Languages and writing systems

Elvish

‘This, Thorin, the runes name Orcrist, the Goblin-cleaver in the ancient tongue of Gondolin; it was a famous blade.’(The Hobbit, Ch. 3).

‘Elvish’ is a general term used to designate the group of languages spoken by Elves, as they did not share a single tongue. Elves always enjoyed playing with words and, in fact, the most generic name for their race – Quendi – means ‘those who speak’. A language evolves in time and space, so the Elves who awoke in Cuiviénen did not speak the same language as their counterparts in the Third Age, just as the inhabitants of Valinor, beyond the Great Sea, to the West, did not talk in the same way as the residents of the forests in Middle-earth. The Elves’ most ancient language was Primitive Quendian, which emerged after their first Awakening. This divided into two distinct linguistic branches when the Eldar separated from the Avari prior to the Elves’ Great March to Valinor. Very little is known about the Avarin languages, or, for that matter, the Avari themselves. We do know, however, that the Eldar consisted of three clans. The Vanyar and the Noldor shared a common language, Quenya, albeit with some dialectal variations. The third, and significantly most numerous of the clans, the Teleri, saw their language, Telerin, evolve into three families divided along geographical (and later cultural) lines. The first Teleri to interrupt their journey spoke Nandorin languages (these were the ancestors of the Silvan Elves from Mirkwood). The Sindar, or Grey Elves, who decided to stay in Middle-earth almost at the end of their journey, spoke Sindarin, and they established the kingdom of Doriath, in which they represented the majority. The Elves who did reach Valinor spoke the Telerin of Aman. When some of the Noldor went back to Middle-earth in the First Age, they brought Quenya with them but, in the meantime, Sindarin had evolved to such an extent that the two tongues were now mutually incomprehensible. So, the Noldor adopted Sindarin as their everyday language and only preserved Quenya for ceremonial purposes.

Sindarin, initially the language of the Sindar in Beleriand, became the Elvish language that was most spoken in Middle-earth, to such an extent that it was adopted as a second language by some houses of Men. When the Edain joined forces with the Elves in the First Age to fight against Morgoth, many of them learned Sindarin and passed on this knowledge to their own descendants, the first Númenóreans. After Númenor’s submersion, Sindarin became one of the official languages of the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor. By the time of the Quest of Erebor, however, only the nobles still spoke Sindarin, as the popular language of the West of Middle-earth was now Common Speech.

Of all the Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin were the most fully developed by Tolkien. His experience as a philologist had provided him with insight into the way a real language evolves, and he always sought to make the evolution of his own invented languages credible. He even declared that he created his Legendarium as a showcase for his languages. It is therefore necessary to take into account the chronology of Tolkien’s life to fully understand his linguistic texts. He started to invent his Elvish languages in the 1910s and was still working on them when he died. His ideas thus had time to change, and it is difficult to view one of his texts from the 1920s in the same light as an essay from the 1970s. Moreover, Tolkien never definitively established the grammar of his different languages and many points remained unclear – and there were even changes in the meanings of words: the term lá, for example, means ‘yes’ in one text from 1959 and ‘no’ in the 1970s!

It seemed that Tolkien’s first invented language was Quenya, spelt Qenya until the 1940s; this was heavily inflected and morphologically highly complex, with no fewer than ten declensions for nouns by the time he came to write The Lord of the Rings. Its grammar and vocabulary are quite well known, which is more than can be said for its syntax. According to Tolkien himself, Quenya was largely inspired by Finnish, Latin and Greek. Sindarin, meanwhile, had a very complicated development, reflecting the various adjustments that Tolkien made to his Legendarium. The first examples that bore a resemblance to Sindarin were found in Gnomish, which he conceived in the late 1910s as the language of the Gnomes (an early name for the Noldor). At that point, Tolkien considered that Qenya would be spoken only by the Elves of the first tribe (the future Vanyar). By the 1920s, he was referring to Gnomish as Noldorin, and this language began to acquire a number of the characteristics of what would later be integrated into Sindarin. During the course of writing The Lord of the Rings, however, Tolkien changed his mind, as Qenya (now Quenya) was being spoken by both the Vanyar and the Noldor. Moreover, he renamed the language formerly known as Noldorin as Sindarin, and this became the language of the Grey Elves. The grammar and, above all, the phonetics of Sindarin are close to those of Welsh: it is inflected and displays both vowel alternations and consonant mutations. Tolkien did not provide enough information to make it possible to completely reconstitute, let alone speak, any of the Elvish languages. In fact, much of the pleasure that he derived from their creation came precisely from the room for manoeuvre that he allowed himself, giving him the chance to experiment and change his mind. Furthermore, several of the texts that he wrote about his invented languages have still never been published.

