While writing his Middle Earth books, JRR Tolkein invented an entire alphabet for the elves called Tengwar. His attention to detail was incredible, Tengwar is a fully functioning writing system. This is the famous Elvish writing seen all through Lord of The Rings and the Hobbit.
Tengwar is an alphabet, not a language, and can be used to write many languages. This is like, for example, Latin and Greek alphabets; the word English word “ring” is normally written in the Latin alphabet but could also be written in the Greek alphabet as “ρινγ”. The two sound the same, it is just a different way of writing the sounds of the word “ring”. The process of transferring a word between two different alphabets is called transliteration.
In Middle Earth, Tengwar is one of the major ways of writing. Many languages were written in Tengwar: two Elvish languages called Sindarin and Quenya, the Black Speech of Mordor (on the One Ring), and the language of men (English). Tolkein gave detailed notes on how to write English in the Tengwar alphabet. In Tengwar “ring” is written:
Writing in Tengwar follows simple rules but quickly gets complicated, so I designed a font that does it automatically! You can download it for free here. As far as I know this font is unique, all other Tengwar fonts are just collections of symbols you have to manually mix and match.
To use this font you just need to download and install it. Once it is installed, just select it as the font and start typing as normal. The font will automatically transliterate the text you type into accurate Tengwar, based on Tolkein’s rules about writing English in Tengwar.
To make sure the font is working accurately you need to make sure three settings are enabled: kerning, contextual alternates and ligatures. For example, in Microsoft Word you can do this through the advanced font settings:
So how does it work? Basic Tengwar is similar to the Latin alphabet, with two classes of symbols representing the sounds of different consonants and different vowels. At the simplest level, to write the word “ring” the font just selects the four symbols for “r”, “i”, “n” and “g”:
Unlike the Latin alphabet, there are special rules for how vowels are written. Instead of always being a separate letter, if a vowel comes immediately before a consonant it is written as an accent on that consonant. In “ring” the “i” comes immediately before the “n” so the font writes it as an accent on the “n”:
There are some special rules to use for some consonants, depending on where they are in a word. “r” is one of these letters. If it is followed by a vowel then it should have a different symbol, which the font automatically selects:
Finally, some common combinations of consonants that have a single sound (like “th” as in “the”, “ch” as in “church” and “gh” as in “ghost”) have their own single symbol. “ng” is one of these pairs and, again, the font automatically makes this substitution:
And that is how the font automatically writes “ring” in Tengwar. These are not the only rules though, there are also other ones built into the font that involve double vowels, double consonants, the letter “n” preceding another consonant, whether a “y” is used as a vowel or a consonant, whether an “e” is voiced in a word or is silent at the end of a word, etc.
The key feature of my font is that it takes all of these rules into account automatically and lets you simply type away as normal and get an accurate, readable result in Tengwar. You can also just select an existing chunk of text and apply the font to it to transliterate it to Tengwar, but make sure the text is all lower case for best effect. It does make a few very small mistakes, but Tolkein would understand it!
Tengwar is a beautiful and concise alphabet. The way vowels, double letters and letter pairs combine make many words very short and elegant:
The overall flow of a paragraph is also excellent, with the letters falling into self-symmetric curves and alignments.
(This is the first paragraph of Lord of The Rings, converted to Tengwar by just changing the font to my Tengwar Transliteral font.)
If you are interested in playing with Tengwar text for any kind of design please consider downloading the italic and script versions of the font here. These cost a few pounds/dollars/euros.
There are also excellent simple guides on writing in Tengwar (like this one), but why do that when you could just download my font and type your name?
Software used:
Inkscape: Glyph design
Fontforge: Font design
