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45-551: The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows. Tolkien created scripts for his Elvish languages, of which the best known are Sarati , Tengwar , and Cirth . J. R. R. Tolkien began to construct his first Elvin tongue c. 1910–1911 while he was at the King Edward's School, Birmingham and which he later named Quenya (c. 1915). At that time, Tolkien

90-522: A family of several related languages and dialects. In 1937, Tolkien drafted the Lhammas and The Etymologies , both edited and published in the 1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings . They depict a tree of languages analogous to that of the Indo-European languages that Tolkien knew as a philologist. This was internally consistent, but for one thing. Central to the story was the history of

135-470: A "mixture of Hebrew , Greek , and Pitman's shorthand ." Each full character represents a consonant, while vowels are represented with diacritics (called tehtar in the terminology associated with the Tengwar). In Sarati, vowel signs are written to the left if the vowel comes before or to the right if after the consonants in horizontal writing. In vertical writing, vowels are written above and below in

180-600: A "sarat". However, Tolkien sometimes called the writing system "The Tengwar of Rúmil", where the word tengwar means "letters" in Quenya . "Sarati" is the Quenya name for Rúmil's script. Upon marrying and getting a job as an assistant on the Oxford English Dictionary , Tolkien began to keep a diary that was written exclusively using the "alphabet of Rúmil". It has been described as a script that looks like

225-728: A compendious narrative, made long afterwards from sources of great diversity (poems, and annals, and oral tales)". Nagy infers from verse-like fragments of text in The Silmarillion that the poetry of Beleriand used alliteration , rhyme , and rhythm including possibly iambics . This applies to the Ainulindalë , Tolkien's account of the godlike Ainur : and they built lands and Melkor destroyed them ; valleys they delved and Melkor raised them up ; mountains they carved and Melkor threw them down ; seas they hollowed and Melkor spilled them ; It applies, too, to

270-527: A full stop) that are used consistently throughout texts. Tolkien created a system of Rúmilian numerals for Sarati. Doriath (Middle-earth) In J. R. R. Tolkien 's fictional legendarium , Beleriand ( IPA: [bɛˈlɛ.ri.and] ) was a region in northwestern Middle-earth during the First Age . Events in Beleriand are described chiefly in his work The Silmarillion , which tells

315-593: A kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me." He had started his study of the Finnish language to be able to read the Kalevala epic. The ingredients in Quenya are various, but worked out into a self-consistent character not precisely like any language that I know. Finnish, which I came across when I first begun to construct a 'mythology' was a dominant influence , but that has been much reduced [now in late Quenya]. It survives in some features: such as

360-672: A language. With the sundering of the Elves , all the Elvish languages are presumed to be descendants of this common ancestor, including the two languages that Tolkien developed most fully, Quenya and Sindarin, as shown in the tree diagram. Telerin (Silvan) Nandorin Sindarin Noldorin Quenya (later, Exilic Quenya) Vanyarin Quenya Avarin (6+ languages) In detail, Tolkien invented two subfamilies (subgroups) of

405-736: A radical solution: the Noldor adopted the local language, Sindarin, as spoken by the Sindar or Green-Elves, when they settled in Beleriand. That allowed Noldorin to be, more plausibly, a scarcely-altered dialect of Quenya; and it freed up his linguistically-developed material to be rebadged as Sindarin, which would have had a long time to evolve in Middle-earth. This was to some extent an awkward solution, as Sindarin had quite different origins, and should have developed rather differently. Tolkien reshaped his "Tree of Tongues" accordingly. The Etymologies

450-452: A world that would feel authentic, he realized that for that to be possible, he must invent accompanying scripts for his languages. And, being a perfectionist, he acknowledged that a fully-fledged writing system could not have just appeared out of nowhere. Therefore, he set out to create a series of scripts for the elves as well as for the humans and dwarves that would indicate a certain degree of evolution and development. The first script for

495-568: Is Tolkien's etymological dictionary of the Elvish languages, contemporaneous with the Lhammas . It is a list of roots of the Proto-Elvish language, from which he built his many Elvish languages, especially Quenya , Noldorin and Ilkorin. The Etymologies , never meant to be published, does not form a unified whole, but incorporates layer upon layer of changes. In his introduction to The Etymologies , Christopher Tolkien wrote that his father

