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Tengwar

| February 09, 2008 | 🕒 1 min read
Elfic alphabet - Tengwar Parmaite

It's not unusual nowadays to see tattoos with elfic writings, after the movie "The Lord of the Rings" brought under everyone's eyes the intrinsic beauty of this language, and of its alphabet in particular.

The most reknown elfic alphabet is Tengwar, invented by J.R.R.Tolkien, and whose runes are the ones appearing inside the one ring, even if those words were not in elfic language, but in the Black Language of Mordor.

Tengwar is based on characters representing consonants, often paired, whereas vowels are mostly written as marks placed over or below the consonants.
Tengwar is used by many languages, among which Quenya, or High Elven, that is the elfic language, and Sindarin, mainly used by gnomes, which has three different ways of being written.
There are many styles of writing elfic characters, among which the Parmaite, which is probably the most elegant and that's the one you'll find in this post translated with roman letters.

You can find several articles on the internet that teach how to correctly write and speak elfic languages (such as Omniglot), but it´s not an easy job.

Luckily, anyone can have his very own correct writing thanks to some dedicated websites, among which we point out the nice Tengwar transcriber from Tecendil: write your sentence, name, or anything and it will show how it would be written using the Tengwar alphabet. You can also download the transcription as a PNG image to eventually take to your favourite tattoo artist (children names, here I come).

Here's a sample of a sentence in Quenya:
"Elen síla lumenn´ omentielvo" = "A star shines on our meeting"
which becomes:

quenya script translation

Want the hi-res alphabet? Here you go:

Tengwar Elfic alphabet.
Have fun!

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