Khuzdul

‘But a small dark figure that none had observed sprang out of the shadows and gave a hoarse shout: Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu!’(The Lord of the Rings, III, 7).

Khuzdul was the language created and taught to the Dwarves by the Vala Aulë. In comparison with the other languages of Middle-earth, Khuzdul was a conservative language that changed very little over the course of the Ages. The slight differences that did appear over time were basically due to the distance between the Seven Houses of the Dwarves. Accordingly, all the Dwarves could understand each other, whatever their lineage, even in the period of the War of the Ring. The Dwarves kept Khuzdul as a jealously guarded secret, refusing to teach it to other races. So, very few outsiders had a chance to study Khuzdul, and most Elven language teachers looked down on it. The Dwarves were particularly defensive about their real, Khuzdul name, going to great lengths to ensure that absolutely no outsider would ever find out what it was. In public, Dwarves used names or nicknames from one of the languages of their human neighbours, while even the name engraved on their tombs was not their Khuzdul name. So, the names of Thorin and Company were derived from the Dalish language (rendered in Old Norse in Tolkien’s story).

The very few Khuzdul words that we do know are confined to toponyms and war cries (mainly found in The Lord of the Rings). Thus, we know, for example, that the mines of Moria were called Khazad-dûm, or the Delving of the Dwarves, in Khuzdul. Khazâd denoted the Dwarf People, as heard in Gimli’s cry in Helm’s Deep: Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! (‘The Dwarves’ axes! The Dwarves are upon you!’). Khuzdul was written down via a runic system known as Cirth, which the Dwarves initially borrowed from the Grey Elves and then adapted for their own purposes, particularly when writing with a pen.

Despite the secrecy surrounding it, Khuzdul influenced other languages, particularly Mannish ones, and its presence can be felt in some Elvish words: for example, Kasar in Quenya and Hadhod in Sindarin, both meaning ‘Dwarf’, are directly derived from the Khuzdul term Khazâd.

Tolkien drew on Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew to construct Khuzdul. In an interview with BBC Radio in 1967, Tolkien confirmed that Khuzdul words have Semitic affinities because he deliberately constructed them along these lines. Like Semitic languages, Khuzdul is based on roots made up of consonants (usually three) and words are built up by inserting vowels or adding prefixes or suffixes: the root k-b-l thus gives us the word kibil, meaning ‘silver’. Khuzdul’s vocabulary was conceived, however, to be different from that of natural languages and also to set it apart from the other languages of Middle-earth. Tolkien wanted Khuzdul to be ‘cumbrous and unlovely’ in comparison with the Elvish languages.

Old Norse

‘The still more northerly language of Dale is in this book seen only in the names of the Dwarves that came from that region and so used the language of the Men there, taking their “outer” names in that tongue.’(The Lord of the Rings, App. E, II).

The stories told in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are supposed to have taken place several millennia before our era, and so the languages used by the Men of Middle-earth could not be the same as our own. In the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien stated that the language rendered in English in the books corresponds to Westron, or Common Speech. By the time of the War of the Ring, this language was understood by almost all the peoples living to the Northwest of Middle-earth, but it was not the native tongue of all the Men in the region. Some Men had preserved their own language, which occasionally resembled Westron. This was the case with the inhabitants of Dale and Lake-town, where Tolkien explained that he had translated the corresponding languages into a Germanic language that has the same kinship with English as the language in question had with Westron. More specifically, the language of Dale was represented by Old Norse.

Historically, Old Norse constitutes a group of closely related languages spoken in Iceland, Scandinavia and Denmark. Various dialects of Old Norse started to differentiate themselves around the 7th century AD, and these would later give rise to the modern Scandinavian languages (Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, etc.) around the 15th century. At the time of its maximum extension, in the 10th century, Old Norse was also spoken in Varangian towns in Northwest Russia, in East Anglia (part of the region of the Danelaw, then under Danish domination), in north Scotland, in various towns in Ireland and on the southern coast of Greenland, which had been colonized by Norwegians and Icelanders. The same was true of the northern coast of Neustria, which was conquered in 911 by the Viking chief Rollo (it would soon be renamed ‘Normandy’).

