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94-726: 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

188-402: A cline as stop consonants (with occlusion , or blocked airflow), fricative consonants (with partially blocked and therefore strongly turbulent airflow), approximants (with only slight turbulence), tense vowels , and finally lax vowels (with full unimpeded airflow). Affricates often behave as if they were intermediate between stops and fricatives, but phonetically they are sequences of

282-403: 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

376-505: A "Tengwar A" font which also maps its characters on ISO 8859-1, overlapping with the first font. For each Tengwar diacritic, there are four different codepoints that are used depending on the width of the character which bears it. Other Tengwar typefaces with this encoding include Johan Winge's Tengwar Annatar , Måns Björkman's Tengwar Parmaitë , Enrique Mombello's Tengwar Élfica or Michal Nowakowski's Tengwar Formal (note that most of these differ in details). The following sample shows

470-518: A beast they took nor slew, and where they went he never knew". Shippey comments that Tolkien took many suggestions from this passage, including the horns and the hunt of the Elves in Mirkwood ; the proud but honourable Elf-king; and the placing of his elves in wild nature. Tolkien might only have had broken fragments to work on, but, Shippey writes, the more one explores how Tolkien used the ancient texts,

564-601: A commentary on the texts themselves or their actual influence on his writing, and cites evidence to this effect in her essay "'Mad' Elves and 'elusive beauty': some Celtic strands of Tolkien's mythology". Fimi proposes that some of the stories Tolkien wrote as elven history are directly influenced by Celtic mythology. For example, "Flight of The Noldoli " she argues, is based on the Tuatha Dé Danann and Lebor Gabála Érenn , and their migratory nature comes from early Irish/Celtic history. John Garth states that with

658-477: A flap. This means that when the stop is released, there is a burst of air as the pressure is relieved, while for flaps there is no such burst. Trills involve the vibration of one of the speech organs. Since trilling is a separate parameter from stricture, the two may be combined. Increasing the stricture of a typical trill results in a trilled fricative . Trilled affricates are also known. Nasal airflow may be added as an independent parameter to any speech sound. It

752-549: A great and mighty people, and that as Men took over the world, these Elves had "diminished" themselves. This theme is shared especially by the god-like and human-sized Ljósálfar of Norse mythology , and medieval works such as Sir Orfeo , the Welsh Mabinogion , Arthurian romances and the legends of the Tuatha Dé Danann . The name Inwe or Ingwë (in the first draft Ing ), given by Tolkien to

846-417: A green axe-wielding giant, an aluisch mon ("elvish man", translated by Shippey as "uncanny creature"). Christian sources from Iceland knew and disapproved of the tradition of offering sacrifices to the elves, álfa-blót . Elves were directly dangerous, too: the medical condition " elf-shot ", described in the spell Gif hors ofscoten sie , "if a horse is elf-shot", meaning some kind of internal injury,

940-541: A list of linguistic material by Tolkien published in the journals Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar , see bibliography in Elvish languages (Middle-earth) . Elf (Middle-earth) In J. R. R. Tolkien 's writings, Elves are the first fictional race to appear in Middle-earth . Unlike Men and Dwarves , Elves do not die of disease or old age. Should they die in battle or of grief, their souls go to

1034-705: 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

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1128-545: A philanthropist to brighten servicemen's quarters, and Faery was used in other contexts as an image of " Old England " to inspire patriotism. By 1915, when Tolkien was writing his first elven poems, the words elf , fairy and gnome had many divergent and contradictory associations. Tolkien had been gently warned against the term 'fairy', which John Garth supposes may have been due to its growing association with homosexuality , but Tolkien continued to use it. According to Marjorie Burns , Tolkien eventually but hesitantly chose

1222-477: A production of J. M. Barrie 's Peter Pan in Birmingham in 1910, and his familiarity with the work of Catholic mystic poet, Francis Thompson which Tolkien had acquired in 1914. O! I hear the tiny horns Of enchanted leprechauns And the padded feet of many gnomes a-coming! In his The Book of Lost Tales , Tolkien develops a theme that the diminutive fairy-like race of Elves had once been

