonant sounds can begenerated from a small number of ‘basic’ sounds.

Besides the varying values for each Tengwa,there are also different modes or methods of po-sitioning the vowels. Depending on the mode,vowels can appear as either separate letters oras accent-like diacritical marks (known by theQuenya term tehtar) that appear over the pre-ceding or following consonant. Tolkien made agreat many examples of Tengwar — in English,Sindarin, Quenya, and even Old English — andused all the different vowel modes. In over toavoid overwhelming the reader, we will touch onlybriefly on Sindarin, Quenya, and the Black Speechinscription on the Ring, and focus on the use of theTengwar to write English, in various ‘modes’.

Full Modes

The simplest ‘mode’ for using the Tengwar is the‘full mode’, in which each vowel is representedby a separate tengwa, rather than by the tehtarthat we will see later. This is exemplified bythe Sindarin inscription on the West-Gate of Mo-ria, reproduced in Figure 2 and identified in thetext as the Mode of Beleriand. Another exam-ple of this mode is seen in the Road Goes EverOn songbook[12] in a transcription of A ElberethGilthoniel, and in Elessar’s letter to Sam in theomitted Epilogue to Lord of the Rings[13].

Because the language is Sindarin, the values inthe lower-right corners on the Tengwar SummarySheet apply. Note that in Sindarin, ch representsthe sound in Bach, ng represents the sound in sing(not finger), and y represents the sound of Frenchu. Long vowels are marked with an ‘acute accent’mark (e.g., w�iriel (mıriel), and a bar over a con-sanant indicates that the consonant is precededby the appropriate ‘nasal’ consonants n or m, as inCelebri�bor (Celebrimbor). Finally, diphthongsare indicated by placing an accent over the vowel:a double-dot for a -y glide (e.g., h�aR (hain)) or atilde for a -w glide in -au (e.g., L�a (lhaw)).

Tolkien often used a related full mode to writeEnglish. It can be seen in Figure 1, and inTolkien’s letter to Hugh Brogan [7]. An extensiveexample appears in the two drafts of Elessar’s let-ter to Sam, and a variant ‘Northern’ mode is foundin Ori’s page of the Book of Mazarbul in Picturesby J.R.R. Tolkien. While the basic consonant usesare pretty much the same throughout these ex-

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amples (using the Westron values in the TengwarSummary Sheet), there were several variations.For example, on Thror’s jar, the symbol u is usedfor o, but in the King’s letter it represents the con-sonant w. In the letter to Hugh Brogan, r is usedfor this w sound, but in the pages of Elvish scriptthat appeared in Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (andthe 1978 Silmarillion Calendar), the symbol � isused in one sample and an inverted version of lis used in another. The Tengwar Summary Sheetreflects the usages in Elessar’s letter. Some notesare in order:

The sound ch represents the English sound inchurch; in Hugh Brogan’s letter, the ch of ‘Christ-mas’ is represented by a k with a vertical markbelow. Tolkien’s dialect of English distinguishestwo r sounds: the ‘strong’ (normal American) r af-ter a consonant or before a vowel is represented byr, while the ‘weak’ sound that sort of disappearswhen an Englishman speaks a word like car isrepresented by R. Again, the sound of th in ‘these’is represented byD, a separate sound from the thin ‘thin’ (T).

The vowels used in this mode are A,e,_i, o, andw for a, e, i, o, and u respectively; a consonant wis represented by u. There is no example in theLetter of consonantal ‘y’; in Hugh Brogan’s letter,� is used for this.

Tolkien used several ‘abbreviated’ forms for En-glish words, notably �, Æ, and Æ for ‘the’, ‘of ’,and ‘of the’ respectively; and also d� for ‘and’,which uses the over-bar (or tilde) diacritical nasal-ization we saw in the Sindarin modes.

