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 ; different Tengwar shapes; and a few correspondences between sound features and letter shape features.
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 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 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 :The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, published 1937Middle Page from the Book of MazarbulLast Page from the Book of Mazarbul, Last Line, this and the above one originally prepared for inclusion in The Lord of the RingsSteinborg Drawing TitleIlbereth's Greeting from The Father Christmas Letters, dating to 1937The Treebeard PageEdwin Lowdham's Manuscript from The Notion Club Papers has Old English language text written in Tengwar, dating to 1945/6.
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, a tengwa. Previously, any letter or symbol had been called a sarat. 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 in Sindarin, when they were introduced to Beleriand. The letters of the earlier alphabet native to Sindarin were called cirth. 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. 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.
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 and either one or two rounded bows.
These principal letters are divided into four series that correspond to the main places of articulation and into six grades 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,, and, 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 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 and the tengwa Calma with extended stem is used for. 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 in the "general use" of the Tengwar is:
  • The basic sign, named parma, represents .
  • With the bow doubled, umbar, it represents.
  • With a raised stem, formen, it represents.
  • With a raised stem and a doubled bow, ampa, it represents generally but possibly .
  • With a short stem and double bow, malta, it represents.
  • With short stem and single bow, vala, it represents, or if that has the phonological behaviour of a sonorant.
In languages such as Quenya, which do not contain any voiced fricatives other than "v", the raised stem + doubled bow row is used for the common nasal+stop sequences. 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 and the fifth tyellë for doubled nasals.

Irregularly formed

There are additional letters that do not have regular shapes. They may represent, e.g.,,, and. 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.

diacritics

A tehta 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, acute, dot, left curl, and right curl . Long vowels, excepting, may be indicated by doubling the signs. Some languages from which is absent or in which compared to it appears sparsely, such as the Black Speech, use left curl for ; other languages swap the signs for and.
A vowel occurring alone is drawn on the vowel carrier, which resembles dotless i for a short vowel or dotless j for a long vowel.

Modes

Just as with any alphabetic writing system, every specific language written in Tengwar requires 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,, and, while others use them to represent,, and . The other main difference is in the fourth tyellë below, where those letters with raised stems and doubled bows can be either voiced fricatives, as in Sindarin, or nasalized stops, as in Quenya.

Ómatehtar

In some modes, called ómatehtar modes, the vowels are represented with diacritics called tehtar. These ómatehtar modes can be considered abugidas rather than true alphabets. In some ómatehtar modes, 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.

Full writing

In the full writing modes, the consonants and the vowels are represented by Tengwar. Only one such mode is well known. It is called the "mode of Beleriand" and one can read it on the Doors of Durin.

Modes for other languages

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 the 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.

Encoding schemes

Legacy encoding

The contemporary de facto standard in 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 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,, or .
The following sample shows the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights written in English, according to the traditional English orthography.

Unicode

Michael Everson made a proposal to include the Tengwar in the Unicode standard in 1997. The range to U+160FF in the SMP was tentatively allocated for Tengwar in the 2023 Unicode roadmap.

ConScript Unicode Registry

Tengwar are included in the unofficial ConScript Unicode Registry, which assigns codepoints in the Private Use Area. Tengwar are mapped to the range U+E000–U+E07F.
Some typefaces that support this proposal are Everson Mono, Tengwar Telcontar, Constructium, Tengwar Formal Unicode, and FreeMonoTengwar. The eight “Aux” variant fonts of Kurinto also support Tengwar.
NameImageCSURDesignation annotation
tincoU+E000Tengwar LETTER TINCO
parmaU+E001Tengwar LETTER PARMA
calmaU+E002Tengwar LETTER CALMA
quessëU+E003Tengwar LETTER QUESSE
andoU+E004Tengwar LETTER ANDO
umbarU+E005Tengwar LETTER UMBAR
angaU+E006Tengwar LETTER ANGA
ungwëU+E007Tengwar LETTER UNGWE
súlë / thúlëU+E008Tengwar LETTER THUULE
formenU+E009Tengwar LETTER FORMEN
harma / ahaU+E00ATengwar LETTER HARMA
hwestaU+E00BTengwar LETTER HWESTA
antoU+E00CTengwar LETTER ANTO
ampaU+E00DTengwar LETTER AMPA
ancaU+E00ETengwar LETTER ANCA
unquëU+E00FTengwar LETTER UNQUE
númenU+E010Tengwar LETTER NUUMEN
U+E011Tengwar LETTER MALTA
noldo / ñoldoU+E012Tengwar LETTER NOLDO
nwalmë / ñwalmëU+E013Tengwar LETTER NWALME
órëU+E014Tengwar LETTER OORE
valaU+E015Tengwar LETTER VALA
annaU+E016Tengwar LETTER ANNA
vilya / wilyaU+E017Tengwar LETTER VILYA
rómenU+E018Tengwar LETTER ROOMEN
ardaU+E019Tengwar LETTER ARDA
lambëU+E01ATengwar LETTER LAMBE
aldaU+E01BTengwar LETTER ALDA
silmëU+E01CTengwar LETTER SILME
silmë nuquernaU+E01DTengwar LETTER SILME NUQUERNA
essë / áre/ázeU+E01ETengwar LETTER AARE
essë nuquerna / áre/áze nuquernaU+E01FTengwar LETTER AARE NUQUERNA
hyarmenU+E020Tengwar LETTER HYARMEN
hwesta sindarinwaU+E021Tengwar LETTER HWESTA SINDARINWA
yantaU+E022Tengwar LETTER YANTA
úrëU+E023Tengwar LETTER UURE
hallaU+E024Tengwar LETTER HALLA
telcoU+E025Tengwar LETTER SHORT CARRIER
áraU+E026Tengwar LETTER LONG CARRIER