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540-524: Is no gender. Tolkien with his Quenya pursued a double aesthetic goal: "classical and inflected". This urge, in fact, was the motivation for his creation of a 'mythology'. While the language developed, he needed speakers, history for the speakers and all real dynamics, like war and migration: "It was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues". The Elvish languages underwent countless revisions in grammar, mostly in conjugation and

585-515: The First Age of Middle-earth: Angband is destroyed, and Morgoth is banished to the void. Beleriand's inhabitants flee, and much of Beleriand sinks into the sea. Only a small section of the eastern edge of Beleriand survives, including part of the Ered Luin (Blue Mountain) range and the land of Lindon , which became part of the far northwestern shore of Middle-earth. Beleriand is a region in

630-581: The Osanwe-kenta and the Lhammas or "The 'Account of Tongues' which Pengolodh of Gondolin wrote in later days in Tol-eressëa". Tolkien wrote out most samples of Elvish languages with the Latin alphabet, but within the fiction he imagined many writing systems for his Elves. The best-known are the " Tengwar of Fëanor", but the first system he created, c. 1919, is the "Tengwar of Rúmil", also called

675-658: The Lambengolmor ; in Quenya, lambe means "spoken language" or "verbal communication." Known members of the Lambengolmor were Rúmil, who invented the first Elvish script (the Sarati ), Fëanor who later enhanced and further developed this script into his Tengwar , which later was spread to Middle-earth by the Exiled Noldor and remained in use ever after, and Pengolodh, who is credited with many works, including

720-518: The Noldor . Their language, Noldorin, evolved very slowly in the changeless atmosphere of Valinor . Tolkien had developed its linguistics in some detail. With their return to Beleriand , the language was evidently sharply distinct from Qenya, implying rapid change. As Tolkien worked on The Lord of the Rings , starting soon after The Hobbit was published in 1937, the matter troubled him. He came up with

765-688: The Vanyar and Noldor , cross the Belegaer sea to Valinor . Some of the Noldor return to Beleriand to retrieve the Silmarils from the evil Vala Morgoth , but they are resented by the Teleri. Later, Men arrive from the east. Morgoth gathers an army of Orcs , Balrogs and other monsters in his fortress of Angband beneath the Thangorodrim mountains in the north of Beleriand, and attacks

810-470: The pronominal system . The Elven vocabulary was not subject to sudden or extreme change; except during the first conceptual stage c. 1910–c. 1920. Tolkien sometimes changed the "meaning" of an Elvish word, but he almost never disregarded it once invented, and he kept on refining its meaning, and countlessly forged new synonyms. Moreover, Elven etymology was in a constant flux. Tolkien delighted in inventing new etymons for his Elvish vocabulary. From

855-399: The sarati . In chronological order, Tolkien's scripts are: This section lists the many sources by Tolkien documenting Elvish texts. A small fraction of Tolkien's accounts of Elvish languages was published in his novels and scholarly works during his lifetime. Posthumously: Many of Tolkien's writings on his invented languages have been annotated and published by Carl F. Hostetter in

900-818: The Elves derived in the beginning from the Valar, but they change it even in the learning, and moreover modified and enriched it constantly at all times by their own invention." In his Comparative Tables , Tolkien describes the mechanisms of sound change in the following daughter languages: Qenya, Lindarin (a dialect of Qenya), Telerin, Old Noldorin (or Fëanorian ), Noldorin (or Gondolinian ), Ilkorin (esp. of Doriath ), Danian of Ossiriand, East Danian, Taliska , West Lemberin, North Lemberin, and East Lemberin . In his lifetime J.R.R. Tolkien never ceased to experiment on his constructed languages, and they were subjected to many revisions. They had many grammars with substantial differences between different stages of development. After

945-521: The Elves repeatedly. Despite the threat, Thingol refuses to fight alongside the Noldor. One by one, the realm of Doriath as well as the Noldor kingdoms Nargothrond and Gondolin fall to assaults, assisted by betrayals and disputes among Elves, Men, and Dwarves . Finally, Earendil crosses the Belegaer Sea to ask the Valar to stop Morgoth. They send an army to overcome Morgoth in the War of Wrath . This ends

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990-698: The Elvish languages. "The language of the Quendelie (Elves) was thus very early sundered into the branches Eldarin and Avarin". These further subdivided as follows: A tradition of philological study of Elvish languages exists within the fiction of Tolkien's frame stories : The older stages of Quenya were, and doubtless still are, known to the loremasters of the Eldar. It appears from these notices that besides certain ancient songs and compilations of lore that were orally preserved, there existed also some books and many ancient inscriptions. Elven philologists are called

