The Everyday Lore Project

3 January 2020 – Elvish

3 January 2020 – Elvish

It’s JRR Tolkien’s 129th birthday today. Despite being a massive nerd about most things, I’ll be honest, I don’t know a lot of about Middle Earth. I did once accidentally startle Samwise Gamgee by blundering into a side room at the London premier of LOTR 3, dance with Bilbo Baggins to The Sweeney theme tune, and sing karaoke with Thorin Oakenshield, but I’m not sure any of those actually count. 

I needed a quick win today due to Other Life, so I decided to learn Elvish, given Tolkien was rather partial about creating this language. This is how little I know about all of this. Elvish turned out to be hard. Complicated. And a little floral. With dialects. Over 15 of them.

I only wanted to write ‘The Everyday Lore Project’, it’s not like I was going to do the whole post in Elvish. So I started with Quenya or High-Elven, using the Tengwar alphabet. I got as far as mapping it out in English, popping vowels above and below their preceding consonants. Next I tried to write some of the actual letters. Then got annoyed and scribbled over it.

So I started again. And got annoyed again. And stopped. And found an online translater. The first one copy and pasted thus:

@ r$6V2ØhE j7NË q7s^zF1

The second one I took a screen shot:

So there you have it. A workaround, or as the Elves might say a gweria-. Or something. I’ll save you the pain of me trying to pronounce it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I seemed to have dropped several names.

Time left on The Everyday Lore Project

And once more in Elvish:


Resources

https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/tengwar.htm

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/03/31/books-bcst-question-tolkien-languages

https://www.wikihow.com/Write-in-Elvish

https://www.tecendil.com

Published by Liza Frank

Author of My Celebrity Boyfriend. Obsessed with hula hooping, sons of preachermen and fresh dates, sometimes all at the same time. Curator of Folklore Agony and The Everyday Lore Project.

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