The first known Old Norse texts were written in a runic alphabet known as Futhark, but the progressive Christianization of Scandinavia led to the introduction of the Latin alphabet, which was adapted to the peculiarities of Old Norse and soon supplanted the runes. The best known variety of Old Norse is Old Scandinavian, the language of the Eddas and the Icelandic sagas. Old Norse was an inflected language with three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and four cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive), exactly like modern German. Initially there were three types of nouns (singular, dual and plural), but the dual noun disappeared in classical Old Norse. Tolkien made several nods to Old Norse: for example, Old Norse nouns ending in ‘a’ are generally masculine, while those ending in ‘o’ tend to be feminine. Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings indicates that the same was true of the proper names of Hobbits: Bilbo’s real name would thus be ‘Bilba’, but Tolkien stated that he had Anglicized these names to avoid any confusion in his readers.

Tolkien’s Dwarves had their own language, Khuzdul, but they did not teach it to outsiders and preferred to use local languages for trading, even going as far as taking on local names in their dealings with other races. It was therefore perfectly natural for the Dwarves originating from the Lonely Mountain to adopt Nordic names, which Tolkien represented with genuine Old Norse names. With the exception of Balin, a name whose etymology remains obscure, all the dwarves in The Hobbit bear names taken from the Dvergatal, a list of dwarves in the Völuspá, ‘The Prediction of the Prophetess’, a major cosmogonic poem in the Eddas.

All these names have a significance that Tolkien was careful to point out: Thorin means ‘hardy, intrepid’, while the name of his father, Thráin, means ‘stubborn, obstinate’ – appropriate for a character obsessed with revenge and the reconquest of the Dwarves’ former homes. Similarly, Thrór, Thorin’s grandfather, bore a name that reflected the major excavations that he oversaw in Erebor: thrór means ‘boar’, but it is also related to the verb thróast, ‘to grow, to extend’. Other names refer to the tools handled by the Dwarves, as in Fili and Kili (‘file’ and ‘wedge’, respectively). Finally, some names contain humorous allusions to a character’s physical characteristics: the Old Norse word bómburr means ‘pot-bellied’, and it is also related to bumba (‘drum’), the instrument that Bombur plays at the impromptu party in Bag End.

Runes

‘Runes were old letters originally used for cutting or scratching on wood, stone, or metal, and so were thin and angular. At the time of this tale only the Dwarves made use of them, especially for private or secret records.’(The Hobbit, Prologue).

One of the first things that a reader sees on opening The Hobbit is its title in runic script, immediately plunging them into a remote, mysterious time. Tolkien used this hermetic aspect of the runes to provoke curiosity: Thrór’s map is presented before any translation of the runic texts featured therein. And we even have to wait until the third chapter for any explanation of the moon letters that are a key to finding the secret door into the Lonely Mountain. This use of runes on Tolkien’s part to heighten mystery is hardly surprising, as the Old Norse word rún itself means ‘secret’ or ‘murmur’!

The runes in The Hobbit were taken from Futhorc, the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet that was itself derived from Elder Futhark, the most ancient representative of the Germanic runic alphabets. It is generally agreed that Elder Futhark developed after contact with North Italian alphabets, which were used, above all, by the Etruscan peoples. The Latin alphabet, which has affinities with the North Italian alphabets, could also have had an influence on Elder Futhark. The first known runic inscriptions date back to the 2nd century BC; they were engraved on stone, wood and bone, and they served a magical function. Elder Futhark, which contained 24 alphabetical signs, spread as far as Scandinavia, where it remained in use until the late 8th century.

Variants of this runic alphabet started to emerge in the 5th century in South-east England and Western Friesland (on the northern coast of today’s Netherlands). Futhorc adopted first 28, and then 33 runes. The literacy rates at that time were extremely low, however, contributing, along with the secrecy that surrounded the use of runes, to the sparse pickings of fewer than 200 inscriptions available to us from the entire period in which Futhorc was used. The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons in the 7th century introduced competition from the Latin alphabet. By the time of the Norman Conquest, Futhorc had become extremely rare, and it soon faded away altogether. In Scandinavia, Elder Futhark became increasingly simplified and in the late 8th century it gave rise to Younger Futhark, whose alphabet comprised only 16 runes. This was widely used throughout the entire Viking period, although its use was constrained when the Scandinavian countries began to convert to Christianity. Nevertheless, it survived in some regions of Sweden, under the guise of medieval runes, until the early years of the 20th century.

