Lord of the Rings: Tengwar Test Page
Tengwar is (along with Cirth)
the script used to write the languages of Middle-Earth,
which were invented by J.R.R. Tolkien and
appear in his Lord of the Rings trilogy and other works.
Display of Tengwar on the web so that it can be read by a wide range of platforms and programs,
without resort to graphics, pretty much requires that it be encoded according to
Unicode standards.
The Tengwar script has not yet reached this stage officially. It has been proposed
by Michael Everson for incorporation
into Unicode Plane 1 but lacks approval at this time. For more info on this see the
proposal and the
"Roadmap to Unicode."
Using this proposal (revision 1998-01-10) as a basis, Tengwar has been included in James Kass' Unicode font
Code2001 in Plane 15, which is
a Private Use
Area (PUA). This font also includes Tengwar glyphs for the PUA of Unicode Plane 0, where a
similar proposal is under consideration by the
ConScript Registry
These proposals are subject to possible future revision, and it is uncertain if or when they might
be finalized or approved.
Below is the Ring Inscription from the Lord of the Rings (LotR1/II ch. 2) in Tengwar
script in Plane 15 UTF-8 and NCR encoding, as well as in Plane 0 PUA UTF-8.
Note that technological limitations currently make it difficult to keep diacritic marks separate and
distinct in some cases. This can be remedied, if necessary, by writing some vowels or consonents
separately rather than in combined form, but such was not done in the inscription example.
In Black Speech the inscription says: "ash nazg durbatuluuk ash nazg gimbatul
ash nazg thrakatuluuk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul."
In English it means: "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all
and in the Darkness bind them."
Good sites for information on Tolkien languages are:
Tengwar,
Ardalambion,
History of Elvish Writing,
Fellowship of the Word-smiths, and
TheLordoftheRings.com.
Also another test page by James Kass.
If you want to create UTF-8 web pages or send email in Tengwar, a useful tool is James Kass' Tengwar Screen Keyboard. This page, when used with the most advanced browsers (like Opera 6 or Netscape 6 for WinXP or OmniWeb for Mac OSX), allows you to generate
Tengwar text strings which can be copy/pasted into HTML documents or a mail program.
To make comments on this page or obtain info on Tengwar input methods, write to
tom@bluesky.org
Browser Notes: As of 3/03, most of the latest Windows and Mac OS X browsers can read UTF-8,
both in Plane 0 and 15. Mac IE 5.2 cannot. The font Code2001 (Version 0.915 or higher) must be used.
(Plane 15 UTF-8)
(Plane 15 NCR's)
(Plane 0 PUA UTF-8)
A picture of the text follows:
