Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | An Unofficial Logo

I recently decided that the hypothetical animated musical needed a logo and one appearing completely different from the other logos found across the vast franchise of The Lord of the Rings. Book covers have varied greatly over the past seventy years, but the most iconic logos tended to be the same gold color as the ring and use fantastical or distressed serif fonts. As one not wanting to do what has been done before, I conducted a thorough review of past logos so as not to repeat anyone else’s work.

I love the ornate font on the 1994 cover of the Ballantine Books / Del Rey editions, which are the copies I use. In 1998, designer Furdzville, also known as Brian Powers, created the free-for-use font Sidhe or Sidhe Noble to mimic that design. Powers claimed his typeface was based on the tabletop role-playing game Changeling: The Dreaming, which came out in 1995, so the font must have been on trend around the time I was born. Other recent versions of the cover have less fantastical serif typefaces colored in gold or white, although The Two Towers published by copyright violator Ace has a dark red font against a garish yellow background above a Ringwraith riding Pegasus. I assume the cover illustrator did not actually read the book.

As for the logo used for the early 2000s films directed by Peter Jackson, I could not find the designer, although others have claimed the font to be a distressed 3D variation of Trajan Pro 3 Semibold. That font was designed by Adobe employees Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach. Twombly is unique in the design world as the first woman to receive the 1994 Prix Charles Peignot from Association Typographique Internationale given to a designer under thirty-five years old who has contributed greatly to typography, while Slimbach won the 1991 prize and now directs Adobe’s type design program. As others vying to have their work featured in the movie, I did find a series of logos in the running designed by the Tim Girvin agency whose other movie logo credits include Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and a Star Trek reboot.

After this review, I concluded that I wanted my logo to convey the three layers of interpretation used to create the work: the original writing, which was the in-universe rune system of Cirth, also called Angerthas; the manuscripts “translated” by hand by Tolkien and later typed on a typewriter; and my own illustrations, compositions, and animations created on a modern computer. I needed to find a font that represented each way of writing the work.

Runes & Fantasy Fonts

I previously discussed the writing systems used in the Legendarium when describing the second part of Appendix E. The characters of the more common writing system were called runes within the book, cementing Middle-earth as a Norse-Germanic inspired culture. Tolkien’s runes were an alphabetical system not unlike the Latin alphabet we use in the Real World, but historic rune systems — called “futharks” as an acronym made of the initial six runes — were often pictographs along with letters, more similar to the complex system used for Japanese than modern German. According to the Dictionary of Northern Mythology by Simek Rudolf, the oldest runes appeared in the 1^st century AD when Roman soldiers made contact with local tribes, while “an extensive and fairly standardized runic alphabet” existed between the 5^th century and mid-8^th century.

As for the place of runes in mythology, Stith Thompson’s Motif Index references them as a form of Magic writings (D1266.1) that can cause sleep (D1364.20), frenzy (D1367.5), mind control (D1379.1.1), speech in the dead (D1379.2), enmity (D1379.3), and protection (D1380.20), especially “from the curse of a dead Christian woman” (D1385.20) or storm and shipwreck (D1388.1.3). Additionally, runes can give power over enemies (D1400.1.11) or the sea (D1545.0.1), bring luck (D1561.1.7), and quench fire (D1566.2.3). Dwarfs were known as the best rune cutters (F451.3.12.4). Many of these motifs came from runes of the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, which was mentioned over a hundred and twenty times in the book.

Rune-like Cirth has not received as much love from designers as calligraphic Tengwar, even though the former was the more common writing system in Middle-earth. The website Tecendil allows users to quickly transform English characters into their Tengwar equivalents available in six different fonts. One such font is Tengwar Annatar by Johan Winge, available in four variants and named after Sauron’s disguise while creating the rings of power. Winge designed the font set while a student at Uppsala Universitet in Uppsala, Sweden. His other interests appear to be recording Latin poetry to share for free on Internet Archive, digitizing a Latin-Swedish dictionary, and coding a Latin macronizer, which automatically adds a horizontal line above a vowel to indicate a long sound. He even uses a Latin nickname, Alatius, and is no doubt a philologist after Tolkien’s own heart.

Another attractive font is Elvish Ring NFI by Norfok Incredible Font Design also known as Thomas W. Otto. Since 1998, he has created “creepy and scary movie horror fonts” inspired by franchises like Friday the 13^th, Terminator, and The Evil Dead.

Designer Nancy Lorenz went in a different direction, as her five Middle-earth inspired fonts imitated the cute handwriting of Hobbits. While these typefaces would be delightful for a party invitation, they are not quite right for my logo.