1316-570: A proposal to include the Tengwar in the Unicode standard in 1997. The range U+ 16080 to U+160FF in the SMP was tentatively allocated for Tengwar in the 2023 Unicode roadmap. Tengwar are included in the unofficial ConScript Unicode Registry (CSUR), which assigns codepoints in the Private Use Area . Tengwar are mapped to the range U+E000–U+E07F. The following Unicode sample (which repeats

1410-431: A specific orthography , depending on the phonology of that language. These Tengwar orthographies are usually called modes . Some modes follow pronunciation, while others follow traditional orthography. Some modes map the basic consonants to /t/ , /p/ , /k/ and /kʷ/ (classical mode in chart at right), while others use them to represent /t/ , /p/ , /tʃ/ and /k/ (general mode at right). The other main difference

1504-415: A stop and fricative. Over time, sounds in a language may move along the cline toward less stricture in a process called lenition or towards more stricture in a process called fortition . Sibilants are distinguished from other fricatives by the shape of the tongue and how the airflow is directed over the teeth. Fricatives at coronal places of articulation may be sibilant or non-sibilant, sibilants being

1598-572: A weird way, quite unlike the elves in any other adaptation, not even resembling the film's depiction of Elrond. Gilkeson describes them as "like Troll dolls that have been left out in the rain too long, and a little like Yzma from The Emperor's New Groove . They have gray skin, pug faces, and blond hair. It’s frankly bizarre". In Peter Jackson 's Lord of the Rings film series (2001–2003), Elves are shown as physically superior to Men in eyesight, balance, and aim, but their superiority in other ways

1692-567: Is "never really made clear". Fimi compared Jackson's handling of Elves with Tolkien's. Tolkien's Elves are rooted as firmly as possible in Anglo-Saxon , Middle English , and Norse tradition, but influenced also by Celtic fairies in the Tuatha Dé Danann . Jackson's Elves are however "Celtic" in the romanticised sense of the Celtic Revival . She compares Jackson's representation of Gildor Inglorion's party of Elves riding through

1786-489: Is a diacritic placed above or below the tengwa. They can represent vowels, consonant doubling, or nasal sound. As Tolkien explained in Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings , the tehtar for vowels resemble Latin diacritics: circumflex (î) /a/ , acute (í) /e/ , dot (i) /i/ , left curl (ı̔) /o/ , and right curl (ı̓) /u/ . Long vowels, excepting /a/ , may be indicated by doubling the signs. Some languages from which /o/

1880-467: Is absent or in which compared to /u/ it appears sparsely, such as the Black Speech , use left curl for /u/ ; other languages swap the signs for /e/ and /i/ . A vowel occurring alone is drawn on the vowel carrier, which resembles dotless i (ı) for a short vowel or dotless j (ȷ) for a long vowel. Just as with any alphabetic writing system, every specific language written in Tengwar requires

1974-478: Is dangerous to mortals because time there is distorted , as in Tolkien's Lothlórien . Shippey comments that it is a strength of Tolkien's "re-creations", his imagined worlds, that they incorporate all the available evidence to create a many-layered impression of depth , making use of "both good and bad sides of popular story; the sense of inquiry, prejudice, hearsay and conflicting opinion". Shippey suggests that

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2068-617: Is in the fourth tyellë below, where those letters with raised stems and doubled bows can be either voiced fricatives, as in Sindarin (general mode at right), or nasalized stops, as in Quenya (classical mode). In some modes, called ómatehtar (or vowel tehtar ) modes, the vowels are represented with diacritics called tehtar (Quenya for 'signs'; corresponding singular : tehta , 'sign'). These ómatehtar modes can be considered abugidas rather than true alphabets . In some ómatehtar modes,

2162-626: Is most commonly found in nasal occlusives and nasal vowels , but nasalized fricatives, taps, and approximants are also found. When a sound is not nasal, it is called oral. Laterality is the release of airflow at the side of the tongue. This can be combined with other manners, resulting in lateral approximants (such as the pronunciation of the letter L in the English word "let"), lateral flaps, and lateral fricatives and affricates. All of these manners of articulation are pronounced with an airstream mechanism called pulmonic egressive , meaning that

