I started learning Latin when I was 11, read Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was 14 and started specialising in Linguistics during my unde

Your Stories: Rhiannon Smith – Elvish

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-26 02:00:05

I started learning Latin when I was 11, read Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was 14 and started specialising in Linguistics during my undergrad. It was therefore only a matter of time before I delved into Tolkien’s languages.

That time finally arrived in the middle of covid, when I was furloughed from work and had nothing else to do. I decided to learn Quenya. Quenya is older of the two Elvish languages of Tolkien’s world, and by the time of the Lord of the Rings, it was spoken by the Elves as a second language. Tolkien never published a grammar of Quenya but I learnt from a workbook made by fans, however this only taught Quenya in the transliterated Latin alphabet. (This workbook was made in 2002 and while journals have published new sections of Tolkien’s notes since then, I have not yet managed to get my hands on Parma Eldalamberon 20, The Quenya Alphabet (2018)).

There are two Elvish scripts, Tengwar and Certar. Tengwar is a more flowing script, designed from writing with brush and pen, whereas Certar, otherwise known as runes, was created for inscriptions. I focused on Tengwar, which is the script more easily recognisable to those with a passing knowledge of Lord of the Rings and the script in which the greeting is written at the start of this post.