Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Appendix E, II Writing

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For the second part of Appendix E, Tolkien focused on the writing systems used for Middle-earth languages. Real-world languages use a wide range of systems that can be grouped into “families”, including those descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs, such as variations on the Latin alphabet; East Asian systems based on Chinese characters; Indian and Southeast Asia systems based on the ancient Brahmi script; pre-Columbian languages from Mexico and Central America; and writing systems created by Indigenous Americans to preserve their own languages after European colonization.

The sophisticated writing systems used by the peoples of Middle-earth showed great understanding for the physicality of speech production, or how words come out of a speaker’s mouth. This far exceeded the knowledge of real-world ancient people, as phonetics or the physical process to creating spoken words would not be studied until the late 19th century. By combining his knowledge of history and biomechanics, Tolkien created comprehensive and logical writing systems with enough flexibility to be modified by speakers of multiple languages to best suit their needs.

The Latin Alphabet & Family

The history of the Latin alphabet, which is used to write English and many other European languages, is a fairly common topic. In 1905, archaeologist power couple Sir William Flinders Petrie and Lady Hilda Mary Isabel Urlin Petrie discovered ancient hieroglyphs in Egypt that were not as complicated as the subjectively prettier work done on the walls of public buildings like temples. A favorite item with this writing was a little sphinx. For those of you interested in scandalous tidbits about archeologists, Flinders Petrie was originally the boss of Hilda and eighteen years her senior. Additionally, he was buried without a head, having posthumously donated it to the Hunterian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons in London to aid the study of human skulls in support of eugenics.

Back to the hieroglyphs on the little sphinx, Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner, a leading British Egyptologist, figured out what the writing meant some eleven years later in 1916. The script did not record Ancient Egyptian, but another Semitic language now called proto-Sinaitic, since the artifacts were discovered on the Sinai Peninsula.

The system soon spread to other parts of the Levant and the Mediterranean thanks to the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC. Throughout the Bronze Age, Egypt had been the best place for Semitic people like early Canaanites to live and work. But after major unrest due to natural disasters, climate change, class wars, political instability, and invasions by a poorly-recorded group known as the Sea Peoples, the previously strong Egyptian government had weakened, and people exited the country, bringing this new writing system with them.

Many descendants of this system emerged, each going in their own direction. During the Bronze age between 1700 and 1500 BC, Phoenicians had created a Proto-Canaanite system that relied solely on consonants, also known as an abjad. Today, Hebrew and Arabic are best known for using this type of system, while Aramaic used a similar way of writing. Besides alphabets and abjads are abugidas, also called alphasyllabaries or pseudo-alphabets. Both consonants and vowels always appear in this system as seen in alphabets, but the vowels are notated similarly to the diacritics found in abjads. The Semitic language Ge’ez is an abugida, as are many scripts found in India and southeast Asia to be discussed in a later section.

As Phoenicians traded with Ancient Greeks, these people evidently decided to buy a few vowels, giving rise to the earliest alphabet. As most readers, frat bros, and sorority girls will already know, the word “alphabet” is simply a combination of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. The word arrived into English from Latin around the 1570s through the Latin term alphabetum in an attempt to be fancy. Previously, in the late 1400s, Medieval people had logically called the system ABC or abece, and alphabet books were abecedary.

Back to the developing alphabet, Ancient Romans had to copy much of what Ancient Greeks did with their own twist. In this case, they borrowed the writing system. However, the letters took an intermediary step through Etruscan, as this alphabet appeared around the 8th century BC. Both Greek and Etruscan wrote in the delightful boustrophedon or “turning as an ox in plowing” style, meaning that the first line was written from left to right, and the next line written from right to left. This system must have been faster to read and somewhat easier on the eyes once one learned the system, but remembering how to see a word forwards or backwards must have been tricky. Latin did away with that “nonsense”, and writing has been left to right ever since using that alphabet with notable exceptions for eccentrics like Leonardo da Vinci, who created “mirror writing” as a left-handed person with plenty of enemies.

