TLDR: I put 200 names in Tengwar onto t-shirts, available in the RealElvish Store now!
In this epic quest, I stumbled upon this: USA’s Social Security Administration’s Top Names Over the Last 100 Years. It’s not perfect, but it’s a starting point. That, plus running across some truly awful attempts by product sellers to put names in tengwar on t-shirts. Instead of doing something destructive like naming and shaming, I decided to be more constructive and make my own line of names in Tengwar on t-shirts.
I asked my talented artist wife to make a nice, gender-neutral border to the names, because I wanted these to be a little more than just names on t-shirts. Then I went to work! I transliterated the top 200 names, then added a few names of family members because I want to be able to give these as Christmas presents to people.
In the process, I had to research how Spanish and Italian fans had adopted the Tengwar to their own languages, for names originating from them that hadn’t been Anglicized. Here are links to articles describing them:
Modo de escritura Tengwar para el castellano
If there are any names that are missing from the selection I’ve provided, let me know! Now that I have all of the pieces together, I can easily add more names to the store. The printing and shipping is handled through Printful, a print-on-demand service.
The names in the image are (from left to right): Kimberly, Abigail, William, and Alexander.
Márienna!