2256-411: Is unthinkable. Betrothal, with the exchange of rings, lasts at least a year, and is revocable by the return of the rings, but is rarely broken. Marriage is by words exchanged by the bride and groom (including the speaking of the name of Eru Ilúvatar) and consummation; it is celebrated with a feast. Wedding rings are worn on the index fingers. The bride's mother gives the groom a jewel to wear. Elves view

2350-463: Is used for /kt/ . The Tengwar with raised stems sometimes occur in glyph variants that look like extended stems, as seen in the inscription of the One Ring . An example from the parmatéma (the signs with a closed bow on the right side) in the "general use" of the Tengwar is: In languages such as Quenya, which do not contain any voiced fricatives other than "v", the raised stem + doubled bow row

2444-631: Is used for the common nasal+stop sequences ( nt , mp , nk , nqu ). In such cases, the "w" sign in the previous paragraph is used for "v". In the mode of Beleriand, found on the door to Moria , the bottom tyellë is used for nasals (e.g., vala is used for /m/ ) and the fifth tyellë for doubled nasals ( malta for /mm/ ). There are additional letters that do not have regular shapes. They may represent, e.g., /r/ , /l/ , /s/ and /h/ . Their use varies considerably from mode to mode. Some aficionados have added more letters not found in Tolkien's writings for use in their modes. A tehta (Quenya "marking")

2538-748: Is well known. It is called the "mode of Beleriand " and one can read it on the Doors of Durin . Since the publication of the first official description of the Tengwar at the end of The Lord of the Rings , others have created modes for other languages such as English , Spanish , German , Swedish , French , Finnish , Italian , Hungarian and Welsh . Modes have also been devised for other constructed languages ; Esperanto and Lojban . Tolkien had used multiple modes for English, including full writing and ómatehtar alphabetic modes, phonetic full modes and phonetic ómatehtar modes known from documents published after his death. The contemporary de facto standard in

2632-629: The South English Legendary from c. 1250, describes elves much as Tolkien does: Some of Tolkien's Elves are in the "undying lands" of Valinor , home of the godlike Valar , while others are in Middle-earth. The Elf-queen Galadriel indeed has been expelled from Valinor, much like the fallen Melkor , though she is clearly good, and much like an angel. Similarly, some of the Legendary ' s Eluene are on Earth, others in

2726-419: The daoine-sithe , and the tylwyth-teg ." Tolkien, a philologist , knew of the many seemingly contradictory traditions about elves. The Old English Beowulf -poet spoke of the strange eotenas ond ylfe ond orcn éas , " ettens [giants] and elves and demon-corpses", a grouping which Shippey calls "a very stern view of all non-human and un-Christian species". The Middle English Sir Gawain meets

2820-647: The Common Speech . According to Shippey, the theme of diminishment from semi-divine Elf to diminutive Fairy resurfaces in The Lord of the Rings in the dialogue of Galadriel. "Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten." Writing in 1954, part way through proofreading The Lord of

2914-902: The Halls of Mandos in Aman . After a long life in Middle-earth, Elves yearn for the Earthly Paradise of Valinor , and can sail there from the Grey Havens. They feature in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . Their history is described in detail in The Silmarillion . Tolkien derived Elves from mentions in the ancient poetry and languages of Northern Europe, especially Old English . These suggested to him that Elves were large, dangerous, beautiful, lived in wild natural places, and practised archery. He invented languages for

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3008-460: The Solosimpi and Tinúviel . Alongside the idea of the greater Elves, Tolkien toyed with the idea of children visiting Valinor, the island-homeland of the Elves in their sleep. Elves would also visit children at night and comfort them if they had been chided or were upset. This was abandoned in Tolkien's later writing. Douglas Anderson shows that in The Hobbit , Tolkien again includes both

3102-423: The r-like sounds ( taps and trills ), and the sibilancy of fricatives . The concept of manner is mainly used in the discussion of consonants , although the movement of the articulators will also greatly alter the resonant properties of the vocal tract , thereby changing the formant structure of speech sounds that is crucial for the identification of vowels . For consonants, the place of articulation and

3196-409: 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: In addition to these variations of