Other diacriticals are: a bar below to doublea consonant (as in p_ip�_in, ‘Pippin’); a dot belowfor a silent or unstressed ‘e’ (as in elfston� ,‘Elfstone’); the double-dot for diphthongal y (as in�eGT ‘eighth’); a tilde-like mark for a diphthongalw (as in dA�Gt�R, ‘daughter’); and a final hookor flourish for a final ‘s’ (as in uestlad��, ‘west-lands’).

As with the runes, Tolkien sometimes uses pho-netic spelling (as in iz for ‘is’ in the Hugh Broganletter) but at other times conforms more closely

to standard English spelling (writing ‘his’ as hisin the King’s letter). Most people follow suit, us-ing standard English spellings where this is mostclear or convenient, but using the available Teng-war like D and Tolkien’s English-word abbrevia-tions where appropriate.

Exercise 6 In the letter to Hugh Brogan, hewrote, �i hop� �o� rot f�id� Dem to�kopl�ikat�d. Remembering that in this letter,he uses r for w, what did he say?

Exercise 7 At the end of the Book of Mazarbulis written, in the Common Speech, the final en-try, “They are coming,” using much the same mode.What does it look like?

Exercise 8 The Sindarin word for ‘and’ in theWest-Gate inscription is ‘a’4. As a finishing touchfor your portrait of Elrond’s sons, write “Elladan aElrohir” in the Mode of Beleriand.

Tehta Modes

It seems likely that, to most people, the most fa-miliar Tengwar modes are the ones that use dia-critical or accent-like marks, known as tehtar5. Itis an accented mode that we see in the Ring in-scription (which appears on the cover of some edi-tions of Lord of the Rings), and another such modeon the bottom half of the title page of Lord of theRings and (by Christopher Tolkien’s hand) on thetitle pages of The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales,and all twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth. All Quenya inscriptions using the Tengwaruse tehtar for the vowels, and a considerable por-tion of Tolkien’s English-language calligraphy anddoodling in the Tengwar uses tehta modes.

The basic vowel ‘accents’ are shown on the Teng-war Summary Sheet, placed over a long verticalstroke known as a carrier. Depending on the lan-guage being represented (which, as we have seen,also affects the symbols used for consonants), the

4but is ar in Elessar’s letter, reflecting either an uncorrecteddraft or perhaps an influence from Quenya.

5Singular tehta, Sindarin taith, possible plural *tıth

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Figure 3: “The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode . . . ”

tehta can be placed over the preceding vowel (as inlanguages like Quenya, in which many words endin vowels) or over the following vowel (as in Sin-darin, the Black Speech, and Westron/English).When no consonant is available, a carrier can beused. Thus, the Quenya word malta, meaning‘gold’ (the metal), is written as mlt, with thethree-dot mark for a written over the precedingconsonants; a word beginning with a vowel, likeanga (ij) starts with a ‘short carrier’ to bear thevowel mark. The letters s (s) and z (z or r or ss,depending on the language) could be inverted tofacilitate vowel placement.

In languages like Sindarin and Quenya that dis-tinguish long and short vowels, carriers are of twolengths (basically, an undotted ‘i’ or undotted ‘j’),to denote vowel length. Hence, we see a long car-rier in��r (ore); the ‘o’ and ‘u’ curls, and sometimesthe ‘e’ accent, could also be doubled to signify along vowel. The Road Goes Ever On songbookcontains a fine example of Tolkien’s Tengwar cal-ligraphy, a transcription of Galadriel’s lament offarewell, Namarie, from the chapter Farewell toLorien. The phrase, O�� _n ��n��_t�m �w rmR iL�rn(yeni unotime ve ramar aldaron) gives examplesof all the vowels, both styles of carriers, and in-troduces the use of a double-dotted O� to representy.

The Ring inscription, reproduced in Figure 3,shows a very different tehta mode, this time rep-resenting Black Speech phrase:

Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul,Ash nazg thrakatuluk, agh burzum-ishikrimpatul

Aside from a very different calligraphic style, wesee here that the right-hand curl is used for u andnot o (because the sound o was rare in the Black

Speech), and is doubled for the long u. We alsosee here that in the Black Speech, the vowels areplaced over the following consonant, rather thanthe preceding one as in Quenya. We also see herethe use of the inverted � to make the vowel place-ment easier in n�g (nazg).