Plenty of other writing systems come from this same family. The Cyrillic alphabet came around the 9th and 10th century for Orthodox Christians due to the Great Schism of 1054, also known as the East-West Schism, as a way to differentiate their beliefs from that of the Roman Catholic Church. The creation of the system was traditionally credited to a pair of brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, with the latter drawing the short straw, since it was not called Methodiusic instead. Some scholars believed the brothers instead created a similar writing system called Glagolitic. A bit of internet digging revealed that the Old Church Slavonic word glagolu simply meant “word”, “speech”, or “thing”, which is found throughout Slavonic versions of the Bible.

Don’t Forget Cuneiform

While the Latin alphabet and its cousins were under development, another writing system was growing up next door. Cuneiform was the more popular Mesopotamian way of writing created by Sumerians and used by Akkadian empires like the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Chaldeans. Despite thousands of years of usage, from around 3500 BC to 100 BC, humans forgot how to write in this system until the work of Georg Friedrich Grotefend of Germany, who figured it out in 1823.

Several other men from Germany and Great Britain continued his work, leading to the first English language translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh by George Smith in 1872. This blog is much indebted to Smith, as Gilgamesh first appeared in my book review of Old Testament Parallels, along with LOTRAM installments such as “Perspectives on the Sea”, “Overview of Appendix A”, and “Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (ii) The Realms in Exile”. As an added bonus, since the British Museum has not been mentioned for some weeks, it seemed like an opportune time to let readers know that the 1911 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica listed Smith as dying of dysentery at age thirty-six, leaving behind a wife and children, after being sent to Aleppo, Syria by the museum.

East Asian Writing Systems

Outside the West, which includes Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, people created their own writing systems. Chinese writing and the systems derived from it use a different approach than alphabets. The earliest forms of writing that are agreed upon by most academics come from the Shang Dynasty, which lasted between 1600 and 1046 BC. Carved characters appeared on oracle bones, previously mentioned in “Note on the Shire Record” and “Appendix D: Shire Calendar”. Did I say the British Museum had not been mentioned lately? Not so today, since you can find many oracle bones there. A diviner or seer would carve a question on a bone and put it near the fire to crack from the heat. The cracks were examined for answers much like tea leaves in European tradition.

Chinese writing evolved over hundreds of years to form different types of scripts, from Jiaguwen appearing on the oldest Oracle bones to Lishu or Clerky Script used on government documents during the Qin and Han Dynasties, or 221 BC to AD 220. In each variation of the scripts, the characters were called hanzi or logograms, meaning that an entire word or concept was represented, which was the same idea for Egyptian hieroglyphs and some parts of cuneiform. Since we are in the business of words here, it is worth noting that the word logogram is fairly recent to the English language, not appearing until 1840 despite being made of Greek roots, with logo meaning “word” and gram meaning “to draw”.

Back to China and its culture, for most of history, the use of writing was concentrated to government workers and the nobility, only wealthy and powerful people were literate. This all changed in 1949 with the formation of the modern-day Chinese government. While Chairman Mao Zedong (also spelled Tse-Tung) was a controversial figure, especially in the West, he did promote literacy for all people after thousands of years of inequality in China. The World Bank rates adult literacy in China at 97%, which has grown steadily from 65% in 1982; meanwhile, a 2019 study of the National Center for Education Statistics shows that 79% of American adults have sufficient English language literacy.

Characters used in Chinese writing spread to other countries in East Asia. Japan is known for its complex, three-part writing system. Kanji are logograms borrowed from Chinese characters or hanzi, while kana stand for syllables, either hiragana used for native Japanese words or katakana used for loanwords from other languages. Additionally, Arabic numbers and Latin alphabet letters are employed as needed. Multiple scholars have cited Japanese as “the most intricate and complicated writing system ever used by a sizeable population” and even “the worst overall systems of writing ever created”.