Experts believe that all the Germanic runes must have had a name, associated with symbolic or magical properties. In The Poetic Edda, the runes were the preserve of Odin, the sovereign god and patron of poetry and sorcery. He gained knowledge of them by hanging himself for nine days and nights, pierced by his own spear, from Yggdrasil, the tree of the world. Another Eddic poem, the Rígthula, tells how the god Heimdall transmitted knowledge of the runes to humans.

In the case of Futhorc, we know the names assigned to some runes from medieval manuscripts, while others can be deduced from other Germanic runic alphabets. Twenty-nine Futhorc runes are quoted in an Anglo-Saxon runic poem in which each verse sets a puzzle for which the name of a rune is the solution. There are two other runic poems that follow a similar scheme – one Icelandic, the other Norwegian – although they both use the 16 runes of Younger Futhark. There are also several runic calendars of Scandinavian origin that use Younger Futhark to indicate days and the phases of the moon. These calendars use the metonic cycle of 19 years, after which the dates of the year again correspond to the same phases of the moon. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that some of the runes on Thrór’s map can be read only in a very specific part of the metonic cycle. Furthermore, the secret gate to Erebor is endowed with a magical opening system based on a conjunction between the Moon and the Sun.

Sometimes Tolkien put a dot below a rune in order to indicate that the letter was doubled, as in the word . It must also be pointed out Tolkien did not always use Anglo-Saxon runes along strictly historical lines in his Legendarium. For example, the rune , which he used for the sound ‘oo’ (as in ‘book’), is not to be found in any Anglo-Saxon script. Furthermore, Futhorc contains more signs than those used by Tolkien in The Hobbit.

Runic texts can also be found on the title page of The Lord of the Rings and inside the book itself: in the inscription on Balin’s tomb, in extracts from The Book of Mazarbul, etc. Once again, Tolkien is playing a game with his reader, who can decipher more details from The Book of Mazarbul than from the incomplete text that Gandalf reads to his companions. The runic system of The Lord of the Rings is different, however, from that of The Hobbit, as Tolkien was now using runes that he himself invented – Cirth, supposedly created in the First Age by the Elf Daeron, minstrel to the king of Doriath, Thingol. Cirth was used for a long time by the Sindar Elves, but it was also adopted by the Dwarves, who modified it for their own purposes. They even came up with a new way of writing Cirth, with the help of a silver pen: their moon-runes could be read only by allowing moonlight to shine through them – and in some cases, the Moon had to have the same shape and season as the time at which they were written. When the Noldor returned to Beleriand, however, the Sindar Elves turned to Tengwar, and thereafter Cirth was kept alive only by Dwarves and the Men with whom they traded.

In one manuscript that long remained unpublished, Tolkien supplied details of the ‘Runes used by Thorin & Company’, accompanied by the English nouns that he attributed to them. These are presented below in alphabetical order, taking into account variants found in the main texts :

Letter	Sound		Rune
A	[a]	oak
A	[o]	ox
A	[æ]	ash
B	[b]	birch
C	[k]	care
CH	[tch]	child
D	[d]	day
E	[e]	elm
EA	[i:]	ear
EE	[i:]	eel
EO, IO(1)	[o]	ice-ox
F	[f], [v]	fire
G	[g], [j]	gift
GH	[gh]	ghost
H	[h]	hail
I	[i]	ice
J(2)	[j]	joy
K	[k]	kin
L	[l]	land
M	[m]	man
N	[n]	need
NG	[]	anger
O OO	[o]	ox
OO	[u]	ooze
P	[p]	pine
Q(2)	[qu]	quill
R	[r]	road
S	[s]	sun
SH	[ch]	shield
ST(3)	[st]	*stone
T	[t]	tongue
TH	[þ], [ð]	thorn
U	[u]	urn
V(2)	[v]	vane
W	[w]	wine
X(4)	[ks]	axle	or
Y	[y]	yew
Z(4)	[z]	zinc	or

Cirth bears a superficial resemblance to Futhorc, as several letters are identical in both alphabets (although they represent completely different sounds). Unlike Futhorc, however, Cirth has a regular structure, and similar sounds, such as ‘k’ and ‘g’, have similar forms ( and instead of and ). Tolkien explained how the several variants of Cirth work in Appendix E to The Lord of the Rings. In one of his letters, he stated that Cirth comprises the authentic alphabet of the Dwarves, and that the Anglo-Saxon runes are merely a representation. As the story of Middle-earth purportedly unfolds in a mythical past, it was impossible for the Dwarves to have used a system that wasn’t invented until the start of our era.