Vowels are also placed over the following let-ter when writing Sindarin. The third version ofElessar’s letter to Sam in Sauron Defeated is theonly published example of Sindarin written in atehta mode. This mode differs from the Mode ofBeleriand in several respects; generally the use ofconsonants is the same as the Westron version ofthe letter, with k and not C for k, R represent-ing r instead of n, and so on. We may conjec-ture that Aragorn or his scribe, as men of Gondor,used the letters in the way most familiar to them,rather than as the Elves of Beleriand or Eregionhad. The vowel symbols used here are the sameas in Quenya. As an example, the phrase i-cherdirPerhael (Master Samwise) is written as _K�Rd_Rp�Rhel.

Tolkien often used tehtar for writing English.The most prominent example is on the title-pageof The Lord of the Rings, reproduced in Figure 4.In Appendix E, Tolkien describes this as

. . . what a man of Gondor might have pro-duced, hesitating between the values ofthe letters familiar in his ‘mode’ and thetraditional spelling of English.

The vowels in this example are the same as thosein the Sindarin and Quenya examples seen ear-lier; the symbol w is used for w. Aside from the useof the tehtar for vowels, the semi-phonetic natureof the writing resembles the full-mode English ex-amples seen earlier: the use of abbreviations, thedistinction of the weak and strong r sounds, and so

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Figure 4: Title page inscription from The Lord of the Rings

on. Note the use of the letter z in the word � ‘as’.Also note that an inverted circumflex (ı) seems tobe used to represent the ‘y’ in ‘by’. The bottom halfof the title page reads, phonetically,

V westmar[ch] by jhon Ronald Reueltolkien . heR(e)in iz set for[th] [DH] his-toRi [V+] wor [V+] Ri[ng] (a)[nd] [DH]Return [V+] ki[ng] az seen by [DH]ho[bb]i[ts]

(using ‘R’ to represent the ‘strong r’) In plain En-glish,

of Westmarch by John Ronald ReuelTolkien. Herein is set forth the historyof the War of the Ring and the return ofthe King as seen by the Hobbits.

Another example of a tehta mode for Englishappears in the Hugh Brogan letter, in which theacute accent (�i) is used for i and the dot (_i) isused for e. In the title pages for The Silmarillionand the History of Middle-earth volumes, Christo-pher Tolkien also uses the accent for e and thedot for i; he also adopts a much more fully ortho-graphic mode, in conformance to English spelling,rather than the semi-phonetic usage we see inJ.R.R. Tolkien’s work. For example, the word‘dwarves’ is rendered as dwRv_a (using a for avowel-bearing s) with no silent-e dot below, andusing an s rather than a z or following-s hook.

Once again, the application of Tengwar to En-glish is as much art as science; it is not simply analphabetic cipher. Pick a convention based on theseveral examples available — either a ‘full’ modeor a tehta mode — then adhere to that conventionconsistently.

Exercise 9 In the transcription of Namarie, thereappears the sub-title ilt_r�i�l� ne _n�i l��_r�i �d��.What does this Quenya description say?

Exercise 10 You discover (in the chapter, ‘TheField of Cormallen’) that the Quenya word for‘ring-bearers’ is ‘cormacolindor’. The perfect namefor your new gaming club! How do you embroiderthis name on your club T-shirts?

Exercise 11 In 1960, Tolkien doodled a Tengwartranscription of a newspaper headline on the news-paper. He wrote: nS�n� _lst bk _N fR Y�id_�l . What did the original headline say?

Exercise 12 You decide to put up a banner at agaming convention, announcing ‘Lord of the RingsTournament Today’ in ordinary letters and Teng-war (using tehtar). How does the Tengwar portionlook?

