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One Ring Rules the MIT Dome
Patiwat Panurach writes "The Great Dome of MIT was overtaken on the morning of Monday the 17th by a great golden ring, inscribed in red Elvish with text that translates to: "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them." The hackers were apparently not completely successful, for neither the Great Dome nor Building 10 managed to vanish into the realm of shadows."
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The script on the ring was in Sindarin, one of the Elvish languages. Gandalf says (p. 80 in my copy of FOTR), "The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here."
Note, however, the commonly used character set in Middle Earth is Tengwar. The characters used on the MIT dome are indeed Tengwar. I haven't been able to find an image of the complete ring on the dome, so I can't fully translate it, but it does appear to be correct, from what I can see.
(Yes, I am truly a geek when it comes to Tolkien).
Actually, the script -- or "character set", as you put it, is the Tengwar. Tengwar and Cirth are the common character sets throughout Middle-Earth. Cirth (runes) is used for carving in stone or clay; Tengwar for writing with pen or brush and for ornamentation.
However, the Tengwar can be used in several different ways, or "modes". Each mode is a mapping of the sounds of a language onto the character set. Quenya uses one mapping; Sindarin another; and so forth. The most distinction between modes is whether they place vowel signs atop the consonant preceding or following the vowel sound. However, the consonant sounds attributed to the characters also vary. For instance, the character for "n" in one language may represent "ng" in another.