I was thinking it would be cool to be able to create realistic elvish inscriptions for TOR scenarios, so I started doing a little research. Having spent most of today searching through sites, downloading tengwar fonts and keymaps, and practicing typing tengwar script, I think I can now share with you my "pick of the crop" and my thoughts on what I've discovered so far.

It's fairly easy to convert any text into tengwar using this site:

Tengwar Transcriber

Just type in some english text, select the PNG output format, and click transcribe. The output PNG file can then be saved to disc and imported into Word or whatever so you can use it for your player handouts or as decoration for your own notes.

Here's "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" in Tengwar script:



However, Sindarin is obviously NOT English. It has it's own words for everything, own grammar, etc. Whilst the above can be fun for just generating some random tengwar script, you can go further and first translate your English text into Sindarin.

Here's a site which teaches you Sindarin:

Sindarin Textbook

This has all those familiar grammatical rules you will have seen from the place names in LotR, e.g. Arad - mountain (sing), Ered - Mountains (pl), as in Ered Luin - Blue Mountains.

[EDIT] Whoops, Arad is not singular of Ered, it should be Orod. See dictionaries below:
Alphabetical Sindarin to English Dictionary
Alphabetical English to Sindarin Dictionary

Here we see that Gandalf's elven name of Mithrandir is a combination of Mith (Grey) and Randir (Pilgrim). Now we have some genuine Sindarin we can convert it to tengwar in the transcriber, which yields the following:



If you want to understand more what the tengwar symbols represent phonetically, this is a nice little site:

Write Your Name in Elvish

One thing to note in the above site is that most examples are in Quenya, not Sindarin, as seen by the placement of the vowels. Vowels in Elvish are accents over the preceding character (Quenya) or the following character (Sindarin).

You can even find tengwar truetype fonts and keymaps on the web to allow you to type tengwar but after downloading these and spending lots of time practicing writing text and comparing it with the transcriber site output, I think the transcriber does a good job of generating accurate script and it's a lot easier to use.

[EDIT] Just found this site too, which shows very clearly how to do all the vowel sounds in tengwar script. This explains the "ow" in "brown" in that first bit of tengwar I listed above. Tengwar just means "letters" in Elvish by the way.

Quenya101

And for a bit of practice, here's the first stanza of one of the longest pieces of tengwar script written by Tolkien, a poem called "Namárië" (in Quenya, so remember those vowels go on the preceding consonant, not the following one like in Sindarin). Note also some punctuation marks (exclamation mark, comma and full stop) in tengwar:



Here's the poem using more familiar script, first in Quenya:

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,
yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!
Yéni ve lintë yuldar avánier
mi oromardi lisse-miruvóreva
Andúnë pella, Vardo tellumar
nu luini yassen tintilar i eleni
ómaryo airetári-lírinen.


.. And now, in English:

Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind,
long years numberless as the wings of trees!
The years have passed like swift draughts
of the sweet mead in lofty halls beyond the West,
beneath the blue vaults of Varda
wherein the stars tremble in the song of her voice, holy and queenly.

When I was younger and took biblical Hebrew, I became fascinated by the fact that the plural male ending for nouns was "-im." I immediately thought of the Rohirrim and the Haradrim. I dug into it further, and discovered that Tolkien the linguist not only knew Biblical Hebrew, but actually translated the Book of Jonah for the Jerusalem Bible. I haven't had much chance to look further into his philological work, though, which is something that I eventually want to do, but I am very much interested in the extent to which he was influenced by Hebrew.

Anyways, the point is that this is all terribly interesting, and I am quite proud to have a Tengwar font on my PC.