Perhaps the most baffling of this disaster is that the system is comparatively not as old. According to Japanese language expert Masayoshi Shibatani, the earliest evidence of a writing system dates back to AD 712 during the Nara Period. This writing reads strangely to modern Japanese speakers, as it uses subject-verb-object (SVO) order as seen in Chinese, along with English, but in contrast to subject-object-verb (SOV) used in Japanese. For example, “I wrote the essay” is SVO, while “I the essay wrote” is SOV. For the nerds overthinking this, Yoda uses object-subject-verb (OSV) “The essay I wrote”.

Moving away from the scary world of written Japanese, written Vietnamese also descended from Chinese script. According to Vietnamese typography expert Donny Trương, Vietnam was a colony under Chinese dynasties from 207 BC to 939 AD making the adoption of Chinese written language compulsory. In Vietnamese, the characters or ideographs are known as chữ Nho meaning “scholars’ script” or chữ Hán or “Han script” after the Han Dynasty, which lasted from 202 BC to 220 AD. Vietnamese writers combined ideographs to form new characters called chữ Nôm, but these were too difficult for the general population to learn. In 1624, Jesuit missionaries Alexandre de Rhodes and Francisco de Pina arrived in Vietnam, laying the groundwork for a written version of Vietnamese using the Latin alphabet. Many other missionaries followed, creating a new system known as Quốc ngữ meaning “national language” or chữ phổ thông meaning “standard script”. Vietnamese people perfected what was started by foreign missionaries, creating what Trương calls a “robust, eloquent, comprehensive writing system”.

These two languages are only scratching the surface of the Chinese script family. Two versions of Khitan Script, one with “small characters” and one with “big characters”, were once used by Khitan people who lived in modern day China. The language was first created around 925 AD and inspired by Chinese characters but has since gone extinct. Its descendent Jurchen script was once used by the ancestors of Manchu people but also fell out of use.

The writing system used in Korea is unique among East Asian writing in that a single person created it. In the 15th century, Korean ruler Sejong the Great, designed Hangeul, literally meaning “Korean letters”, as a reaction against the Chinese characters being used to represent the language at the time. His original system was called Hunminjeongeum or “proper sounds to instruct the people” and contained twenty-eight letters, but the modern version has twenty-four. The system is renowned for being easy to learn, and its creation is celebrated as a national holiday on October 9. Just as exciting for historians is the survival of the original commentary handwritten by Sejong where he described how to use the system. The Haerye Edition of Hunminjeongum Manuscript has been registered as a piece of UNESCO World Heritage since 1997.

Indian & Southeast Asian Writing Systems

The scripts of India and Southeast Asia appear to have originated from a Semitic script, just like Hebrew and Arabic did. The earliest recognized Indian script was Brahmi, which appeared as early as the 8th century BC, although verified examples only date from the 3rd century BC. It may have been derived from the Aramaic writing system used by ancient Persians or the Phoenician script and was an alphasyllabary or abugida, just like Ge’ez.

According to the 2011 India census, 121 languages were recorded as spoken in the country. Additionally, these languages have multiple dialects, the largest being Hindi, which was recorded as having 56 dialects in the census. Because of this vast variety, Brahmi was adopted into many writing systems that best fit local phonetics. Variations on the system spread into Thailand, Tibet, Java, and further to become the recording system for many languages, even those unrelated. For example, the written version of the Dravidian language Telugu spoken by people originally from the southeastern coast of India has similarities to the written version of Sinhala, an Indo-European language on the island Sri Lanka.

Indigenous American Writing Systems

People who lived in the Americas before European colonization had their own recording systems. The Maya Empire had an elaborate writing system, last discussed during “Note on the Shire Record”, which may have been developed from an Olmec system and rose to its height during the Maya Classic period between 250 and 900 AD. Nahuatl script used by Nahua people, which includes Mexica or Aztecs, were used by people living in modern day Mexico and Central America. French linguist Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin first translated documents from the language during the mid-19th century, and his codexes are now in (you guessed it) the British Museum. The pre-contact version of the writing system was syllabic, while later versions of the system were phonetic, apparently influenced by Spanish and the Latin alphabet.

