A short history of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish scripts

This blog post is about one of my special interests: the development of J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented scripts. J.R.R. Tolkien was a linguist and author (The Lord of the Rings, etc.) and also a passionate inventor of languages and scripts. Especially his Elvish script Tengwar is not world-famous. Tolkien did not invent this script in one day, not in a year either. It is the result of more than 20 years of experimenting with different scripts. In this post, I want to trace the process that led to the Tengwar from the 1910s to the 1930s and discuss possible sources of inspiration. While the development of Tolkien’s invented languages is pretty well-known within pop culture, the history of his scripts is often neglected. This post is mainly based on the research that other Tolkien scholars have done but which unfortunately is often not accessible for the general public.

This post is a revised version of a talk about Tolkien’s scripts that I gave a couple of years ago in German. You can still find it online. In this post, I will only deal with the Elvish scripts, defined as those invented writing systems that Tolkien associated with the Elves and that are not runes. I will deal with the runes in a later blog post.

Why did Tolkien invent scripts?

For the most part of his life, Tolkien did not make his living as an author but rather as a philologist. A philologist is a linguist (an expert in languages) who researches the history and literature of one specific language or a group of closely related languages. In Tolkien’s case, these languages were first and foremost Middle and Old English. He taught about these languages in Oxford as a professor. Therefore, languages and scripts were Tolkien’s daily job.

Tolkien differs from many other authors in that he did not create languages and scripts for his stories and characters but rather stories and characters for his languages and scripts. In 1955, Tolkien wrote in a letter “The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.” (Letter #165)

This approach had consequences for the development of Tolkien’s invented scripts. Tolkien did not sit down one day and think “Today, I will invent a script for the Elves.” The development of the scripts until they reached the form, we are familiar with today, took 10 to 20 years. In short, Tolkien invented languages and script because he had the skills and the wish to do so.

Tolkien was not the only person during his lifetime who invented languages and scripts as a hobby. You may be familiar with the term “ConLang” for “constructed language” for invented languages. In analogy, there are also “ConScripts”, “constructed scripts”. “NatLangs” or “NatScripts”, on the other hand, are “natural languages or scripts”, languages or scripts that developed in a natural way and that were not invented by a person or a group of people. In contrast to ConLangs of which only a few are relevant in most peoples’ day to day life, ConScripts got quite far. An example for a successful ConScript is the Armenian alphabet, which was invented around 405 CE by Mesrop Mashtots (362-440) and which is still in use today.

More examples for ConScripts that are used for natural languages are the Korean Hangul, the Cherokee syllabary or the N’Ko script for the language Manding in West Africa.

Tolkien’s invented scripts did not make it that far. But they are regarded as prototypical ConScripts and especially Tengwar will be for many people the first ConScript that comes to mind.

If you are interested into Tolkien’s scripts, you should always consult “Appendix E” of The Lord of the Rings first. There, you will find the most important information, written by Tolkien himself and therefore in any case correct. You can also find lots of information on the internet but not all of them are reliable. More material on Tolkien’s invented languages can be found in The History of Middle-earth.

The backstory of the scripts is documented in two journals, which are dedicated to Tolkien’s languages and scripts, Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar. Unfortunately, these are often difficult to access. Therefore, I will add specimens from them here.

Which Elvish scripts did Tolkien create?

Specimens of Tolkien’s Elvish scripts can be classified into four types. From 1919 to 1925, Tolkien used the Alphabet of Rúmil, also called Sarati. From 1922 to 1925, he wrote in the Valmaric script. From these two scripts, he then developed a number of scripts that are called Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets. From 1931 onwards, Tengwar-like scripts occur, but Tolkien used the name “Tengwar” only a while later. All these scripts have in common that they are written in a flowing manner and have lots of bows.

Why am I talking about different types of scripts and not just scripts? In a way, Tolkien’s scripts are similar to medieval manuscripts: there is a huge amount of variation. Almost every text and note by Tolkien forms its own scriptal variety. Specimens can still be assigned relatively easy to one of the four types but they each form a variant of this type of script.