1035-587: The Rings . Instead, the prose of The Silmarillion hints repeatedly at the style of its "lost" poetry. Nagy notes David Bratman 's description of the book as containing prose styles that he classifies as "the Annalistic, [the] Antique, and the Appendical". The implication of the range of styles is that The Silmarillion is meant to represent, in Christopher Tolkien 's words, "a compilation,

1080-429: The Rings , of which it was/is in fact independent. Tolkien stated that he intentionally designed Sindarin to be in relation to Quenya as medieval Welsh is to Latin. Nelson Goering analysed this claim, finding it broadly reasonable, if the relationships are allowed to be of different kinds. In the early 30s Tolkien decided that the proto-language of the Elves was Valarin , the tongue of the gods or Valar: "The language of

1125-414: The absence of any consonant combinations initially, the absence of the voiced stops b, d, g (except in mb, nd, ng, ld, rd , which are favoured) and the fondness for the ending -inen, -ainen, -oinen , also in some points of grammar, such as the inflexional endings -sse (rest at or in), -nna (movement to, towards), and -llo (movement from); the personal possessives are also expressed by suffixes; there

1170-400: The easternmost part of Beleriand). One of Beleriand's early names was Ingolondë, a play on "England", part of Tolkien's long-held but ultimately unsuccessful aim to create what Shippey calls "a mighty patron for his country, a foundation-myth more far-reaching than Hengest and Horsa , one to which he could graft his own stories." Tolkien's aim had been to root his mythology for England in

1215-524: The elves was the Sarati which eventually developed into Tengwar by Fëanor . Known as the first writing system of Arda , Sarati was in the fiction invented by the Ñoldorin chronicler Rúmil of Valinor in the Valian Year of 1179. It was he "who first achieved fitting signs for the recording of speech and song" The writing system is officially called Sarati as each letter of the script represents

1260-777: The far northwest of Middle-earth , bordering the great sea, Belegaer . It is bounded to the north by the Ered Engrin, the Iron Mountains, and to the east by the Ered Luin, the Blue Mountains. Beleriand had many different names in Tolkien's early writings, including Broceliand , the name of an enchanted forest in medieval romance, Golodhinand, Noldórinan ("valley of the Noldor"), Geleriand, Bladorinand, Belaurien, Arsiriand, Lassiriand, and Ossiriand (later used for

1305-462: The journals Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon , as follows: See also Douglas A. Anderson , Carl F. Hostetter: A Checklist , Tolkien Studies 4 (2007). Sarati Sarati is an artificial script , one of several scripts created by J. R. R. Tolkien . According to Tolkien's mythology, the Sarati alphabet was invented by the Elf Rúmil of Tirion. As Tolkien strove to create

1350-473: The name of an enchanted forest in medieval romance, and Ingolondë, a play on "England" when he hoped to create a mythology for England rooted in the region. The scholar Gergely Nagy has found possible signs of the structure and style of Beleriand's poetry in the prose of The Silmarillion . Events in Beleriand are described chiefly in the second half of the Quenta Silmarillion , which tells

1395-541: The narrative of Elves and Men in the Beleriand landscape, in the Quenta Silmarillion : But there was a d eep w ay under the mountains d elved in the d arkness of the w orld by the w aters that flowed out to join the s treams of S irion. In a few places, it is possible to relate the adapted verse in the prose to actual verse in Tolkien's legendarium . This can be done, for instance, in parts of

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1440-423: The outset, Tolkien used comparative philology and the tree model as his major tools in his constructed languages. He usually started with the phonological system of the proto-language and then proceeded in inventing for each daughter language the many mechanisms of sound change needed. I find the construction and the interrelation of the languages an aesthetic pleasure in itself, quite apart from The Lord of

1485-622: The publication of The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), the grammar rules of his major Elvish languages Quenya, Telerin and Sindarin went through very few changes (this is late Elvish 1954–1973). Two magazines ( Vinyar Tengwar , from its issue 39 in July 1998, and Parma Eldalamberon , from its issue 11 in 1995) are exclusively devoted to the editing and publishing of J.R.R. Tolkien's gigantic mass of previously unpublished linguistic papers, including those omitted by Christopher Tolkien from " The History of Middle-earth ". The Elvish languages are

