Tengwar Ogham
The Fëanorian tree alphabet?

This is just a bit of fun…

What if J.R.R. Tolkien’s elves had used ogham?

His elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, were based on Finnish and Welsh, not Old Irish. But still, how might the elvish tengwar (or tîw) – the Fëanorian letters – have been used as a manuscript version of the ogham feda?

Tolkien arranges the tengwar in four témar (series), each of which has six tyeller (grades) (see Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings).

One logical choice is to use the first five tyeller in each téma to stand for the ogham feda in each aicme. (The sixth tyelle might be used as an alternative form of the fifth fid.) This was the transcription that I original set out on this page in 2004.

An alternative choice (new for 2007!) is to find tengwar with stalks that have the same direction as the strokes in the feda.

This is easy for the first four feda in the first, second and fourth aicme, by using the tengwar in the first, third and sixth tyelle (respectively) across the témar. (I use the sixth rather than the fifth as the tengwar have single “bowls”: this is an oddity in Tolkien’s table.) The fifth fid has to “wrap round”, however (in the case of the fourth aicme, this means doubling back to the fifth tyelle in the first téma.

The third aicme presents a challenge as no standard tengwar have stalks that go both up and down. However, there are alternative forms of some of the tengwar (used in transcribing the orcs’ “Black Speech”) that do, and it is those that I use here.

(Note: The tengwar PNG images on this page are based on Dan Smith’s Tengwar Sindarin font.)

The forfeda are not chosen systematically; rather I follow the example of the original glyphs, and chose from the “additional letters” the tengwar that most resemble the orginal Greek letters and/or ogham feda.

These are only slightly changed in the new transcription. I chose a different tengwa for eabhadh to avoid confusion with that used for ifin. For uilleann I chose an alternative, more tighly coiled, version of the same tengwa as before. And for peith I chose to use the same tengwa as for beith differenced by a horizontal stroke; the stroke alone might be used instead.