Numerals and Punctuation

No numerals for Cirth nor Tengwar were pub-lished in J.R.R. Tolkien’s lifetime. Three possibleCirth numerals are in the Book of Mazarbul draw-ing that appeared in Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien,but while there are very reliable rumors that acomplete list of Dwarvish numerals exists in un-published form, none have yet been seen.

In 1981, Christopher Tolkien presented J.R.R.Tolkien’s numerals for use with the Tengwar tothe British Tolkien Society; they have been widelycirculated and used among enthusiasts since then.These numerals are shown in the Tengwar Sum-mary Sheet. There are some important notes onusage:

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a. Unlike Arabic numerals, numbers are writtenwith the units digit on the left. So the number123 would be written 321.

b. To help distinguish the numerals from the let-ters, a dot could be written above each digit,or a line drawn above the entire number. Forexample, 32767 could be written as 76723.

c. For lists, series, and the like, the letter Teng-war, numbers 1–24 (see the Tengwar Sum-mary Sheet), could be used, just as we use (a),(b), and so on. In this case, a dot or bar abovecould be used to mark this usage.

d. There are also symbols for 11 and 12 (< and>) for use in a duodecimal system, which wassometimes used by the Elves.

The various long Tengwar samples that haveappeared in print show a variety of punctuation.The transcription of Namarie uses: a single dotfor a comma; a pair of dots (like a colon) for asemicolon; two pairs of dots in a square (.) for aperiod/full stop; a modified vertical stroke ! for anexclamation point, and the symbol ? for a questionmark. On the other hand, the title page ends witha colon-like pair of dots and a tilde-like horizontalstroke, and the West-Gate of Moria uses the colonfor a period.

The various version of the King’s letter to Samshow still other variations, such as two dots fora pause or comma or three dots in a column fora colon; for a period, we see both three dots in atriangle : and four dots in a diamond pattern (*).The different drafts of the King’s letter show somevariations on ( and) to represent parentheses. Fi-nally, the beautifully calligraphed Tengwar tran-scription of ‘Tom Bombadil’ from Pictures uses or-dinary European punctuation marks.

Lettering Styles

The Cirth and Tengwar are used by Middle-earthenthusiasts, as they were by Tolkien himself, forthe purposes of calligraphic decoration, or for com-munication between kindred spirits. There is thus

a certain incentive to make the Tengwar, at least,look as beautiful as possible. Tolkien himself useda variety of styles at different times in differentplaces: the title-page writing looks very differentfrom the Ring inscription; and both look very dif-ferent from the writing on the West-Gate of Mo-ria — even the runes look somewhat different onBalin’s tomb from their appearance on the title-page.

In Elessar’s letter to Sam, the name Perhael(Samwise) is ‘emboldened’ by the use of a thickerpen with angular strokes (rather like Dan Smith’s‘Tengwar Noldor’ font). It is reliably rumored thatstill other Tolkien experiments in lettering styleremain in unpublished form, including a letter-ing style that one informant described as resem-bling ‘an Elvish computer readout’. Other experi-ments in style appear in The Treason of Isengard,in which a cursive style for the Angerthas is pre-sented.

The point of all this is to encourage the creativereader to experiment with the lettering ratherthan simply relying on one particular model orcomputer font for all runic or Tengwar writing.The choice of writing tool — ball-point pen, felt-tip, or calligraphic stylus — and of the exact for-mation of the letters can create a huge variety inthe appearance of the runes or Tengwar.

