Tengwar: Script of the Elvish Languages

Hello,
Today, in correlation with the appearance of the script on the Ring of Power, I am going to do a brief post on Tengwar. Tengwar is a beautiful and elegant script developed by Tolkien himself. It encompasses both Quenya and Sindarin, the two Elvish languages, and is also easily utilized in many of our modern languages.

Here is a short video of someone writing in Tengwar:

Here is a sample of my (rather untidy) Tengwar:

I wrote this in ballpoint pen; fountain pen lettering makes for a much more refined look as you can see above.

Tengwar actually has many more characters than are used in English, mainly for digraphs, including (but certainly not limited to) common appearances such as "th" and "ch." Tengwar also possesses its own set of numerals and punctuation marks. There are also several grammatical rules that are important to remember.

There are two modes in this script, Sindarin and Quenya. They differ little in the characters but vary mainly in that Sindarin (as I and the video have used) places the vowels (represented by markings above the letters) on the letter after the sound, while Quenya places them on the letter before.

I found that the easiest way to learn this was by merely writing various passages or phrases with the assistance of the key, eventually becoming independent but for minor references. Here is the website I used to learn:
http://freenet.am/~sssite/res/elvish.html
There are also many videos on Youtube if you feel that you learn better by having someone talk to you about it.

Good luck and thanks for reading,
C