In the following history of the Elvish scripts, I will compare Tengwar with later scripts.

The Alphabet of Rúmil/Sarati

The oldest known invented Elvish script by Tolkien is the “Alphabet of Rúmil”, also known as “Sarati”. Tolkien used it from around 1919 to the mid-1920s. The script can be written top to down, right to left or left to right. Often, the letters “hang” on a line, as is shown in the example on the right.

A comparison of the Sarati and the later Tengwar does not reveal many similarities between the two scripts. But the letters for “t”, “d”, “p” and “b” are similar. In the picture below, the Sarati letters are on the left and the Tengwar letters are on the right. The letters have the same number of bows and the line in “p” and “b” can already be found in the Sarati letters.

Tolkien first used the Sarati as a “secret code” for his diaries and only later connected them with the Elves.

Valmaric

Valmaric is the second known Elvish script by Tolkien. He used it between 1922 and 1925, at the same time as he also used Sarati. In fact, Valamaric is an umbrella term for a variety of scripts since the sound-letter correspondence varies a lot. The most famous specimen of Valmaric is found on Tolkien’s image Lunar Landscpae (cf. this website).

At first glance, Valmaric can be easily confused with Tengwar. This excerpt of Beowulf looks a lot like later specimens of Tengwar.

However, a comparison of Valmaric and Tengwar discloses that only two letters share their sound-letter correspondence between the two scripts, namely “k” and “g”. Other letters are found in both scripts but the sound-letter correspondence is different, e.g.  Valmaric “p” and “b”. Other Valmaric letters do not occur among the Tengwar at all.

The Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets

In the late 1920, Tolkien experimented with more letter shapes and the scripts he used during this time are becoming closer and closer to the form of the Tengwar. The scripts are collectively called “Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets” in the literature but their actual form and sound-letter correspondences vary a lot. There are many letters which later occur among the Tengwar as well. But others have vanished, like the letters in the red boxes below.

The Tengwar

From 1931 onwards, the Elvish scripts used by Tolkien can be called Tengwar, even though Tolkien did not yet use this name then. Below, you see an excerpt from the Lay of Leithian, which is published in the volume The Lays of Beleriand of the History of Middle-earth. Please apologize the bad quality, the print is quite blurry.

This script does not only look like the later Tengwar, the sound-letter correspondence also matches to almost 100%. The table below shows the letters that are used in the excerpt from the Lay of Leithian. The sound-letter correspondence differs to the Tengwar only in details. For example, the letter that represent “sh” here is later used for “hw”. On the other hand, the letter that looks a little bit like a “2” and represents “w” does not occur among the later Tengwar.

The Tengwar were revealed to the world for the first time in 1937 in the image Conversation with Smaug, which Tolkien had made for the Hobbit und which can be found in several editions of that book. On a jar, several curses in Tengwar are inscribed. This inspricption is known as the The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription.

Tolkien used the Tengwar for the rest of his life and for a multiple of different texts.

Re-inventions or continuation?

One interesting question that arises from the history of the Elvish scripts is whether these scripts are the outcome of an uninterrupted creative process that eventually led to the Tengwar, or whether they are independent inventions that were only loosely connected in Tolkien’s mind. In the previous sections, I have pointed out returning, and often not returning, letter shapes and sound-letter correspondences. In summary, concerning these two aspects, the scripts vary a lot. Tolkien did adopt single letters from older scripts but it is only from the Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets onwards that we can see a continuous use of most letters.

But there is one aspect of Tolkien’s invented scripts that he used consequently from the first Sarati to the last Tengwar, and that is the systematic structure of the scripts, based on phonological features.

For you to understand this this structure better, I will insert a quick excursion about phonology (the study of sounds). If you say “p”, “t” and “k” (in this order), you will notice that your tongue moves through your mouth to the back. “p” is formed with the lips. For “t”, the tongue tips against the alveolar ridge behind the teeth. And for “k”, the tongue retracts and hits against the soft palate. If you say “p” and “b”, “t” and “d” and “k” and “g” and at the same time but your hand against your throat, you will notice that while saying “b”, “d” and “g” something moves inside your throat. That is your glottis (or your vocal folds). You can feel this movement even better when you say “ssssss” and “zzzzzz”. When saying “zzzzzz” the vocal folds will vibrate since “z” is voiced. For “s” you won’t feel any movement since “s” is voiceless.