3290-532: The " Earthly Paradise ". So, did they have souls, Shippey asks? Since they could not leave the world, the answer was no; but given that they didn't disappear completely on death, the answer had to have been yes. In Shippey's view, the Silmarillion resolved the Middle English puzzle, letting Elves go not to Heaven but to the halfway house of the Halls of Mandos on Valinor. By the late 19th century,

3384-451: The "fusion or kindling-point" of Tolkien's thinking about elves came from the Middle English lay Sir Orfeo , which transposes the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into a wild and wooded Elfland, and makes the quest successful. In Tolkien's translation the elves appear and disappear: "the king of Faerie with his rout / came hunting in the woods about / with blowing far and crying dim, and barking hounds that were with him; yet never

3478-467: The "wh" in those dialects of English that distinguish "which" from "witch" . Sonorants may also be called resonants , and some linguists prefer that term, restricting the word 'sonorant' to non- vocoid resonants (that is, nasals and liquids, but not vowels or semi-vowels). Another common distinction is between occlusives (stops, nasals and affricates) and continuants (all else). From greatest to least stricture, speech sounds may be classified along

3572-679: The Anglo-Saxons might call a very fair woman ælfscýne , "elf-beautiful". Some aspects can readily be reconciled, Shippey writes, since "Beauty is itself dangerous". But there is more: Tolkien brought in the Old English usage of descriptions like wuduælfen "wood-elf, dryad ", wæterælfen "water-elf", and sǣælfen "sea-elf, naiad ", giving his elves strong links with wild nature. Yet another strand of legend holds that Elfland , as in Elvehøj ("Elf Hill") and other traditional stories,

3666-726: The Avari, The Unwilling . The others were called Eldar, the People of the Stars by Oromë, and they took Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë as their leaders, and became respectively the Vanyar, Noldor and Teleri (who spoke Vanyarin Quenya, Noldorin Quenya, and Telerin, respectively). On their journey, some of the Teleri feared the Misty Mountains and dared not cross them. They turned back and stayed in

3760-600: The Elves to Valinor rather than leaving them where they were first awakened, near the Cuiviénen lake in the eastern extremity of Middle-earth. They sent Oromë, who took Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë as ambassadors to Valinor. Returning to Middle-earth, Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë convinced many of the Elves to take the Great Journey (also called the Great March) to Valinor. Those who did not accept the summons became known as

3854-460: The Elves who never went to see the light of the Two Trees of Valinor . Tolkien developed his conception of elves over the years, from his earliest writings through to The Hobbit , The Silmarillion , and The Lord of the Rings . Traditional Victorian dancing fairies and elves appear in much of Tolkien's early poetry, and have influence upon his later works, in part due to the influence of

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3948-526: The Elves, including Sindarin and Quenya . Tolkien-style Elves have become a staple of fantasy literature . They have appeared, too, in film and role-playing game adaptations of Tolkien's works. The framework for J. R. R. Tolkien 's conception of his Elves, and many points of detail in his portrayal of them, is thought by Haukur Þorgeirsson to have come from the survey of folklore and early modern scholarship about elves ( álfar ) in Icelandic tradition in

4042-556: The Grey Havens, where Círdan the Shipwright dwells with his folk. Eventually, any Elves that remain in Middle-earth undergo a process of "fading", in which their immortal spirits overwhelm and "consume" their bodies. This renders their bodily forms invisible to mortal eyes, except to those to whom they wish to manifest themselves. The 1977 Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit depicts the wood-elves in what Austin Gilkeson calls

4136-655: The Númenóreans, were killed. During the Second and Third Ages , they held some protected realms with the aid of the Three Rings of Power : Lothlorien, ruled by Galadriel and Celeborn; Rivendell , ruled by Elrond and home to the Elf-lord Glorfindel; and the Grey Havens, ruled by Círdan the shipwright. Círdan and his Elves built the ships on which Elves departed for Valinor. After the destruction of

4230-684: The One Ring , the power of the Three Rings of the Elves ended and the Fourth Age , the Age of Men, began. Most Elves left for Valinor; those that remained in Middle-earth were doomed to a slow decline until, in the words of Galadriel , they faded and became a "rustic folk of dell and cave". The fading played out over thousands of years, until in the modern world, occasional glimpses of rustic Elves would fuel folktales and fantasies. Elladan and Elrohir,