1530-662: The reader is free to assume that the Satanic Morgoth has carried out the Biblical serpent 's temptation of Adam and Eve , and that "the incoming Edain and Easterlings are all descendants of Adam flying from Eden and subject to the curse of Babel ." The Tolkien scholar Gergely Nagy , writing in 2004, notes that The Silmarillion does not contain explicitly embedded samples of Beleriand's poetry in its prose, as Tolkien had done with his many poems in The Lord of

1575-401: The role of vowels was secondary and were used to accentuate the consonants. The consonants, more so than the vowels, appear differently throughout the texts. Only the shapes of a select few sarati are stable, varying just slightly. The alterations of the shapes can be mostly attributed to Tolkien's constant work on the development of the script. [REDACTED] As mentioned above, the role of

1620-423: The same principle. According to Tolkien, consonants were considered more salient than vowels, and vowels were considered merely modifiers. When writing Quenya, the sign for "a" is usually omitted, as it is the most common vowel in Quenya. This makes Sarati an abugida with an inherent vowel of "a". In accordance with the leading theory at the time, the consonants were created as the main characters of Sarati, while

1665-443: The scraps of names and myths that had survived, and to situate it in a land in the northwest of the continent, by the sea. Shippey writes that the Quenta Silmarillion has a tightly-woven plot, each part leading ultimately to tragedy. There are three Hidden Elvish Kingdoms in Beleriand, founded by relatives, and they are each betrayed and destroyed. The Kingdoms are each penetrated by a mortal Man, again all related to each other; and

1710-543: The sense of doom, which Shippey glosses as "future disaster", hangs heavy over all of the characters in the tale. Shippey writes that the human race seen in Beleriand in the First Age did not "originate 'on stage' in Beleriand, but drifts into it, already sundered in speech, from the East [the main part of Middle-earth]. There something terrible has happened to them of which they will not speak: 'A darkness lies behind us... and we have turned our backs upon it'". He comments that

1755-415: The story of the early ages of Middle-earth in a style similar to the epic hero tales of Norse mythology . Beleriand also appears in the works The Book of Lost Tales , The Children of Húrin , and in the epic poems of The Lays of Beleriand . The land is occupied by Teleri Elves of King Thingol from the east, who founded the city of Menegroth in the forest realm of Doriath. Other Elves,

1800-401: The story of the early ages of Middle-earth in a style similar to the epic hero tales of Nordic literature, with a pervasive sense of doom over the character's actions. Beleriand also appears in the works The Book of Lost Tales , The Children of Húrin , and in the epic poems of The Lays of Beleriand . Tolkien tried many names for the region in his early writings, among them Broceliand ,

1845-463: The vowels was to emphasize linguistically and, possibly, aesthetically, the consonants of the script. Therefore, the vowels fill the role of diacritics , which can be pronounced either before or after the consonant. The vowel diacritics often can also double the sound or indicate an adjacent "s" or a preceding homorganic nasal. Though vowel diacritics vary considerably less frequently than the consonants, vowels had undergone considerable changes throughout

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1890-422: The writer to see what had just been written. Also, as Sarati was meant to represent an older script, its distinguishing trait of allowing the script to be written in multiple directions is meant to mirror real ancient scripts that are known for their less rigid nature. While a fair amount of punctuation marks have been created for the script, Sarati has established only two punctuation marks (both of which serve as

1935-456: The years. [REDACTED] As Sarati was created for the Eldar who were ambidextrous, the script can be written right-to-left; left-to-right; top-to-bottom, from the right or left; or boustrophedon (back-and-forth) . When writing from right-to-left, the left hand was employed, whereas when writing left-to-right, the right hand was used. This prevented the accidental smudging of ink, and allowed

1980-496: Was "more interested in the processes of change than he was in displaying the structure and use of the languages at any given time." The story of the Elvish languages as conceived by Tolkien from when he began working on The Lord of the Rings is that they all originated from Primitive Quendian or Quenderin, the proto-language of all the Elves who awoke together in the far east of Middle-earth, Cuiviénen , and began "naturally" to make

2025-418: Was already familiar with Latin , Greek , Italian, Spanish, and three ancient Germanic languages : Gothic , Old Norse , and Old English . He had invented several cryptographic codes such as Animalic, and two or three constructed languages including Naffarin. He then discovered Finnish , which he described many years later as "like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of

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