This distinction in the place of articulation and the voice of sounds was integrated, among other features, by Tolkien into his scripts. In the table below, the sounds in the yellowish fields are formed with the lips. For the sounds in the greenish fields, the tongue reaches towards the teeth or the alveolar ridge. And for the sounds in the bluish fields, the tongue retracts to the soft palate. The voiced sounds of one more bow than the voiceless sounds.

This system is also found in the other Elvish scripts, but in a still more rudimentary form. For example, both the Sarati and the Valmaric script use bows to mark differences in voice. The basic idea of a feature-based scripts is already found in the Sarati while the shape of the letters changed a lot.

How are the Elvish scripts integrated into Tolkien’s Legendarium?

The word Legendarium refers to Tolkien’s invented mythology as a whole. Just like it is the case with the scripts, the Legendarium was in constant change too.

In Tolkien’s main work The Lord of the Rings only two of the scripts discussed above are mentioned, Tengwar and Sarati. The Sarati are only referred to in one and a half sentences and Tolkien is pretty vague about them: “The oldest Eldarin letters, the Tengwar of Rúmil, were not used in Middle-earth. The later letters, the Tengwar of Fëanor, were largely a new invention, though they owed something to the letters of Rúmil.” This is all we learn about Sarati in The Lord of the Rings (Appendix E). Rúmil was an Elf who lived in the city Tirion in Valinor (cf. The Silmarillion, chap. VI). Partly based on the Sarati, Fëanor (when he wasn’t busy creating Silmarils) created the Tengwar. Since Sarati and Tengwar were written with brush and quill, they got their round and flowing shape. The Noldor brought the Tengwar to Middle-earth and they came to be used everywhere there. Since they were used to write different languages, the letters are used for different sounds (resulting in different Tengwar modes). This is shown in the table above in the differently colored boxes. Tolkien fans are often confused by these changing sound-letter correspondences since they do not know which Tengwar mode they should learn.

Which scripts may have inspired Tolkien?

One of the favorite pastime activities of Tolkien fans is to speculate about possible sources of inspiration for Tolkien. This is especially interesting for the Elvish scripts since Tolkien himself has never commented about their origin. Therefore, I will end this post with some speculations about this topic.

In the section “Re-inventions or continuation?”, I have shown that Tolkien Elvish scripts are (partly) based on phonological features. The next question is whether Tolkien came up with this structure himself or whether he got it from another script. There are some NatScripts, natural scripts, that are ordered in a systematic way, for example the Indian Devanagari that are used to write Hindi and other languages. In the common display of the Devanagari, the rows represent the place of the articulation and the columns represent voice and whether a sound is aspirated or not.

In contrast to the Tengwar, the letter shapes of the Devenagari are not as systematic. We cannot derive from the shape of a letter how it is pronounced, as we can do with the Tengwar. It is therefore possible that Tolkien was inspired by the Devanagari to use a systematic structure for his script but that he then perfected this system. This is supported by the fact that the older Elvish script like the Sarati are only partly based on phonological features and the letter shapes are still quite random.

The Devanagari are also reminiscent of the Sarati when it comes to the line on which the letters are “hanging” in both scripts. The shape of the letters is also a little similar. This is also claimed by Tolkien linguist Arden R. Smith in a paper (Smith 2001).

Why should Tolkien have cared about Indian scripts? As a philologist, Tolkien was also involved in language comparison. Hindi and its distant ancestor Sanskrit are Indo-European languages and has distantly related to English. Therefore, Tolkien certainly knew about the languages and their scripts though he probably was not very proficient in them.

Smith is further of the opinion that Sarati without a line are reminiscent of Hiragana, one of the three Japanese scripts. I personally cannot really see that. Both scripts can be written from top to down but this is really the only the similarity I can find. Tolkien decorated his college rooms with Japanese art prints. He probably knew what the script looked like.

Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter describes the Sarati as “a mixture of Hebrew, Greek, and Pitman’s shorthand” (Carpenter: 101), the latter being a system of shorthand.  Tolkien was definitely familiar with the first two and may have known the third one. Maybe Carpenter’s reference to Hebrew is not about letter shapes but concerns the vowel diacritics that are used in the Sarati script (as well as for the later Tengwar). Vowels are not written as full letters but as dots and strokes above or below the consonants.

I have my own theory about a potential source of inspiration for the Sarati. In my opinion, the Sarati show a strong resemblance to the Sogdian alphabet. Sogdian was an important middle Iranian language and hence also related to English and Sanskrit. However, I have no proof that Tolkien ever studied Sogdian to any extent. Sogdian is written from top to down without a line and the letter shapes are superficially similar to the Sarati too.

The modern Mongolian alphabet is a descendent of the Sogdian script. This script reminds me of the Sarati with a connecting line. Mongolian is written top to down as well. But fortunately, I cannot prove a connection between Tolkien and Mongolian. The similarity also means that the two scripts look similar, it does not necessarily mean that one influenced the other.

Concerning the Tenwgar, Jim Allan pointed out that they have a strong resemblance to the ConScript Universal Alphabet by Francis Lodwick (1619-1694). The two scripts share their systematic ordering and composition of the letters. There is no proof that Tolkien knew this ConScript but since he was generally interested and ConLangs and ConScripts, it is not impossible that he did. As I have shown above, Tolkien invented feature based scripts before the Tengwar, hence the inspiration must precede this script.

Tolkien was certainly inspired to some letter shapes of the Tengwar by the so-called Insular Script. This term subsumes several medieval scripts that we used on the British Isles. Tolkien seems to have adopted several letter shapes but assigned completely different sound values to them. For example, the insular “t” looks like the Tengwar “l”.

Tolkien draw inspiration for his scripts from a wide variety of sources. He then combined and reworked them into something completely new, just as he did with his stories.

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Sources

website about Tengwar and Sarati (with free fonts): https://at.boktypografen.se/

Allan, Jim. 1978. A Parallel to the Tengwar. In An Introduction to Elvish. Hayes: Bran’s Head. 276-279.

Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin.

Carpenter, Humphrey. 1981. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. London: Allen & Unwin.

Hammond, Wayne G. & Christina Scull. 2000. J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin.

O’Brien, Donald. 1990. The Tengwar Text of ll. 3994-4027 of the ‘A’ Text of “The Lay of Leithian”. Vinyar Tengwar 10. 9-12.

Scull, Christina & Waye G. Hammond. 2017. Writing Systems. In Reader’s Guide. Part II. London: HarperCollins. 1146-1450.

Smith, Arden R. 1995. The Túrin Prose Fragment: An Analysis of a Rúmilian Document. Vinyar Tengwar 37. 15-23.

Smith, Arden R. 2001. The Alphabet of Rúmil: Documents by J.R.R. Tolkien. Parma Eldalembaron 13. 3-89.

Smith, Arden R. 2003. The Valmaric Script: Documents by J.R.R. Tolkien. Parma Eldalamberon 14. 87-134.

Smith, Arden R. 2006. Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets. Parma Eldalamberon 16. 5-16.

Smith, Arden R. 2007. Alphabets, Invented. In Drout, Michael D.C. (Hrsg.) J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. New York, London: Routledge. 11-14.

Smith, Arden R. 2012. The Qenya Alphabet. Parma Eldalamberon 20.

Swann, Donald & J.R.R. Tolkien. 1978². The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle. London: Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J.R.R. & Christopher Tolkien (Hrsg.) 2015. The Lays of Beleriand (The History of Middle-earth 3). London: HarperCollins.

Tolkien, J.R.R. & Christopher Tolkien (Hrsg.) 2015. The Treason of Isengard (The History of Middle-earth 7). London: HarperCollins.

Tolkien, J.R.R. 1995². The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins

Tolkien, J.R.R. 2007. The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again. London: HarperCollins.

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