NameImageCSURDesignation annotation
U+E027Tengwar LETTER ANNA SINDARINWA
U+E028Tengwar LETTER EXTENDED THUULE
U+E029Tengwar LETTER EXTENDED FORMEN
U+E02ATengwar LETTER EXTENDED HARMA
U+E02BTengwar LETTER EXTENDED HWESTA
U+E02CTengwar LETTER EXTENDED ANTO
U+E02DTengwar LETTER EXTENDED AMPA
U+E02ETengwar LETTER EXTENDED ANCA
U+E02FTengwar LETTER EXTENDED UNQUE
U+E030Tengwar LETTER STEMLESS OORE
U+E031Tengwar LETTER STEMLESS VALA
U+E032Tengwar LETTER STEMLESS ANNA
U+E033Tengwar LETTER STEMLESS VILYA

NameImageCSURDesignation annotation
amatixe 3U+E040Tengwar SIGN THREE DOTS ABOVE
unutixe 3U+E041Tengwar SIGN THREE DOTS BELOW
amatixe 2U+E042Tengwar SIGN TWO DOTS ABOVE
unutixe 2U+E043Tengwar SIGN TWO DOTS BELOW
amatixe 1U+E044Tengwar SIGN AMATICSE
unutixe 1U+E045Tengwar SIGN NUNTICSE
teccoU+E046Tengwar SIGN ACUTE
U+E047Tengwar SIGN DOUBLE ACUTE
rempeU+E048Tengwar SIGN RIGHT CURL
U+E049Tengwar SIGN DOUBLE RIGHT CURL
rempenuquernaU+E04ATengwar SIGN LEFT CURL
U+E04BTengwar SIGN DOUBLE LEFT CURL
amatweU+E04CTengwar SIGN NASALIZER
unuatweU+E04DTengwar SIGN DOUBLER
U+E04ETengwar SIGN TILDE
U+E04FTengwar SIGN BREVE
U+E050Tengwar PUSTA
U+E051Tengwar DOUBLE PUSTA
U+E052Tengwar EXCLAMATION MARK
U+E053Tengwar QUESTION MARK
U+E054Tengwar SECTION MARK
U+E055Tengwar LONG SECTION MARK
thinnasU+E056Tengwar SIGN LONG CARRIER BELOW
U+E057Tengwar SIGN DOUBLE ACUTE BELOW
U+E058Tengwar SIGN RIGHT CURL BELOW
U+E05ATengwar SIGN LEFT CURL BELOW
sarinceU+E05CTengwar SIGN LEFT FOLLOWING SILME
U+E05DTengwar SIGN RIGHT FOLLOWING SILME

NameImageCSURDesignation annotation
0U+E030Tengwar LETTER STEMLESS OORE
1U+E033Tengwar LETTER STEMLESS VILYA
2U+E062Tengwar DIGIT TWO
3U+E063Tengwar DIGIT THREE
4U+E064Tengwar DIGIT FOUR
5U+E065Tengwar DIGIT FIVE
6U+E066Tengwar DIGIT SIX
7U+E067Tengwar DIGIT SEVEN
8U+E068Tengwar DIGIT EIGHT
9U+E069Tengwar DIGIT NINE
10U+E06ATengwar DUODECIMAL DIGIT TEN
11U+E06BTengwar DUODECIMAL DIGIT ELEVEN
U+E06CTengwar DECIMAL BASE MARK
U+E06DTengwar DUODECIMAL BASE MARK
U+E06ETengwar DUODECIMAL LEAST SIGNIFICANT DIGIT MARK

In popular culture

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.