Why Read the Books? Many fans like to try their hand at writing The Lord of the Rings fan fiction after seeing the movie. I suppose they figure, “Hey, it’s the movie of the book, right? There can’t be that many changes, right?” Luckily, they are wrong. The books are
Fiona J.
Hello! I'm your friendly neighborhood linguist! I grew up on a small sheep and horse ranch in Montana, but now I'm a city-slicker and a college grad, with a degree in English-Linguistics from the University of Montana. I am the owner and head translator of this website.
How to Write Dialogue for Middle-earth Characters
I see it all over the Lord of the Rings fan fiction world, and it makes me sigh. “It” is irrational dialogue. So, I present to you a few simple steps to writing authentic dialogue for the peoples of Middle-earth. Here’s a sample; right now it is modern sounding and
Sea-Longing
In The Lord of the Rings, Legolas hears a seagull’s call and right away starts wanting to go to the sea. Then there all of these other Elves that are leaving Middle-earth in droves, going to the sea. Many fans have wondered about that and started some fanon based on
The Council of Elrond and the Fellowship of the Ring
This essay shouldn’t be necessary. These are two greatly misunderstood events in The Fellowship of the Ring, sadly enough. So, if you’re too lazy to read the books (Go read them now! They’re really good books; I promise!) or need your memory refreshed, here’s a quick summary of each. The
The Origin of Man
The most common and incorrect assumption about Men is that Men of Arda are just like us. Like the Elves, their appearance and strength is based upon their genealogical past. Like the Elves, they have a beginning that is carefully planned out. Men share weaknesses with us, and some of
Graduation
I, dreamingfifi, have graduated from college, with a degree in Linguistics! I’ve now got the letters “BA” after my name. This means some changes will happen around here. Because I don’t have mountains of homework anymore, I can spend more time on the website! The Sindarin lessons will now be
Taking Requests
These updates are pretty minor. I just moved around some of the content. I made a whole section for requesting translations out of the old Need Help? page, so hopefully people can figure out how to request translations more easily. I changed the Need Help? page into a new FAQ page,
Words and Poems
A bigger than usual update for today. I posted two new Sindarin poems: I Chiril os Salod and Ollas Nin o hAuth. I cleaned up the Word Lists page, and got rid of the old wordlists (Except the Adûnaic Dictionary, that has aged much more gracefully). They’re outdated, we have
Dictionaries
I reorganized some links and page a section in my trustworthy websites list for dictionaries, and added a new one: Eldamo.
Kickstarter
Elvish Linguistics Learning Tool The reason that I jumped into this project, other than the obvious, is that I see the potential for this to be useful for teachers and students of languages in general. It makes it easy to learn to read a language, especially one like Japanese or