Parma Eldalamberon (The Book of Elven-tongues) is a journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, a special interest group of the Mythopoeic Society. This new issue presents previously unpublished writings by J. R. R. Tolkien about an early version of one of his invented scripts, edited and annotated by Arden R. Smith, under the guidance of Christopher Tolkien and with the permission of the Tolkien Estate.
The Qenya Alphabet is an edition of Tolkien’s charts and notes dealing with the circa-1931 version of the writing-system later called Fëanorian Tengwar. It includes 40 documents in which Tolkien’s examples of the scripts are reproduced using electronic scans of black-and-white photocopies of the original manuscripts.
Among the documents are explanations of the use of the script for representing English, both phonetically and also according to English spelling. These have charts of the theoretical values of the sounds represented by the letters, and various English words and texts written in the scripts.
There are also numerous specimen texts written by Tolkien in the Qenya Alphabet. There is a great variety of different styles, rounded and angular, and ranging from carefully formal writing to rapid cursive. This is the period when Tolkien made the samples of elvish script first published in the Silmarillion Calendar of 1978, which are now placed in their context within the conceptual development of the Tengwar.
As in previous editions of Tolkien’s earlier writing-systems published in Parma Eldalamberon, the editor has provided transcriptions of the examples texts along with commentary on their dating and historical background.
Parma Eldalamberon Issue Number 20 is a 160-page journal.
Publication Date: 3 August 2012
Cost: $35 per copy including postage and handling world-wide.
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