My last attempts to find a proper font brought me to the work of Iconian Fonts also known as Dan Zadorozny, a Texas-based attorney by day and font designer by night with a supportive family. His font Half-Elven has eleven variations, included italics, bold, expanded, and 3D options, while its font sibling Odinson had three variations. As much as I loved these fonts, they did not work for my purposes.

At last, I found a font up to the task. Created by Daniel Steven Smith in 1998, Cirth Erebor were the exact characters found in Appendix E as a typable font. He also created his own version of a historical runic font and Tengwar, along with linking to the works of other designers through his website. Unfortunately, his method for mapping letters to keys was befuddling, although his system became the standard for other Legendarium font designers, including Winge. If I really wanted to contact Smith, his bio page indicated he lives about forty-five minutes north of me, but I have not reached that phase in obsession yet.

Since Tolkien used Cirth while creating the modern English-language facsimile of the Book of Mazarbul that Gandalf read to the Fellowship while in Moria, then writing “The Lord of the Rings” using the same method was an acceptable option for the first line of my logo. One Wiki to Rule Them All user FrodoBaggins(blackhat999) had previously done this work, saving me the trouble of figuring it out. Once I had the text written out, I turned the shapes into vectors so I could manually edit them. After importing the shapes into Adobe After Effects, I added a pen scraping sound to each stroke, using “writing-short-4” by NewAgeSoup on Freesound.org as the base.

Authors & Their Typewriters

Tolkien is infamous for his nearly illegible handwriting, and as a result, I decided not to go that route while creating the logo. Instead, I focused on his typewriter usage. Pop history websites love to compile lists about famous authors and the typewriters they used. L. Frank Baum of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had a Smith Premier, the poet Dr. Maya Angelou used an electric Adler, and humorist Sir P.G. Wodehouse preferred a Monarch. Fellow blogger Tony Riches mentioned in an uncited article on Tolkien’s writing habits that he used a 1927 American Hammond Vari-Typer manual typewriter, but his dream was to have an electric typewriter custom built to type in Fëanorian script, another name for Tengwar.

The Hammond Typewriter Company was based in New York City and founded by James Bartlett Hammond in 1880. Hammond was an inventor from Massachusetts who won the 1890 Elliott Cresson Medal in Engineering from the Franklin Institute for figuring out improvements to this early typing machine. At this time, typewriters came in a range of keyboard layouts, some more practical than others. The Hammond No. 1 from 1884 had a semicircular “Ideal keyboard”. A few years later, the Hammond No. 1 Universal model had a rectangular format familiar to modern typists. By the time of Tolkien’s Hammond typewriter, the brand was considered top-of-the-line, as typists won speed typing contests on the machine, and its “masters” or original typed papers were considered ideal for photo-lithographic duplication.

Font designers have sought to recreate the letters once printed by typewriters. While I was unable to find a free-for-use font that duplicated a Hammond typewriter, I did find My Old Remington by Johan Holmdahl, JMH Typewriter by Jorge Morón, and Veteran Typewriter by Magique Fonts. Despite the popularity of their fonts, I could find little information on these artists, but the history of the typewriter brand behind one of these fonts proved more promising.

The Remington typewriters were originally created by E. Remington and Sons who got their start creating firearms and then moved into sewing machines. Family patriarch Eliphalet Remington II founded the company in Ilion, NY in 1816 based on his work as a blacksmith. In 1873, the company purchased U.S. Patent 79,265 — improvements to the typewriter made by Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel W. Soulé — not only cementing itself as a future typewriter-making dynasty but also popularizing the QWERTY keyboard, invented by Sholes in 1868. In 1927, Remington Typewriter Company merged with Rand Kardex to become Remington Rand, which eventually transitioned to making UNIVAC mainframe computers.

I decided to use Veteran Typewriter to represent Tolkien’s line, “Lord of the Rings”, as appearing in my logo. The thick line weights and slight distressing of the letters struck a balance between making the text easy to read while having a vintage, archival feel. I removed some of the distressed effect from the letters to make the words more readable. In the animated version of the logo, the typewriter keys click each time a letter appears, and the typewriter bell rings at the end. I used a pair of recordings of a 1936 Royal Portable typewriter created by fastson on FreeSound.org, one for the typing sound and one for the bell.