4324-506: The Rings , Tolkien claimed that the Elvish language Sindarin had a character very like British-Welsh "because it seems to fit the rather 'Celtic' type of legends and stories told of its speakers". In the same letter, Tolkien goes on to say that the elves had very little in common with elves or fairies of Europe, and that they really represent men with greater artistic ability, beauty and a longer life span. In his writings, an Elven bloodline

4418-852: The Shire "moving slowly and gracefully towards the West, accompanied by ethereal music" with John Duncan 's 1911 painting The Riders of the Sidhe . She notes that Jackson's conceptual designer, the illustrator Alan Lee , had made use of the painting in the 1978 book Faeries . Tolkien-style Elves have influenced the depiction of elves in the fantasy genre from the 1960s and afterwards. Elves speaking an elvish language similar to those in Tolkien's novels became staple non-human characters in high fantasy works and in fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons . They are often portrayed as being mentally sharp and lovers of nature, art, and song, as well as wiser and more beautiful than humans. They usually fit

4512-785: The Silmarils back, and led a large army of the Noldor to Beleriand. In Beleriand, Elwë was eventually found, and married Melian the Maia . He became the overlord of Beleriand, naming himself Thingol (Sindarin: Grey-cloak ). After the First Battle of Beleriand , during the first rising of the Moon, the Noldor arrived in Beleriand. They laid a siege around Morgoth's fortress of Angband , but were eventually defeated. The Elves never regained

4606-526: The Teleri took his brother Olwë as their leader and were ferried to Valinor. Some Teleri stayed behind though, still looking for Elwë, and others stayed on the shores, being called by Ossë. They took Círdan as their leader and became the Falathrim . The Teleri who stayed in Beleriand later became known as the Sindar. Matthew Dickerson notes the "very complicated changes, with shifting meanings assigned to

4700-534: 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

4794-434: 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

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4888-414: The Tengwar shapes, there is yet another variation, the use of stems that are extended both above and below the line. This shape may correspond to other consonant variations required. Except for some English abbreviations, it is not used in any of the better known Tengwar modes, but it occurs in a Quenya mode where the tengwa Parma with extended stem is used for /pt/ and the tengwa Calma with extended stem

4982-514: The Tengwar user community maps the Tengwar characters onto the ISO 8859-1 character encoding following the example of the Tengwar typefaces by Dan Smith. This implies a major flaw: If no corresponding Tengwar font is installed, a string of nonsense characters appears. Since there are not enough places in ISO 8859-1's 191 codepoints for all the signs used in Tengwar orthography, certain signs are included in

5076-526: 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. 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

5170-420: The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey 's suggestion that the "real root" of The Silmarillion lay in the linguistic relationship, complete with sound-changes and differences of semantics, between these two languages of the divided elves. Shippey writes, too, that the elves are separated not by colour, despite names like light and dark, but by history, including their migrations. In Valinor, Fëanor, son of Finwë, and

5264-712: The Valar tried to summon the Elves back to Valinor. Many complied, but some stayed. During the Second Age they founded the Realms of Lindon (all that was left of Beleriand after the cataclysm), Eregion , and Rhovanion (Mirkwood). Sauron , Morgoth's former servant, made war upon them, but with the aid of the Númenóreans they defeated him, though both the king of the Noldorin Elves, Gil-galad, and Elendil, king of

5358-579: The West Germanic concept appears to have come to differ from the Scandinavian notion in the early Middle Ages, and the Anglo-Saxon concept diverged even further, possibly under Celtic influence. J. R. R. Tolkien made it clear in a letter that his Elves differed from those "of the better known lore" of Scandinavian mythology . The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey notes that one Middle English source which he presumes Tolkien must have read,

5452-574: The airflow (stops, fricatives, affricates) are called obstruents . These are prototypically voiceless, but voiced obstruents are extremely common as well. Manners without such obstruction (nasals, liquids, approximants, and also vowels ) are called sonorants because they are nearly always voiced. Voiceless sonorants are uncommon, but are found in Welsh and Classical Greek (the spelling "rh"), in Standard Tibetan (the "lh" of Lhasa ), and

