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Writing with Elvish Fonts

Posted by michael on from the spanish-is-easier-and-more-useful dept.

dj_whitebread writes "Have you ever wanted to write in the Elvish script? Now's your chance to have your Elvish text look just like Tolkien's. This page gives you all the instructions. The typographer in me has to respect these guy's efforts!"

8 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Elvish Meetups by bluethundr · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you want to understand the invented languages of Tolkien, a good place to start is with a meetup group.

    Some people take their Elvishness pretty sillyessny...erm meant to say seriously... :)

    --
    Quod scripsi, scripsi.
  2. Mirror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    In case the site (or routes to the site) get slashdotted. Here is a mirror.

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    Martin Studio Slashdot Effect Mirror Policy

  3. Conscript/Unicode by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I appreciate the mapping by Daniel and all, but if you are really interested in Cirth and Tengwar, push for the Unicode inclusion. http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/tengwar.htm l and http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1641/n1641. htm

    For a font that does PUA and Plane 15 implementation of this standard use code 2001 from http://home.att.net/~jameskass/code2001.htm

    Logban (A logical language for human speech), Quenya, Sindarian, English, etc. can all be written in Tengwar. I believe there are people using it for just about every language, including esperanto.

    So, while the keymap is nice, use the Unicode stuff and help push it through to final inclusion.

  4. Hardly a new idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    There have been (several) Tengwar variants for TeX for at least 10-20 years....

    I'm just surprised nobody made a set for windows yet, if this is the first one

  5. Re:The battle of the Fonts... by 1u3hr · · Score: 4, Informative
    Tengwar vs. Aurebesh!

    No contest. Tolkien was a language expert. Elvish has all the structure of a real language (loosely based on Finnish, I seem to remember). From a brief look Aurebesh looks like just a substitution code for English (or am I wrong?). There's a lot more to a language than an alphabet. Also, the Elvish scripts are beautiful; and if you like more angular characters, look at his Dwarvish runes.

  6. They all work fine on my Mac.. by caveat · · Score: 4, Informative

    With OS X, just drag the .ttf files to /Library/Fonts and restart any running apps, maybe log out for good measure. Works fine, I just installed all of them.

    --

    Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
  7. Re:The battle of the Fonts... by JorenDahn · · Score: 5, Informative

    >Elvish has all the structure of a real language (loosely based on Finnish, I seem to remember).

    Actually it wasn't based on Finnish at all, but rather inspired by it. It has it's own structure, just like any other language. Quenya was (in some ways) meant to capture the beauty that Tolkien saw in the Finnish language. In the early versions of Quenya he did use some loanwords from Finnish, but those were of course all replaced. Also there are many fundamental differences besides simple words (since it is, of course, it's own language). The modern (or "completed" if you prefer, although he never actually finished them) version have no connections with any real languages. If you get to really know the internal linguistic history of Tolkien's languages you can see how their world was meant to connect to ours (hint: in the LotR movies the Rohirrim speak a real language).

    For some great info on the relationship between the Elvish languages and real world languages (primarily Finnish), check out this great article: http://www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm

    Yes, I'm a big fat nerd. I even have my own page on Tolkien: http://jerek.deciv.com/tolkien.htm

    --
    Blatant self-promotion: Jerek.net
  8. LaTeX has had a Tengwar font for many moons by topologist · · Score: 4, Informative
    Interesting. I'd also like to note that LaTeX, the Knuth/Lamport typesetting system available on a great many platforms (including Windows), has had an elvish font for several years. I am no elvish scholar of course, so I can't comment on the appeal of the LaTeX approach to the elvish cognoscenti :-)
    \documentclass{article}

    \begin{document}

    \newfont{\elvish}{tengwar}

    The One Ring: {\elvish

    Three rings for the elven kings under the sky Nine for mortal men doomed to die Seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone One for the dark lord on his dark throne In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.}

    \end{document}