Tengwar: Elvish Transcription
At tengwar.3rin.gs you will find a transcriber for the elvish languages that J.R.R. Tolkien created and appear in Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and other works of his “Legendarium”.
I would advise you to pay an expert to check your work before imprinting a transcription on metal or your own flesh.
This is a good tool for doing a first-approximation transcription and does not capture all the nuances of Tolkien’s ever-changing modes for writing Elvish. However, this tool is much more polite than typing out the underlying text by hand:
tlE xr^5#P5$= 7E2`CÁ
I also produced a prototype for a transcriber that shows its work:
Visit the about page to learn about the creation of this tool. The software behind the transcriber is open source:
- tengwarjs is the JavaScript library that performs the transcription and an example of the design pattern that shall not be named. This tool supports continuous deployment to tengwar.3rin.gs using Vercel which means that you (yes, you) can help prevent typos in tattoos and wedding rings.
- @gutentags/tengwar.html is the latter “self-explaining transcriber”.
To learn about the Tengwar, the best resource available is Måns Björkman Berg’s Amanye Tenceli. Parf Edhellen is the best resource for casually discovering Elvish vocabulary.
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