5546-528: The arts. Elves, particularly the Noldor, spend their time on smithwork, sculpture, music and other arts, and on preparing food. Males and females are equal, but females often specialize in the arts of healing while the males go to war. This is because they believe that taking life interferes with the ability to preserve life. However, females can defend themselves at need as well as males, and many males such as Elrond are skilled healers. Elves are skilful horse-riders, riding without saddle or bridle, though Tolkien

5640-628: The bay of Cuiviénen during the Years of the Trees . This event marked the beginning of the First Age . They awoke under the starlit sky, as the Sun and Moon had yet to be created. The first Elves to awaken were three pairs: Imin ("First") and his wife Iminyë, Tata ("Second") and Tatië, and Enel ("Third") and Enelyë. They walked through the forests, finding other pairs of Elves, who became their folk. They lived by

5734-399: 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. 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

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5828-508: The consonant signs feature an inherent vowel. Ómatehtar modes can vary in that the vowel stroke can be placed either on top of the consonant preceding it, as in Quenya , or on the consonant following, as in Sindarin , English, and the notorious Black Speech inscription on the One Ring. In the full writing modes, the consonants and the vowels are represented by Tengwar. Only one such mode

5922-419: The degree of phonation or voicing are considered separately from manner, as being independent parameters. Homorganic consonants , which have the same place of articulation, may have different manners of articulation. Often nasality and laterality are included in manner, but some phoneticians, such as Peter Ladefoged , consider them to be independent. Manners of articulation with substantial obstruction of

6016-579: The eldest of the elves and his clan, is similar to the name of the god Ingwi-Freyr in Norse mythology, a god who is gifted the elf-world Álfheimr . Terry Gunnell finds the relationship between beautiful ships and the Elves reminiscent of the god Njörðr and the god Freyr's ship Skíðblaðnir . He also retains the usage of the French derived term "fairy" for the same creatures. The larger Elves are inspired by Tolkien's personal Catholic theology , representing

6110-418: 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

6204-615: The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights written in English, according to the traditional English orthography . It should look similar to the picture at the top of the page , but if no Tengwar font is installed, it will appear as a jumble of characters because the corresponding ISO 8859-1 characters will appear instead. j#¸ 9t&5# w`Vb%_ 6EO w6Y5 e7`V`V 2{( zèVj# 5% 2x%51T`Û 2{( 7v%1+- 4hR 7EO 2{$ yYO2 y4% 7]F85^ 2{( z5^8I`B5$ I( 2{( dyYj2 zE1 1yY6E2_ 5^( 5#4^(7 5% `C 8q7T1T W w74^(692^H -- Note: Some browsers may not display these characters properly. Michael Everson made

6298-628: The golden house of Finarfin." The Vanyar were called "The Fair" for their golden hair. Maeglin is said to have been "tall and black-haired" and "his skin was white." Túrin, a Man, was called Elf-man due to his appearance and speech, and described as "dark-haired and pale-skinned, with grey eyes." Elves, at least the Eldar, have a pregnancy that lasts about a year. By the age of 1, Elves can speak, walk and dance. Puberty and full height are attained at around their fiftieth to one hundredth year, when they stop aging physically. Elves marry freely, monogamously, only once, and for love early in life; adultery

6392-471: The greatest of the Elves, created the Silmarils in which he stored a part of the light of the Two Trees that were lighting Valinor. After three ages in the Halls of Mandos, Melkor was released, feigning reform. He however spread his evil and started to poison the minds of the Elves against the Valar. Eventually he killed Finwë and stole the Silmarils. Fëanor then named him Morgoth (Sindarin: The Black Enemy ). Fëanor and his seven sons then swore to take

6486-441: The introduction to Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri ('Icelandic legends and fairy tales'). It covered stories from the 17th century onwards, noting that elves are the firstborn race; that they could marry humans; and that they lack an immortal soul. The modern English word Elf derives from the Old English word ælf (with cognates in all other Germanic languages ). Numerous types of elves appear in Germanic mythology ;

6580-401: 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

6674-400: The more common. Flaps (also called taps) are similar to very brief stops. However, their articulation and behavior are distinct enough to be considered a separate manner, rather than just length . The main articulatory difference between flaps and stops is that, due to the greater length of stops compared to flaps, a build-up of air pressure occurs behind a stop which does not occur behind