Modern Typing & Personal Font Branding

The modern computer has radicalized the way people think about fonts. The first computer typeface is typically cited as Digi Grotesk, which was created by German inventor Rudolf Hells in 1968 and popularized during the early 1970s. Unlike today when the text appears on a glowing screen, the image was sent to a cathode ray tube (CRT) connected to a lens that projected the text onto film. The machine was bulky and not nice to look at, but the technology was a major step forward. Modern fonts are based on vectors or outlines, where the computer used fast fancy math to determine what pixels to change on the screen. This makes the edges of the text appear crisp and smooth instead of blurry and jagged.

I learned much in the way of font history and font design while completing my BA at Wheaton College. During this time, I took several arts & design courses where I created the earliest visuals for what became my personal brand. I chose a pair of fonts that I use to this day on my print material and my blog: the serif font Domine and the sans-serif font Chivo. Domine was designed by Pablo Impalli from Argentina who works with The League of Moveable Type, the first font foundry to specialize in open-source typefaces. Chivo was the first font designed by Omnibus-Type, a collective specializing in web fonts. The name means “goat” in Spanish, the native language of several designers in the collective.

When determining what font should be used for my line, “The Animated Musical”, I had to decide if I wanted my font to match Tolkien’s line or offer a contrast. I noted similarities between Veteran Typewriter and Domine including their line weights, the “looptail” lowercase g made of two connected loops, the straight right leg on the capital R, and a two-story lowercase a. In contrast, Veteran Typewriter was a narrower font than Domine, especially for both uppercase and lowercase letter M, along with using heavier serifs. Even so, I wanted more visual clarity between Tolkien’s font and my font. I decided to use Chivo since the sans serif letters would contrast the serifs of Veteran Typewriter, but I manually rounded the edges of the letters to give the text a softer look. For the typing sound effect, I used “Computer keyboard - Pressing fast and hard” by Khenshom on FreeSound.org.

Putting It All Together

With my research complete, I was ready to create the logo. To review my workflow, I typed out the words in Adobe Illustrator and turned the fonts into vectors before modifying the letterforms and putting each stroke onto its own layer. Once I was pleased with the static logo, I moved on to animation. I imported the vector file into Adobe After Effects and began the laborious work of animating each brushstroke and keystroke. This logo ended up having over a hundred layers of visual animation, sound effects, and a music track. Fortunately, my layer naming schemes kept everything in order. I had not used this program in a few months and had never tried to replicate realistic writing and typing there, although I had done similar work in Microsoft PowerPoint and TechSmith Camtasia, so I had a few false starts before finding a fairly straightforward method. For example, sound effect files from FreeSound did not perfectly fit my purposes, so I lightly edited these using Audacity. As for the original sound track, I used the sheet music program MuseScore to create an instrumental version of the musical theme “One Ring”, which will be discussed in detail next week. As the final step, I created a basic title slide and sources cited slide using templates I had previously created in PowerPoint and then put all the parts together in Camtasia to create a demo reel.

Overall, I was pleased by this opportunity to combine my historical research with my abilities in graphic design, animation, and music composition to create a unique animated logo conveying the work’s many layers of writing, editing, translation, and interpretation. As an added bonus, this is the first piece of real animation for the hypothetical musical! Much more is to come.

Watch the animated logo here:

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

• Forewords & Miscellaneous
• New Project Announcement
• Introduction by Peter S. Beagle
• Foreword by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference
• Framing Device
• Introduction to the History of...
• Animation
• Maps
• Perspectives on the Sea
• Musical Theater
• Documentaries
• Conlangs
• Prologue
• 1 Concerning Hobbits
• 2 Concerning Pipe-weed
• 3 On the Ordering of the Shire
• 4 Of the Finding of the Ring
• Note on the Shire Record
• Races
• Hobbits
• Elves
• Men
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Dwarves
• Orcs
• Maiar
• Wizards & Balrogs
• Environment & Craft
• Valar
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Appendixes
• Introduction to the Appendixes
• Appendix A: Annals of the Kings and Rulers
• Overview
• I The Númenórean Kings
• (i) Númenor
• (ii) The Realms in Exile
• (iii) Eriador, Arnor, and the Heirs of Isildur
• (iv) Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion
• (v) The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen
• The House of Eorl
• II The Kings of the Mark
• III Durin’s Folk
• Appendix B: The Tale of Years
• Appendix C: Family Trees
• Appendix D: Shire Calendar
• Appendix E
• I Pronunciation
• II Writing
• Appendix F
• I The Languages & Peoples of the Third Age
• II On Translation
• Architecture
• Architecture: Bag End
• Characters
• Characters: Elanor Gardner Fairbairn