Book Synopsis
"The Qenya Alphabet" is an edition of Tolkien's charts and notes from circa 1931 dealing with the earliest version of the script of the type he would later call "Fëanorian Tengwar" and eventually include in "The Lord of the Rings." This issue of "Parma Eldalamberon" contains 40 documents in which Tolkien's examples of the scripts are reproduced in facsimile. The documents include detailed explanations of the use of the script for representing English, both phonetically and according to English spelling, and charts of the theoretical values. There are various specimen texts written by Tolkien in the Qenya Alphabet, which exemplify some conceptual changes in the assignments of phonetic values to particular letters. Most of these examples are in English, but there are also texts in Latin, Old English and Old High German. Transcriptions of the examples and commentary on the dating and historical background are provided by the editor, Arden R. Smith.