Cherokee linguist and silversmith Sequoyah invented the Cherokee Language Syllabary during the 1820s and even printed a bilingual newspaper, Cherokee Phoenix, in Cherokee and English. Now online, the newspaper will celebrate its 200th birthday in just four years and is still going strong. Far north in Canada, Cree languages have used Cree syllabics since 1840 after the publication of a hymnal in the language. While Wesley Methodist missionary James Evans was long credited for the invention, although he never claimed it, his Ojibwe coworkers Pahtahsega or Peter Jacobs and Sowengisik or Henry Bird Steinhauer likely did much of the work with help from other Indigenous linguists.

Middle-earth Writing Systems

Compared to the myriad of real-world writing systems, Middle-earth has only two main systems by the Third Age (III), both invented by Elves: Tenwar or Tîw meaning “letters” used for brush or pen writing and Certar or Cirth meaning “runes” used for carved inscriptions (The Return of the King, 440). The Ñoldor or Wise Elves had invented Tengwar, beginning with the oldest variant, Tengwar of Rúmil, which were not used in Middle-earth. This was evidently a different Rúmil than the brother of Haldir who lived in Lothlorien, as Legolas mentioned these elves were his “kindred” or Sindar, the Shadow Elves (The Fellowship of the Ring, 384). Tengwar was used in the same physical area as Common Speech or the Westron, but it was not popular among most mortals.

The competing writing system was Cirth, originally used by Sindar for carving inscriptions. A variation of this system was adopted by Middle Men from Dale and Rohan, Dwarves, and Orcs during the Second Age (II). The prettiest version of Cirth was the Alphabet of Daeron, created by an Elf who served as “minstrel and loremaster of King Thingol of Doriath” (Return, 441). As a refresher, Thingol was the husband of Melian and the father of Luthien, making him an ancestor of some Half-elves like Elrond and Arwen, and Númenóreans and their Dúnedain descendants. Additionally, since Thingol was a Sindar Elf from Doriath, he is somehow related to Legolas’ family. If the family only used Cirth and opposed the Tengwar that Ñoldor brought to Middle-earth, this could explain why Legolas was of no help reading the Door to Moria. The dwarf Narvi of Moria and the elf Celebrimbor of Eregion wrote the inscription in Fëanorian letters “according to the mode of Beleriand”, the version of Tengwar used by exiled Ñoldor in Middle-earth (Fellowship, 342-344). This implied ignorance did not work both ways, as Ñoldor of Eregion, who were led by Celebrimbor, developed two new “series” of runes for Cirth to accommodate their sounds, which were different from Sindarin sounds.

At their city in Moria, Dwarves created “pen-forms” of Cirth called Angerthas Moria or “Long Rune-rows of Moria”. They also changed rune sound options to match their language. Because Dwarves prided themselves on good penmanship, presumably since it was a form of craft, they also learned Fëanorian letters (Return, 441). Dwarves in Erebor had their own modification of the runes, which was called the Mode of Erebor and found in the Book of Mazarbal (Return, 451). No commentary was given on how Hobbits further modified the system to suit their own needs. Since not all Hobbits were “lettered” and tended to like neat and practical things, I imagine the characters would be as simplified as possible.

As for the construction of these systems, Fëanorian letters were not originally an alphabet but “consonantal signs” with tehtar or diacritics to indicate vowel sounds, making this language an abjad like Semitic languages (Return, 443). The same writing system was used to express different sounds depending on the language, not unlike how the Latin alphabet is used today. Tolkien included a highly detailed explanation of how Elves perceived letters to be related to each other based on what he called “Grades”. Grade 1 contained what he called “voiceless stop” characters, which are /t/, /p/, /k/, and /kw/. Grade 2 contained an added “voice”, which become /d/, /b/, /g/, and /gw/. In the real-world International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) chart, as discussed last week, this covers all plosives, or the sound of a consonant made with a little puff of air. Grades 3 and 4 cover what Tolkien called “spirant” and what the IPA calls “fricative”. Grade 5 were “nasal”, same for Tolkien and IPA, and sounding as /n/, /m/, /ŋ/, /ŋw/, while Grade 6 were “semi-vocalic”, called “approximant” in IPA.

