Elvish orthography in practice
May 2024
Introduction
The purpose of this article is to provide a simple reference for reading and writing Eldarin languages found in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. It does not delve into particularities of various orthographies and provides only enough explanation to be able to read all of the published material written in Elvish scripts and write most of the known words. The reader should be able to read the entire Namárië poem, the A Elbereth Gilthoniel hymn and the inscription on the One Ring after carefully reading this article.
Tengwar—the Fëanorian alphabet
In the chapter The Shadow of the Past of The Lord of the Rings we find the following text (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 50).
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Chronologically, this is the first time the reader is exposed to tengwar in such an explicit way (as opposed to the verses adorning the title pages, etc.). “I cannot read the fiery letters,” says Frodo. One can wonder at this point if it was the first time he was exposed to such a script, if he saw it before as those weird symbols the Eldar use, or if he actually recognized the letters, but the orthography did not make much sense for him (much like a person well-versed in a language written using Latin alphabet can have troubles reading another language with diametrally different rules of representing the sounds). “The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here,” says Gandalf. (Fortunately for us, he does utter them later, much to the dismay of the Eldar.) The mode, Gandalf refers to, is basically the way to read these seemingly arcane symbols. The letters are actually, as was mentioned before, tengwar (), sg. tengwa ().
Unfortunately, unless the reader reads some supplementary material, this is the last time the tengwar are to be seen in such an explicit way. We do get the names of locations, various personal names and even words, phrases or entire poems, but they are always rendered in Latin alphabet with the rules on how to read them included in the Appendix E to The Lord of the Rings. Fortunately, it also contains the section explaining how tengwar are written and how they map to various sounds.
The table below is taken directly from Appendix E (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 1119), but each tengwa additionaly contains a label with its full name, i.e., its quantesse () (Tolkien 2015, 50), which are found there as well, but only rendered in Latin alphabet (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 1122–1123).
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An alert reader might notice three things (among others). First of all, the tengwar in the first six rows resemble each other and their positions seem not coincidental the moment we try to find any relations between them. Second of all, most of the quantesser contain their respective tengwar (usually adorned with a diacritic sign). Third of all, if one were to try to match the symbols in the table with the One Ring inscription, it seems there are two symbols which are missing in our table (the author recommends trying to find them by comparing the two).
Parmaquesta
The first mode we are going to look at is parmaquesta (), i.e., a mode for written Quenya (), one of the Eldarin languages. First of all, let us analyze the first five rows of the table from the previous section.
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| /t/ | /p/ | /k/ | /kw/ |
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| /nd/ | /mb/ | /ŋɡ/ | /ŋɡw/ |
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| /s/ | /f/ | /χ/ | /χw/ |
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| /nt/ | /mp/ | /ŋk/ | /ŋkw/ |
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| /n/ | /m/ | /n/ | /nw/ |
A reader versed in phonology might immediately notice the columns are arranged in a dental, labial, velar, labialized velar order while the rows represent either stops (rows 1, 2, 4 and 5) or fricatives (row 3) in a voiceless, voiced prenasalized, voiceless, voiceless prenasalized, nasal order with a few exceptions: originally represented the /θ/ sound while and represented sounds /ŋ/ and /ŋw/ respectively, they apparently did change in the course of history (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 1123). The author recommends trying to read this table row by row and column by column, since the relation between the sounds can actually be heard and even felt.
All of these tengwar are composed using an either short or long (pointing upwards or downwards) telco (), one or two lúvar () and a potential bar closing the character.
An eager reader probably did compare what we just learned with the table containing the quantesser, trying to read some of them. Unfortunately, we still need one important thing: vowels.
The quantesser in our table are written using the ornamental writing style called áratenkele () (Tolkien 2015, 47), a style in which all of the vowels are explicitly marked (other parmaquestarin writing styles are beyond the scope of this article). An alert reader will notice some of the tengwar in the examples we have seen so far are certainly marked with diacritical signs. These signs are called tehtar ().
A question arises: how do we represent the vowels if we do not have a consonant to modify? Fortunately, there is a convention we can use for this purpose, but we will need two more characters.
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A regular short telco can be used as a carrier to carry our vowel in this case. A long telco extending downwards can also be used for this purpose, but it has another interesting property: it prolongs the vowel. Another way to prolong a vowel seems to be duplicating the tehta (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 1122). The two techniques seem to be used interchangeably even in a single text (Swann 1969, 57).
Below we can find all of the vowels.
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| /a/ | /e/ | /i/ | /o/ | /u/ |
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| /aː/ | /eː/ | /iː/ | /oː/ | /uː/ |
A lone long telco can also be used when extended upwards. In this case, it represents a voiceless glottal fricative.
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| /h/ |
The reader should now be able to read some of the quantesser (and should try it).
After this short intermission, let us get back to our table. The next row is a little more complicated.
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| /r/ | /v/ | /w/ |
Three of these four tengwar represent sounds just like all the other tengwar we talked about. Curiously, the third tengwa does not represent a sound by itself. It is used as a carrier in a rather degenerate case: parmaquesta allows us to represent palatalization using a diacritic sign rendered as two dots below the character, but in some cases we do not have a character to mark—this is where comes in. Two example words are shown below (speech and bridge, the second one being also one of the quantesser).