4 A Final Example

As a final example, we return to our example fromCent o Hedhellem: a refrigerator-door inscriptionreading “Enter, Friends, and Eat Well.” First, per-haps inspired by the fact that the door is in factjust five feet high, we use the Futhark to writethis name in English: consulting Table 1, we con-coct:

ENTER-FRIENDS-AND-EAT-WEL:

Remembering that there are special symbols forthe unstressed e and nd, the same English textusing the Angerthas Moria appears as:

en t � r f r i e � s a � e a t w e l

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We can also use the Tengwar, either in the adaptedMode of Beleriand or a semi-phonetic Westrontehta mode:

eteR fre�d� �d� eat weLor�tR� fr��d� �d� }t w�l�

But the truly ambitious Tolkien fan will not settlefor mere English text. We will no doubt recall thatthe Sindarin translation of this phrase is Minnomellyn a mae mado. We can render this in the‘traditional’ Mode of Beleriand:

wino wellyR a wae wadoor in the tehta mode seen in the King’s Letter:

m_n�i m�l��n � me md�iOnce we have chosen the letters to use, we

would then decide how best to write them. A felt-tip calligraphic pen is an easily obtained tool thatrequires only a little practice to produce satisfy-ing results. For runes, some possible media in-clude wood carving or burning, or ceramic or stoneengraving. But if calligraphic tools and skill fail,there are quite a few resources for computer usersthat can produce fine lettering.

5 Computer Resources

Fonts

Because the Runes, and especially the Tengwar,do not have a straightforward one-to-one mappinginto the Roman alphabet, any computer font willhave a certain amount of eccentricity or unex-pected behavior when using it with some partic-ular piece of software. The Tengwar font for Don-ald Knuth’s TEX system seen throughout this arti-cle uses the ASCII letter d ford, a bit arbitrarilyuses DforD (dh), and quite idiosyncratically usedoctal code 004 (sometimes known as Control-D) for�. Different font authors will have different pref-erences for which glyph to use for r, and so on. Andthe treatment of the tehtar — are they accents?

— will vary widely from font to font and softwareplatform to software platform. Thus, wheneverobtaining a new Tengwar or runic font for yoursystem, it is very important to read any accompa-nying documentation, print out a keyboard map,or do whatever else is needed so that the keysyou type produce the letters on the page that youwould put there if you were doing the calligraphyyourself. To simply assume that you can switchinto your new font and start typing text is a for-mula for disaster (and one that has claimed morethan one unwary victim)!

Incidentally, those who are interested in techiematters may be interested to learn that thereare proposals for the assignment of Unicode codepoints to the Tengwar, so some day there will be aninternational standard for the use of the Tengwaron computers. But not yet.

Here are a few sources for Cirth and Tengwartypefaces that can be found on the World-WideWeb.

� Dan Smith’s Fantasy Fonts for Windows6

contains three Tengwar fonts and a Cirthfont, all of very high quality, as well as a goodfuthark font. However, the keyboard assign-ments for the characters mimic their place-ments on their respective tables, and haveno relationship to their Roman-letter equiv-alents, so be sure to read the accompanyingHelp file. Mr. Smith also provides Tengwarsupport macros for Microsoft Word and othersoftware. This page also has good links toother Tolkien font resources and information.

� For the Macintosh, The Yamada CenterTolkien Fonts7 has an assortment of Tolkienfonts, some quite old. The ‘Tengwar Gandalf ’font is the better Tengwar font, but has thelbackwards! At this stage of the game, Macin-tosh owners might do better to convert Win-dows TrueType fonts through a utility likeFontMonger.

6http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/4948/index.html7http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/fonts/tolkien.html

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� CTAN Font Archive8 The Combined TEXArchive Network; this is one of many mirrors.The subdirectory tengwar contains META-FONT source for the Tengwar font used here;the subdirectory elvish contains an alter-native font by Julian Bradfield. There is acirth font that was, with modfications, usedin this article; Julian Bradfield’s elvish di-rectory has a superior alternative. There isalso a futhark font. TEX users may also beinterested in Ivan Derzhanski’s T ´gTEX macropackage, which greatly facilitates the typeset-ting of text in either of the Tengwar fonts. Anew version of T ´gTEX will soon be available; itincludes a new Tengwar font similar to Com-puter Modern in style.