6768-608: The more one sees "how easy it was for him to feel that a consistency and a sense lay beneath the chaotic ruin of the old poetry of the North". Tolkien's Sundering of the Elves allowed him to explain the existence of Norse mythology 's Light Elves, who live in Alfheim ("Elfhome") and correspond to his Calaquendi, and Dark Elves, who live underground in Svartalfheim ("Black Elfhome") and whom he "rehabilitates" as his Moriquendi,

6862-429: The more serious 'medieval' type of elves, such as Elrond and the wood-elf king, Thranduil , and frivolous elves, such as the elvish guards at Rivendell . In 1937, having had his manuscript for The Silmarillion rejected by a publisher who disparaged all the "eye-splitting Celtic names" that Tolkien had given his Elves, Tolkien denied the names had a Celtic origin: Needless to say they are not Celtic! Neither are

6956-731: The most complete of Tolkien's constructed languages. Elves are also credited with creating the Tengwar (by Fëanor) and Cirth (Daeron) scripts. Elves are immortal, and remain unwearied with age . They can recover from wounds which would be fatal to a Man, but can be killed in battle. Spirits of dead Elves go to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor. After a certain period of time and rest that serves as "cleansing", their spirits are clothed in bodies identical to their old ones. If they do not die in battle or accident, Elves eventually grow weary of Middle-earth and desire to go to Valinor; they often sail from

7050-598: The one above) is meaningful when viewed under a typeface supporting Tengwar glyphs in the area defined in the ConScript Tengwar proposal.             ⸬                   ⸬ Some typefaces that support this proposal are Everson Mono , Tengwar Telcontar, Constructium, Tengwar Formal Unicode, and FreeMonoTengwar (James Kass's Code2000 and Code2001 use an older, incompatible version of

7144-760: The proposal). The eight “Aux” variant fonts of Kurinto (such as Kurinto Text Aux, Book Aux, Sans Aux) also support Tengwar. Tengwar has been used in Tolkien fandom since the publication of The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s. With the exception of John Rhys-Davies , the actors playing the Fellowship of the Ring in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy have Tengwar tattoos of the English word nine . Footballers such as Sergio Agüero and Fernando Torres have tattoos with their first name in Tengwar on their forearms. For

7238-490: The rivers, and invented poetry and music in Middle-earth . Journeying further, they came across tall and dark-haired elves, the fathers of most of the Noldor. They invented many new words. Continuing their journey, they found elves singing without language, the ancestors of most of the Teleri. The elves were discovered by the Vala Oromë , who brought the news of their awakening to Valinor. The Valar decided to summon

7332-467: The same names" as Tolkien worked on his conception of the elves and their divisions and migrations. He states that the sundering of the elves allowed Tolkien, a professional philologist , to develop two languages, distinct but related, Quenya for the Eldar and Sindarin for the Sindar, citing Tolkien's own statement that the stories were made to create a world for the languages, not the reverse. Dickerson cites

7426-403: The sexual act as special and intimate, for it leads to the birth of children. Elves who are married cannot be forced by other Elves to have sex; before that they will lose the will to endure and go to Mandos . Elves have few children, and there are long intervals between each child. They are soon preoccupied with other pleasures; their libido wanes and they focus their interests elsewhere, like

7520-759: The shores of the Anduin. After Elessar's death, Legolas built a ship and sailed to Valinor and, eventually, all the elves in Ithilien followed him. In " The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen " in Appendix A, most Elves have already left, barring some in Mirkwood and a few in Lindon; the garden of Elrond in Rivendell is empty. Arwen flees to an abandoned Lothlórien, where she dies. Tolkien describes elves as "tall, fair of skin and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, save in

7614-623: The sons of Elrond, did not accompany their father when the White Ship bearing the Ring-bearer and the chief Noldorin leaders sailed from the Grey Havens to Valinor; they remained in Lindon. Celeborn and other elves of the Grey Havens remained for a while before leaving for Valinor. Legolas founded an elf colony in Ithilien during King Elessar 's reign; the elves there helped to rebuild Gondor , living mainly in southern Ithilien, along