Another diacritic sign we can find underneath a character is a bar, which causes the modified consonant to become long.
The next row, once again, represents only sounds.
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| /r/ | /rd/ | /l/ | /ld/ |
It seems there is another /r/. This tengwa is used only when followed by a vowel; in other cases— is used.
The next row is somewhat interesting.
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| /s/ | /s/ | /sː/ | /sː/ |
It seems we have two pairs of tengwar, both representing distinct sounds. The second tengwa in each pair appears upside-down and there is actually a reason for that: these tengwar are used with tehtar, since the regular forms would not leave us much space to place them.
Finally, the last row.
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| /ç/ | /w/ | /i/ | /u/ |
The first tengwa represents a voiceless palatal fricative, but can also represent a voiceless palatant approximant. The second one resembles the last character of the third row, i.e., the voiceless labialized velar fricative, but it was scarcely used in the Third Age (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 1121). The third and the fourth tengwar are ... vowels. They are used when constructing diphthongs and can be noticed immediately at the beginning of Namárië (Swann 1969, 57).
The rules of tehtar are reversed in this case—the vowel marked with a tehta appears before the one represented by the tengwa.
The Exiles
The mode of Beleriand, i.e., the one used to write the Sindarin language, has really simple rules compared to parmaquesta. It uses a writing style called quantatenkele (), i.e., full-writing, where all of the vowels and consonants are written as individual characters.
The table below shows us the sounds of the tengwar in our original table.
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| /t/ | /p/ | /k/ | |
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| /d/ | /b/ | /ɡ/ | |
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| /θ/ | /f/ | /h/ | |
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| /ð/ | /v/ | ||
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| /nː/ | /mː/ | /ŋː/ | |
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| /n/ | /m/ | /o/ | /w/ |
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| /r/ | /l/ | ||
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| /s/ | /s/ | ||
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| /h/ | /e/ | /u/ |
We need to represent two more sounds which are not in the table. They are rendered as a single lúva and a short telco.
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| /a/ | /i/ |
The reader should have no problems writing down a few familiar words.
The reader should be careful when transcribing ancient Gondolic names, as they retained the earlier orthography where , and represented the sounds /nd/, /mb/ and /ŋg/ respectively (Tolkien 2015, 35).
The orthography of Mordor
The language spoken in Mordor, the Black Speech, has the smallest literary corpus among the languages written using tengwar. This section will focus on the ancient mode Gandalf mentioned.
The first thing we have to do is figuring out what to do about the missing tengwar mentioned before. The Fëanorian system apparently did include these tengwar as aspirated consonants in some truly ancient modes, but it did come out of use in the Third Age (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 1120). If we delve a little deeper, we will learn there were entire two rows of these tengwar and the Eldar even did come up with names for them in case they needed to talk about them (Tolkien 2015, 50).
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Even though there were no sounds to represent with these, they did function as variant forms for other tengwar (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 1120) and we can see this is the case on the One Ring inscription: is used as a variant form of and —of .
If we disregard the variant forms and replace them with traditional forms, we can build the following table of sounds.
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| /t/ | /p/ | /k/ | |
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| /d/ | /b/ | /ɡ/ | |
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| /θ/ | /ʃ/ | ||
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| /ɣ/ | |||
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| /n/ | /m/ | ||
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| /r/ | |||
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| /r/ | /l/ | ||
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| /z/ | /z/ |
When it comes to vowels, we can see the inscription is written using the ornamental áratenkele, so all the vowels are going to be explicitly marked. The major difference from parmaquesta is the fact that tehtar indicate vowels appearing before the consonants. An interesting thing to note is that the right curl represents the /u/ sound instead of /o/, the reason seemingly being that /u/ appears more frequently in Black Speech (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 1121–1122). /i/ and /e/ also appear to be swapped, which did sometimes happen (Tolkien [1968] 2002, 1121), but it is not really possible to tell due to the cursive form of the script used (this article assumes they are).
An example word, ring, is shown below, compared to its Quenya equivalent.
One can notice there is another diacritic in play—a bar above the tengwa. We can see it in the words meaning seeking and binding, rendered below.
If we analyze these examples, looking how different they are than what we already know, it becomes obvious this sign causes the modified consonant to become prenasalized (just like the second and the fourth row in parmaquesta).
The only example we have shows that the long telco is not used to carry a long vowel (at least in this case), the doubled curl being used instead. We can use this knowledge to try to write down another word the reader should be familiar with.
Conclusions
The reader can compare various modes by writing down words with the same ethymological origin and/or meaning as they appear in various languages, e.g., the word orc as it is rendered below.
Hopefully this article will find its way to readers who were as confused as Frodo when they saw the inscription while reading The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, it was written and published after both Shire and Mordor were long gone, so it will probably not be put to any practical use.
References
Swann, Donald. 1969. The Road Goes Ever On. New York: Ballatine Books.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1968) 2002. The Lord of the Rings. Reset edition. London: HarperCollins Publishers. First published 1954–1955 by George Allen & Unwin (London). First published in one volume 1968 by George Allen & Unwin (London). Page numbers are to the 2013 edition.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 2015. The Feanorian Alphabet: Part I. Edited by Christopher Gilson and Arden R. Smith. Mountain View, CA: Elvish Linguistic Fellowship.