Some of the general Tolkien linguistics sites haveparticular Tengwar resources that may be of inter-est:

� Mellonath Daeron9 The page for the lan-guage interest group of the Stockholm TolkienSociety. Has a fine Q&A section, and a verycomplete index of all the Tengwar and Cirthwritings by Tolkien that have so far appearedin print.

� Amanye Tencele10 is a page dedicated toTolkien’s writing systems.

References

[1] Tolkien, J. R. R. and Carpenter (Ed.), H., TheLetters of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, letter163, [14], 1981.


[3] Tolkien, J. R. R., “Of Dwarves and Men,” ThePeoples of Middle-Earth, edited by C. Tolkien,

8ftp://ftp.duke.edu/tex-archive/fonts/9http://www.forodrim.org/daeron/md_home.html

10http://user.tninet.se/ xof995c/

The History of Middle-Earth, Houghton Mif-flin Company, 1996.

[4] Tolkien, C., editor, The Treason of Isengard,The History of Middle-Earth, Houghton Mif-flin Company, 1989.

[5] Tolkien, J. R. R. and Tolkien, C., Pictures byJ.R.R. Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin Company,1992, Now out of print.

[6] Hammond, W. G. and Scull, C., JohnRonald Reuel Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator,Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995.



[9] Hammond, W. G. and Scull, C., John RonaldReuel Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, plate176, [6], 1995.

[10] Tolkien, J. R. R., “Quendi and Eldar,” War ofthe Jewels, edited by C. Tolkien, The Historyof Middle-Earth, Houghton Mifflin Company,1994.

[11] Smith, A., “The Turin Prose Fragments: AnAnalysis of a Rumilian Document,” VinyarTengwar, Vol. 1, No. 37, 1995.

[12] Tolkien, J. R. R. and Swann, D., The RoadGoes Ever On: A Song Cycle, Houghton Mif-flin Company, 1967.

[13] Tolkien, C., editor, Sauron Defeated, The His-tory of Middle-Earth, Houghton Mifflin Com-pany, 1992.

[14] Tolkien, J. R. R. and Carpenter (Ed.), H., TheLetters of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, GeorgeAllen & Unwin Ltd., 1981.

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Answers to the Exercises

1 OF COVRSE I WILL SIGN YOUR COPY OFjE HOBIT. (‘Of course I will sign your copy ofThe Hobbit’). Note the use of English-spelling ‘OF’rather than phonetic ‘OV’ here.

2 How about:-DEAx--To--oRKS-

3 It basically reads, ‘In the land of shadows wherethe Mordor lie’, which exchanges the words ‘shad-ows’ and ‘Mordor’. Hey, it was a rough draft.

4 kc a z A d - a i m E N u , using the same symbol for ‘kh’ ason Balin’s tomb.

5 “The Lord of the Rings translated from the RedBook”. The sentence is completed in the Tengwarsection on the bottom half.

6 “I hope you won’t find them too complicated,” re-ferring to his enclosed explanations of the variouswritings.

7 D�e aR� kom�iN ; the actual illustrationshows an initial ‘capitalization’ using � with adoubled vertical bar.

8 elladaR a elrohir . Did you remember touse the Sindarin values instead of the Westron? Itis worth mentioning that the Sindarin version ofthe King’s letter uses R for non-final occurrencesof r rather than the r seen in the inscription onthe West-Gate, perhaps reflecting a late Third Ageusage.

9 Altariello nainie Loriendesse: ‘Galadriel’slament in Lorien’

10 Remembering that there is no c character (usek instead): �CRm�C_l�dR

11 “Nationalist Backing for ‘New Deal’”. The firsta is written ‘inverted’, with two dots above one.The placement of the dot over the following con-sonant in ‘backing’ is inconsistent with the rest ofthe doodle. The word ‘new’ is written with the un-usual ny character, reflecting Tolkien’s pronunci-ation of that word; he started to write the wordwith the expectedn, but did not complete it.

12 I would write l�Rd Æ r�_N t�wRn�m�tt �dO, but there are many other possibilities.

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tolkien letters about middle earth

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