Tengwar

The Tengwar () script is an artificial script, one of several scripts created by J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. Within the context of Tolkien's fictional world, the Tengwar were invented by the Elf Fëanor, and used first to write the Elvish languages Quenya and Telerin. Later a great number of Tolkien's constructed languages were written using the Tengwar, including Sindarin. Tolkien used Tengwar to write English: most of Tolkien's Tengwar samples are actually in English.

External history

Precursors The sarati, a script developed by Tolkien in the late 1910s and described in Parma Eldalamberon 13, anticipates many features of the Tengwar: vowel representation by diacritics (which is found in many Tengwar varieties); different Tengwar shapes; and a few correspondences between sound features and letter shape features (though inconsistent). Even closer to the Tengwar is the Valmaric script, described in Parma Eldalamberon 14, which Tolkien used from about 1922 to 1925. It features many Tengwar shapes, the inherent vowel [a] found in some Tengwar varieties, and the tables in the samples V12 and V13 show an arrangement that is very similar to one of the primary Tengwar in the classical Quenya "mode". In his An Introduction to Elvish, Jim Allan compared the Tengwar with the London merchant Francis Lodwick's 1686 Universal Alphabet, both on grounds of the correspondence between shape features and sound features, and of the actual letter shapes.

Tengwar

The Tengwar script was probably developed in the late 1920s or in the early 1930s. The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, the first published Tengwar sample, dates to 1937. The full explanation of the Tengwar was published in Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings in 1955. The Mellonath Daeron Index of Tengwar Specimina (DTS) lists most of the known samples of Tengwar by Tolkien. There are only a few known samples predating publication of The Lord of the Rings (many of them published posthumously):

The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, published 1937 Middle Page from the Book of Mazarbul Last Page from the Book of Mazarbul, Last Line, this and the above one originally prepared for inclusion in The Lord of the Rings Steinborg Drawing Title Ilbereth's Greeting from The Father Christmas Letters, dating to 1937 The Treebeard Page Edwin Lowdham's Manuscript from The Notion Club Papers has Old English language text written in Tengwar (with a few Adûnaic and Quenya words), dating to 1945/6. The Brogan Tengwa-greetings, appearing in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, No. 118, tentatively dated to 1948 The following samples presumably predate The Lord of the Rings, but were not explicitly dated:

Elvish Script Sample I, II, III, with parts of the English poems Errantry and Bombadil, first published in the Silmarillion Calendar 1978, later in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, So Lúthien, a page of the English Lay of Leithian text

Internal history and terminology Within the context of Tolkien's fictional world, the Tengwar were invented by the Elf Fëanor in Valinor, and used first to write the Elven tongues Quenya and Telerin. According to J. R. R. Tolkien's The War of the Jewels, at the time Fëanor created his script, he introduced a change in terminology. He called a letter, a written representation of a spoken phoneme (tengwë), a tengwa. Previously, any letter or symbol had been called a sarat (from *sar 'incise'). The alphabet of Rúmil of Tirion, on which Fëanor supposedly based his own work, was known as Sarati. It later became known as "Tengwar of Rúmil". The plural of tengwa is tengwar, and this is the name by which Fëanor's writing system became known. Since, however, in commonly used modes, an individual tengwa was equivalent to a consonant, the term tengwa in the fiction became equivalent to "consonant sign", and the vowel signs were known as ómatehtar. By loan-translation, the Tengwar became known as tîw (singular têw) in Sindarin, when they were introduced to Beleriand. The letters of the earlier alphabet native to Sindarin were called cirth (singular certh, probably from *kirte 'cutting', and thus semantically analogous to Quenya sarat). This term was loaned into exilic Quenya as certa, plural certar.

Description

Letters The most notable characteristic of the Tengwar script is that the shapes of the letters correspond to the distinctive features of the sounds they represent. The Quenya consonant system has five places of articulation: labial, dental, palatal, velar, and glottal. The velars distinguish between plain and labialized (that is, articulated with rounded lips, or followed by a [w] sound). Each point of articulation, and the corresponding tengwa series, has a name in the classical Quenya mode. Dental sounds are called tincotéma and are represented with the Tengwar in column I. Labial sounds are called parmatéma, and represented by the column II Tengwar; velar sounds are called calmatéma, represented by column III; and labialized velar sounds are called quessetéma, represented by the Tengwar of column IV. Palatal sounds are called tyelpetéma and have no tengwa series of their own, but are represented by column III letters with an added diacritic for following [j]. Similarly shaped letters reflect not only similar places of articulation, but also similar manners of articulation. In the classical Quenya mode, row 1 represents voiceless stops, row 2 voiced prenasalized stops, row 3 voiceless fricatives, row 4 voiceless prenasalized stops, row 5 nasal stops, and row 6 approximants.

Regularly formed Most letters are constructed by a combination of two basic shapes: a vertical stem (either long or short) and either one or two rounded bows (which may or may not be underscored, and may be on the left or right of the stem). These principal letters are divided into four series (témar) that correspond to the main places of articulation and into six grades (tyeller) that correspond to the main manners of articulation. Both vary among modes. Each series is headed by the basic signs composed of a vertical stem descending below the line, and a single bow. These basic signs represent the voiceless stop consonants for that series. For the classical Quenya mode, they are /t/, /p/, /k/ and /kʷ/, and the series are named tincotéma, parmatéma, calmatéma, and quessetéma, respectively; téma means "series" in Quenya. In rows of the general use, there are the following correspondences between letter shapes and manners of articulation:

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