Tengwar Basics for English

Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo! A star shines on the hour of our meeting!

Goal: Learn how to write understandably using tengwar.

I'm just going to talk about writing with tengwar, here. There are lots of fabulous tengwar fonts out there, but using them is a bit tricky - it's easier if you understand how to write tengwar first. If you are ready to look at fonts, check out my font references and resources page. Otherwise, either use my pixel-tengwar in MSPaint or pull out a pencil and a (::gasp!::) piece of paper.

You should already know: The difference between consonants and vowels. It helps if you either know how to spell in English or have a good dictionary. ;)

This tutorial is divided into two parts, to make it easier for you to process all the information: Things you need to know and Things you probably should know.

Part 1: Things you need to know.

First, you have to pick a mode.

What makes the tengwar special is that they can be used to write in any language, because the letters can have different values depending on which language you are writing. For this tutorial, I'll talk about writing English text. It turns out that the common English modes are very similar to the common Sindarin modes (most LotR-era Elven names would be written in Sindarin), so this is a good place to work from.

Tengwar are supposed to be used phonetically (i.e. you spell it the way it sounds), but English is really not a phonetic language and Tolkien didn't always try to write it phonetically, so I prefer to just go with straight spellings (see Q: Why don't you write tengwar phonetically for English?).

The rest of this tutorial will talk about writing tengwar for English, going with English spellings and using the tehtar mode (in case anyone asks you what you are doing ;).

The "letters".

Here you go! Great! Now memorize that...well, okay, not really. ;) The four long columns of letters are the tengwar ("letters") and are used to write consonants. The punctuation-mark looking symbols on the right (over the grey undotted-i tengwa) are called tehtar and are used to write most vowels (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, remember?).

Consonants! You'll find this chart a little bit more useful. We aren't quite ready for the whole thing yet, of course. ;) Most of the tengwar are pretty straightforward. Note that sometimes when we use two letters, tengwar will only use one (ch, sh, th, etc.). When these come up, it's generally better style if you use them instead of trying to spell it out (s+h or c+h). Some of these you may not be familiar with. kh is as in loch and really doesn't come up much. zh is like in beige. gh is as in ghost (I can't tell the difference there, either). hw is supposed to be the sound in why, but not all English speakers pronounce it that way (so I wouldn't worry about it too much). The rest we will talk about a bit later.

Vowels!

The vowels in this writing system are the tehtar - they look like accents and go above the tengwar (they can never stand alone.) If you don't have a tengwa handy, you can use one of the carriers (the ones that look like an undotted "i" and "j").

For the English mode, you write the tehta on top of the tengwa that comes after it. If there is no following consonant, you use a carrier.

If you keep your eyes open during the movies, you will see that they often stick the appropriate tehtar over the vowels on signs and such! This is technically redundant, but still cool.

Here are some examples - I made them bigger to make sure you can see how they fit together. You should read each letter/accent combination from top to bottom. (Side note: "Legolas" and "Arwen" would normally be written in the Sindarin mode...but in these cases it is the same as the English version, so it doesn't matter!)

Note that there are two versions you can use for "a". The triple-dot is the standard, but it is such a common letter in the Elvish languages that it is often simplified to a circumflex (the upside-down "v"). This is very useful when you are trying to write something very small. ;)

Long and Short Carriers

Some people prefer to use the long carrier (the one that looks like "j") for long vowels, but an Elvish "long" vowel is literally doubled in length, so I only use the long carrier when a vowel is doubled (ee or oo, typically). The rest of the time I use the short carrier. You can show doubled vowels with two tehtar, also (put them above the same tengwa).

And here is my name. :) Note the use of the short carrier because there isn't really room for the tehta over the last letter.

You actually should know enough now that you can write in tengwar and have the results be readable by anyone who knows the basics. :) Read on if you want to refine your knowledge into something more elegant.

Next: Part 2: Things you should know.

References

I learned to write with tengwar from reading the appendices to The Lord of the Ring and by deciphering the inscription on the title page. I have learned quite a bit from a variety of online sources, which are listed here under 'references'. I wrote most of this off the top of my head (so any errors are my own fault), but I did reference Dan Smith's help files to double-check the values for the standard English mode.