7708-627: The state of Men in Eden who have not yet fallen , like humans but fairer and wiser, with greater spiritual powers, keener senses, and a closer empathy with nature. Tolkien wrote of them: "They are made by man in his own image and likeness; but freed from those limitations which he feels most to press upon him. They are immortal, and their will is directly effective for the achievement of imagination and desire." In The Book of Lost Tales , Tolkien includes both more serious "medieval" elves such as Fëanor and Turgon alongside frivolous, Jacobean elves such as

7802-433: The stereotype of being skilled archers and gifted in magic . Manner of articulation In articulatory phonetics , the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators ( speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound . One parameter of manner is stricture, that is, how closely the speech organs approach one another. Others include those involved in

7896-422: The tales. I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact "mad" as your reader says – but I don't believe I am. Dimitra Fimi proposes that these comments are a product of his Anglophilia rather than

7990-406: The term elf over fairy . In his 1939 essay On Fairy-Stories , Tolkien wrote that "English words such as elf have long been influenced by French (from which fay and faërie , fairy are derived); but in later times, through their use in translation, fairy and elf have acquired much of the atmosphere of German, Scandinavian, and Celtic tales, and many characteristics of the huldu-fólk ,

8084-539: The term 'fairy' had been taken up as a utopian theme, and was used to critique social and religious values, a tradition which Tolkien and T. H. White continued. One of the last of the Victorian Fairy-paintings , The Piper of Dreams by Estella Canziani , sold 250,000 copies and was well known within the trenches of World War I where Tolkien saw active service. Illustrated posters of Robert Louis Stevenson 's poem Land of Nod had been sent out by

8178-670: The underground enslavement of the Noldoli to Melkor, Tolkien was essentially rewriting Irish myth regarding the Tuatha Dé Danann into a Christian eschatology . In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien pretends to be merely the translator of Bilbo and Frodo 's memoirs, collectively known as the Red Book of Westmarch . He says that those names and terms that appear in English are meant to be his purported translations from

8272-611: The upper hand, finally losing the hidden kingdoms Nargothrond , Doriath , and Gondolin near the culmination of the war. When the Elves had been forced to the furthest southern reaches of Beleriand, Eärendil the Mariner , a half-elf from the House of Finwë , sailed to Valinor to ask the Valar for help. The Valar started the War of Wrath , finally defeating Morgoth. After the War of Wrath,

8366-606: The vales of the Anduin , and, led by Lenwë, became the Nandor, who spoke Nandorin. Oromë led the others over the Misty Mountains and Ered Lindon into Beleriand . There Elwë became lost, and the Teleri stayed behind looking for him. The Vanyar and the Noldor moved onto a floating island, Tol Eressëa, that was moved by Ulmo to Valinor. After years, Ulmo returned to Beleriand to seek out the remaining Teleri. Without Elwë, many of

8460-424: Was associated both with neolithic flint arrowheads and the temptations of the devil. Tolkien takes "elf-shot" as a hint to make his elves skilful in archery. Another danger was wæterælfádl , " water-elf disease ", perhaps meaning dropsy , while a third condition was ælfsogoða , "elf-pain", glossed by Shippey as "lunacy". All the same, an Icelandic woman could be frið sem álfkona , "fair as an elf-woman", while

8554-401: Was inconsistent on this point. Tolkien created many languages for his Elves . His interest was primarily philological , and he said his stories grew out of his languages. Indeed, the languages were the first thing Tolkien ever created for his mythos, starting with what he originally called "Elfin" or "Qenya" [sic]. This was later spelled Quenya (High-elven); it and Sindarin (Grey-elven) are

8648-552: Was loaned into exilic Quenya as certa , plural certar . 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

8742-489: 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 following samples presumably predate the Lord of the Rings, but were not explicitly dated: The most notable characteristic of

8836-520: Was the only real claim to 'nobility' that the Men of Middle-earth could have. Tolkien wrote that the elves are primarily to blame for many of the ills of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings , having independently created the Three Rings to stop their domains in mortal-lands from ' fading ' and attempting to prevent inevitable change and new growth. The first Elves were awakened by Eru Ilúvatar near

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