1 – In this unpublished table, Tolkien specified that the combinations ‘io’ and ‘eo’ could be represented by the supplementary sign , which did not form part of the normal series but served as a combination of I and O.

2 – Tolkien also indicated here that, although J was usually represented by the rune for I, the special form could equally be used. There was no rune for Q, and the QU group had to be represented by the combination of runes for CW, although the form could be used for QU. Finally, V was traditionally represented by the rune for U, but the form could act as a substitute. These three special signs were not considered as real letters in this runic alphabet.

3 – The rune for ST is missing from this table, but the Introduction to The Hobbit indicates that this sound was sometimes used, as in the Anglo-Saxon name ‘Stan’ (‘Stone’) that Tolkien claimed as his own.

4 – In the table, Tolkien indicates that the runes for X and Z, and x, denoted, respectively, ‘axle’ and ‘zinc’. In the introduction to The Hobbit, however, the runes for X and Z are, respectively, and z.

Tengwar

‘As Frodo did so, he now saw fine lines, finer than the finest penstrokes, running along the ring, outside and inside: lines of fire that seemed to form the letters of a flowing script.’(The Lord of the Rings, I, 2).

The tengwar were the letters forming part of a writing system of Elvish that was intended, unlike runes, for handwriting and calligraphy rather than engraving. Tengwar letters were used by various other peoples.

The Noldor, the Deep-Elves who went Westward, beyond the sea, to Valinor, declared that these letters were created by Finwë’s son, Fëanor, the greatest of all of them, responsible for both the misfortune that had befallen them and their days of glory. The word tengwar is the plural of tengwa, meaning ‘letter’. The Sindar, who were in the majority in Middle-earth at the time of Bilbo Baggins, in the Third Age, used a word taken from their own language (Sindarin) to denote these letters that had come from the West: tîw. Tengwar comprised one of the three writing systems invented by the Elves, along with Sarati and Cirth. Sarati was invented by Rúmil, a Noldo, and it inspired Fëanor to create Tengwar. Sarati constituted a phonographic system – in other words, every sign corresponded to a sound. They could thus be applied to various languages, on the basis of pronunciation. Sarati never seems to have left Valinor, and it was never used in Middle-earth. Fëanor decided, at an early age, to improve Rúmil’s writing system. His new script was quickly adopted, and it was then taken to Middle-earth when the Noldor returned there. The Sindar who were already there initially tended to favour the Elf Daeron’s Cirth but they soon forsook it in favour of Tengwar, which established itself as the Elves’ main writing system. Tengwar served to transcribe all the Elvish languages, but as these contained distinct phonemes (sounds), Tengwar letters were not used in the same way in each case and thus came to require different modes. Some modes are phonetic, while others are more alphabetical. The sound of an individual tengwa can also change, as its pronunciation can vary according to the mode in which it is being used.

Most of the known modes of Tengwar follow the lines of consonant alphabets, as only consonants are written in Tengwar, with tehtar (a system of diacritical dots and accents) placed above or below to indicate vowels. In Quenya, the tehtar are usually placed on the preceding consonant, while in Sindarin they are placed on the following consonant. In the mode used in Beleriand, however, vowels are written in the same way as consonants (during the War of the Ring, the Fellowship of the Ring came across this mode on the Gates of Durin, at the entrance to the mines of Moria). The Elves were not alone in taking advantage of the Tengwar. So, for instance, the One Ring found by Bilbo in the Goblins’ caves, which enabled him to win the duel of riddles against Gollum, revealed an inscription in Tengwar when it was thrown on a fire – and this same inscription would be discovered by Gandalf years after the end of the Quest of Erebor. It was not written in any Elvish language, however, but in Dark Speech, the language of Sauron the Necromancer.

Tolkien also invented several modes for writing English with Tengwar. He unveiled his first version of Tengwar to the public with the reprint of the first edition of The Hobbit in English, in 1937. That edition contained an illustration that has since become famous, showing the Dragon Smaug, stretched out on his pile of gold, a small silhouette of Bilbo and, in the left foreground, an earthenware jar bearing an inscription in Tengwar. This cannot be read in full, as it is partly hidden by a ladder, but its sense can be deciphered: ‘gold [of] th[rór] thráin/ accursed [be] the thief’.