My favorite description in this entire passage was that elves would have found the English language separation between ‹F›, ‹M›, and ‹V› to be “absurd”, as these appeared in the Column 2 of their writing system, a combination of the “bilabial” and “labiodental” columns in IPA, or sounds made with either both of the speaker’s lips or with lips and teeth. Column 1 in Tengwar was the same as the of “dental” and “alveolar” columns in IPA, meaning sounds made with teeth and jaw. Column 3 was the “palatal” and “velar” columns in IPA, sounds from the hard and soft palate, and Column 4 was semi-vowels or glides, which do not appear on the IPA chart. In short, Ñoldor were linguists, and their writing system reflected this.

These characters even had fun names in Quenya, based on “an actual word in Quenya that contained the letter in question… [or] it followed immediately after an initial vowel” (Return, 447). Some of the names referred to concepts found in the main story, such as: ungwe for spider’s web; noldo for the Ñoldor; vala for the Valar, described as “angelic power” here; vilya meaning air like the Ring of Air, which belonged to Elrond; arda described as “region” but also used as the name of the planet; and silme meaning light like in Silmarilli, three magic stones that caused a lot of problems.

The language even had a fun connection to maps, as the most commonly used letters were “17 n, 33 hy, 25 r, 9 f and were given the names númen, hyarmen, rómen, formen meaning west, south, east, north” (Return, 447) Since the Elves came from the West, they put West at the top of their maps. This was different from Dwarves, who put Erebor in the southeast of Middle-earth at the top of their maps, as seen on the map at the front of The Hobbit. Men put North at the top of their maps. Hobbits only drew maps of the Shire and occasionally Bree, so direction must not have been as important.

My final bit of confusion came when Tolkien described common vowel sounds used by Dwarves and Westron speakers as the sounds found in “butter” (Return, 451), since these vary greatly by accent. For speakers with Receive Pronunciation, the type of English that the Queen used, the first is /ʌ/ or an “open-mid back unrounded vowel”, and the second is /ə/ or “schwa”, while my General American accent turns that second vowel into /ɚ/ or “rhotic vowel”. With Dwarves considered cultured in the text, while Middle Men and Hobbits were less learned, I would lean towards a schwa for Dwarves and a rhotic vowel for native Westron speakers.

What Would Appear in the Animated Musical?

This information on historical linguistics was integral to the creation of Middle-earth, including its characters and mythology; in fact, Tolkien derived the languages before he developed the storyline. As stated by the man himself during an interview in 1970, which last appeared in my post about “Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion”, “I’m a linguist, and everything is linguistics”. Not honoring this authorial intent is unfaithful to the original story. Unlike Tolkien, I am not a linguist, and while I do know significantly more about this field than the general population, I am by no means an expert on the subject. My sister is a linguist and uses these skills to teach children with dyslexia, so she has agreed to serve as an advisor on this project.

Because I do not derive the same levels of joy in creating or deciphering fictional languages that Tolkien obviously had, while I would strive for authenticity in the representation of the languages in the hypothetical animated musical, far greater than what I felt has been done in previous film attempts, I do not feel beholden to the absolute accuracy of every written letter and pronunciation. I would want writing displayed on-screen especially on books and ephemera like notes or broadsides. I would consider adding passages where characters who are knowledgeable and somewhat pedantic correct the pronunciation used by other characters with Tolkien’s descriptions of sound. Finally, I would want to show characters in the act of writing, especially while creating and editing the manuscript that would become the Red Book of Westmarch.


Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical