Tengwar

• 1. Introduction

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  Tengwar is a writing system invented by J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, and it is unlike almost any script in the history of human language. Its letters are not arbitrary symbols. Each stroke, each curve, each stem encodes something about how the sound it represents is made inside the mouth. That design principle alone would make Tengwar remarkable. But Tengwar's story runs deeper than a single clever idea. It has a fictional history stretching back to an Elf named Fëanor in a land called Valinor. It has a real history beginning in the late 1920s and ending, in some sense, never, because fans, football players, and film actors are still writing and wearing it today. How did Tolkien build a script with its own internal logic? What did he write in it? And why, decades after his death, are people tattooing Tengwar onto their forearms?

• 2. Before Tengwar

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  Tolkien did not arrive at Tengwar in a single leap. A script he called the sarati, developed in the late 1910s and described in Parma Eldalamberon 13, already pointed toward what Tengwar would become. The sarati used diacritics to represent vowels, a method that later became central to many Tengwar varieties. Its letter shapes also foreshadowed Tengwar forms, and some connections between sound features and letter shape were already emerging, though inconsistently.

  Closer still was the Valmaric script, described in Parma Eldalamberon 14, which Tolkien used from roughly 1922 to 1925. Valmaric carried many Tengwar shapes and introduced an inherent vowel for the sound 'a', a feature found in some Tengwar varieties. Two samples, designated V12 and V13, display an arrangement very similar to the arrangement of primary Tengwar letters in the classical Quenya mode.

  The lineage does not stop with Tolkien's own earlier work. In his book An Introduction to Elvish, Jim Allan compared Tengwar to a Universal Alphabet devised by the London merchant Francis Lodwick in 1686. Allan's comparison rested on both the correspondence between shape features and sound features, and on the actual forms of the letters themselves.

• 3. A Script Takes Shape

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  Tengwar was probably developed in the late 1920s or early 1930s. The first published sample to reach readers was the Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, which dates to 1937. The complete explanation of how the system works did not appear until Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, published in 1955.

  Before that public explanation arrived, only a handful of samples existed. Among them: the Middle Page and the Last Page from the Book of Mazarbul, both originally prepared for inclusion in The Lord of the Rings itself. A 1937 sample called Ilbereth's Greeting appeared in The Father Christmas Letters. Edwin Lowdham's Manuscript, from The Notion Club Papers, dates to 1945-6 and carries Old English text in Tengwar, with a few words in Adunaic and Quenya. A set of Brogan Tengwa-greetings, appearing in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien as letter number 118, is tentatively dated to 1948.

  The Mellonath Daeron Index of Tengwar Specimina, known by the abbreviation DTS, now catalogues most of the known Tengwar samples by Tolkien. Many predating the publication of The Lord of the Rings reached the public only after Tolkien's death. Among these posthumous releases are three samples called Elvish Script Sample I, II, and III, which contain parts of the English poems Errantry and Bombadil. They were first published in the Silmarillion Calendar in 1978.

• 4. The Fictional Origin

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  Inside Tolkien's fictional world, the Tengwar carry their own detailed history. Fëanor, an Elf of Valinor, created the script to write the Elven tongues Quenya and Telerin. According to The War of the Jewels, Fëanor introduced a new terminology at the same time he introduced the script. A written representation of a spoken sound, called a tengwe, was given the written form tengwa. The previous word for any letter or symbol had been sarat, derived from the Elvish word 'sar', meaning 'to incise'.

  Fëanor based his work on an earlier alphabet created by Rúmil of Tirion, which had itself been known as the Sarati. After Fëanor's adaptation, Rúmil's alphabet became known as the "Tengwar of Rúmil". The plural of tengwa is tengwar, and that is the name the new script acquired.

  As the Tengwar spread beyond Valinor into the land of Beleriand, the Sindarin-speaking Elves adopted them under their own name. By loan-translation, the Tengwar became tîw in Sindarin, with the singular form têw. Sindarin had its own older writing system, the cirth, whose name derives from kirte, meaning 'cutting', making it semantically parallel to Quenya's own earlier term sarat.

• 5. How the Letters Work

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  The most striking feature of Tengwar's design is that letter shapes directly encode phonetic information. Quenya consonants fall into five places of articulation, and the Tengwar are organized to match. Dental sounds belong to the first column, called tincotéma. Labial sounds belong to the second column, parmatéma. Velar sounds belong to the third column, calmatéma. Labialized velar sounds belong to the fourth column, quessetéma. Palatal sounds, called tyelpetéma, share the third column's letters but carry an added diacritic to signal a following 'j' sound.

