Basics of Tengwar for Tattoo Seekers

The reasons for getting an Elvish tattoo are many. It marks us to fellow fans. It’s a way to write a secret message on your skin for others who can read it. It proves to the world that you love Tolkien’s works. And most of all, it looks really cool! This is a list of things to consider when getting an “Elvish Tattoo,” written by a linguist who studies Tolkien’s Elven languages and translates for a lot of tattoos. This article is also useful for people who want to get “Elvish inscriptions” on things.

Elvish Basics

The tengwar are NOT a language. “Tengwar” means “letters” in Quenya. It’s just a writing system. It’s a very flexible writing system, where the letters are arranged in a grid, and they can be reassigned different sounds to fit different languages. That means that the tengwa “anta” is used for “NT” in Quenya, but for “DH” in Sindarin, and a hard “TH” when writing English. That means you can’t learn the writing system for one language and be able to go on to write in other languages. You basically have to relearn it for every language.

Speaking of that – there are two different ways to approach writing in English, which have very different uses of Tengwar. The first is writing English phonetically, based on how the words sound. Tolkien used it this way more often, when writing in his diary and for his own use. The upside of this is that we have lots of texts written this way, but the downside is that it’s based on his own dialect of English. If you don’t speak his dialect, then you’ll have to make changes to the script, and other people will have a harder time reading it. But when he wrote for others to see, like the inscription on The Lord of the Rings‘ title page, he wrote using a system based off of English orthography. This is what I recommend. Amongst English speakers, no matter how different our dialects, we still spell everything the same ways. (for the most part, anyways)

And other than those two, Phonetic and Orthographic, there are also the Mode of Beleriand/Northern Variety, which has vowels represented by Tengwar, and the Classical Mode/General Use, which has the vowels represented by Tehtar, which are marks added to Tengwar. The writing on The Lord of the Rings‘ title page is using Tehtar, as well as the famous writing on the One Ring. This is usually what people want, because the tehtar are really pretty. But Tolkien did develop a system for writing English with the vowels in the Tengwar. He wrote several drafts of a letter that Aragorn sent Sam before cutting it from The Return of the King. Some versions were in Sindarin, some in English, some with the Mode of Beleriand, some with the General Use mode. You can view these in Sauron Defeated, Part One, The Epilogue. Since it’s more famous, and people usually find it more aesthetically pleasing, I recommend using the General Use mode.

Now you know about the Tengwar, it’s time to choose the language. The Elven languages that Tolkien developed the most are Sindarin and Quenya. They are part of the same language family, but not mutually intelligible. Also, all translations not made by Tolkien are in Neo-Sindarin and Neo-Quenya. These are the languages expanded by fan theories and fan-made words. They are never made up from nothing – the theories and words are always based on something that Tolkien made. But unless you’re using a translation that Tolkien himself provided, the translation will be by necessity in some form of Neo-Elvish.

One important thing to know is that not all of Tolkien’s writings on his languages have been published yet. There are several groups of people putting together and publishing this data, but it takes a LONG time. It’s been Christopher Tolkien’s life’s work. The current state of things is that we know a lot more about Quenya than we know about Sindarin, since more of Tolkien’s notes and writings on Quenya have been published. As a language used amongst fans, Neo-Sindarin is still rapidly changing, because every publication brings to light fascinating new information on Sindarin grammar. That means translations from 10 years ago, even state-of-the-art ones, are obsolete now. A modern scholar can barely read the translations in the Lord of the Rings movies, the language has changed in our understanding of it so much. Therefore, if you want the language in the tattoo to be an Elven one, I suggest Neo-Quenya. If you want people who study the language to be able to read it in a few years, a Neo-Quenya translation is much less likely to become obsolete.

Finding a Translator

DO NOT use app “translators” or anything where you just put the English in one end and it automatically transcribes for you on the other end. Even the really good ones, like Tecendil, will make errors. These programs cannot sense context, like we humans can. Therefore, hilarious or tragic errors can result. You’ll see an all too common example later on in this article. Using Tecendil is fine for getting an idea of what it’ll look like, but it should not be your last stop.

Don’t try to do this on your own. Languages aren’t something you can easily pick up, especially not something as complex and alien as Tolkien’s languages. You want experts to help you. Human ones. Ones who have studied Tolkien’s languages in depth for at least 5 years. Some people do learn faster than that, true. But you, as someone who doesn’t know these languages, can’t know that. So, trust in time and experience. It’s not foolproof, not in any stretch of the word, but it’s better than nothing.

You also want the expert to be part of the Tolkien Language studying community. That way you can trust that they have at their disposal vast resources to help with the translation, and they have contacts that they can ask to check their translations for errors. Typos and simple errors affect EVERYONE, even someone who has studied for more than a decade. The way you check this is simple – if their website has a list of recommended websites for studying Tolkien’s languages, check that the list has a bunch of websites and resources. Everyone knows about Ardalambion and Parma Tyelpelassiva, you’ll want to check that they are also part of communities like the Discord chatroom Vinyë Lambengolmor. I can’t think of a good Tolkien language website that doesn’t acknowledge the community it’s a part of.

Fonts

This is kinda an offshoot of DON’T TRY TO DO THIS ON YOUR OWN, but it’s a really important topic, so I’m giving it its own section.

No Tengwar font uses a QWERTY keyboard layout. NONE OF THEM. You CANNOT plug in a font and type a text as you normally would. First off, Tengwar use punctuation differently than we do. Second, because the Tengwar are so different from the Latin alphabet, and since they don’t have capital letters, you can’t easily fit the Tengwar onto a QWERTY keyboard. Here. I’ll show you.

Here is a sentence you want to transliterate into Tehtar-Tengwar.

This is it just thrown directly into the font.

Here is a sentence you want to transcribe into Tehtar-Tengwar.

Here is what is says: