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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."
It's making hacks.mit.edu server disappear...
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Victor Danilchenko
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Made me crack up.
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.
Heh. And I'm not even a conlanger. You ain't seen obsessive.
(Honestly, I don't see how knowing facts about something "historical" or literary can qualify as obsessive. Old facts don't change, so they don't require constant pursuit to keep up one's knowledge. Following things which change, such as technology or fashion, requires a great deal more active engagement -- obsession, as you put it -- than knowing dead facts does.)
For a little bit more "obsessive" information on the Ring inscription and Dr. Tolkien's languages: Tolkien used over a dozen invented languages in his works, of which the most well-developed are the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin. Less developed were, for instance, the languages of the Rohirrim, the Adûnaic language of Nûmenor, and the Black Speech of Mordor (the language of the Ring inscription).
The Tengwar, the Elvish script used on the Ring, was Tolkien's attempt at a logical system of writing. The majority of the consonants fall into a simple arrangement which describes the relation of their sounds. For instance, the pairs of sounds ("T", "D"), ("P", "B"), and ("K", "G") all have similar relationships -- in each pair, the latter sound is merely the "voiced" form of the former. So, in the Tengwar, the symbols for these sounds are closely related. A few sounds, such as "L" and the rolled "R" do not fit the system, and have unrelated letterforms.
Historically, very few real-world alphabets have been based on the relationships of sounds. Most "natural" alphabets derive from ancient hieroglyphic or pictographic systems. The Latin letters A, B, C and the Hebrew aleph, beth, gimel both derive from Middle Eastern pictograms meaning "ox", "house", and "camel" -- hence Joyce's "Semper as oxhousehumper." Most "invented" alphabets are derivatives or composites of natural ones. For instance, Cyrillic (created by Sts. Cyril and Methodius and now used to write most of the Slavic languages) is a fusion of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. Cherokee is worse. By comparison, Tolkien's alphabets are radically simple.
However, unlike Prof. Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto), Tolkien did not intend or even imagine that his languages or scripts might be adopted by real-world populations. He invented them as an intellectual or linguistic game, and later as historical and cultural background to his stories. It is in that sense, not in the evangelical Esperantist's sense, that Tolkien fans pursue them.