  The rows add another layer of encoded meaning. 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. A listener familiar with linguistics will recognize that those rows are tracking manner of articulation, just as the columns track place of articulation.

  Most letters are built from two basic elements: a vertical stem, either long or short, and one or two rounded bows. Specific transformations apply consistently across the system. Doubling the bow turns a voiceless consonant into a voiced one. Raising the stem above the line turns the letter into the corresponding fricative. Shortening the stem creates the corresponding nasal. The parmatéma series illustrates the logic well. The basic sign, parma, with its descending stem, represents the sound 'p'. Double the bow and it becomes umbar, representing 'b'. Raise the stem and it becomes formen, representing 'f'. Raise the stem and double the bow and it becomes ampa, representing generally 'v'.

• 6. Vowels, Diacritics, and Modes

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  Vowels in Tengwar are handled differently depending on the mode being used. In the ómatehtar modes, vowels are written as small diacritical marks, called tehtar, placed above or below a consonant rather than as full letters. Tolkien explained in Appendix E that these vowel marks resemble Latin diacritics: the circumflex for 'a', the acute for 'e', a dot for 'i', a left curl for 'o', and a right curl for 'u'. Long vowels, except for 'a', can be indicated by doubling the signs. When a vowel appears alone without an adjacent consonant to attach to, it is written on a special symbol called the vowel carrier.

  The Black Speech inscription on the One Ring uses an ómatehtar mode, placing the vowel stroke on the consonant following it rather than the consonant preceding it. Quenya does the opposite, placing the vowel stroke on the preceding consonant.

  For languages that use full written vowels rather than diacritics, the mode of Beleriand exists. That mode is the one Tolkien carved on the Doors of Durin. Since the publication of The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, scholars and enthusiasts have devised modes for numerous other languages: English, Spanish, German, Swedish, French, Finnish, Italian, Hungarian, Welsh, and the constructed languages Esperanto and Lojban, among others. Tolkien himself used multiple modes for English, including full writing modes and phonetic ómatehtar modes.

• 7. Encoding Tengwar for Computers

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  Representing Tengwar on computers has required creative solutions, because no standard encoding exists for the script. The de facto standard in the Tengwar user community maps the characters onto ISO 8859-1, following the typefaces created by Dan Smith. The flaw is plain: without a Tengwar font installed, the same text displays as meaningless characters from the Latin extended set. Because ISO 8859-1 offers only 191 codepoints, not enough space exists for every Tengwar sign. A second font, designated Tengwar A, also maps to ISO 8859-1, overlapping the first. Several typeface designers have worked within this system, including Johan Winge, who created Tengwar Annatar; Måns Björkman, who created Tengwar Parmaitë; Enrique Mombello, who created Tengwar Élfica; and Michal Nowakowski, who created Tengwar Formal.

  A proposal to bring Tengwar into the Unicode standard was made by Michael Everson in 1997. The range up to U+160FF in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane was tentatively set aside for Tengwar in the 2023 Unicode roadmap, but that allocation has since been removed.

  The unofficial ConScript Unicode Registry, known as CSUR, offers an alternative by assigning Tengwar to codepoints in the Private Use Area, specifically the range U+E000 through U+E07F. Several typefaces support this registry, including Everson Mono, Tengwar Telcontar, Constructium, and Tengwar Formal Unicode. The eight "Aux" variant fonts in the Kurinto family also support CSUR Tengwar, covering the individual letter names that echo Tolkien's own Quenya terminology: tinco, parma, calma, quesse, and so on across the full alphabet.

• 8. Tengwar Beyond the Page

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  Tengwar has moved well beyond Tolkien scholarship and into everyday life. Fans have engaged with the script since The Lord of the Rings appeared in the 1950s. The Lord of the Rings film trilogy brought a particularly visible demonstration: with the exception of John Rhys-Davies, every actor playing a member of the Fellowship of the Ring received a Tengwar tattoo of the English word 'nine', one for each member of the company. The tattoos bound the cast together in the fictional script their characters had never actually written.

  The script has also found its way onto football pitches. Players including Sergio Agüero and Fernando Torres have had their first names tattooed in Tengwar on their forearms. The appeal seems to rest on the same quality that drew Tolkien to design the system in the first place: Tengwar looks like a real script, because it was built with the internal consistency of one.