Today a post in Caveat Lector sent me on a short excursion down memory lane.
Dorothea’s husband David is an expert in Sindarin (one of the Elvish languages), and consulted on the Lort of the Rings movies, as cited numerous places (but an interesting place is here.) She reports:
We’re hoping he can get the class list in advance, so that everybody can have a Sindarin name as soon as they walk in. This afternoon we picked up some chisel-tip pens (in distinctly un-Tolkienian shades of garish blue, orange, and pink, but they were the only real angled chisel-tip pens the place had) for everybody, to get started on calligraphy. I just placed Ebay bids on a couple of poster-size Middle-Earth maps with lots of juicy Sindarin place-names; plenty of fun stuff to do with those.
Back in 1977, I took a calligraphy class partly to improve my own handwriting, and partly to get the hang of working witih a chisel-point pen and improve my Elvish calligraphy. I didn’t make a linguistic study of the language at the time, other than puzzling over fragments of words and wondering if they were cognates with other fragments, and trying to work out possible translations (mostly guesswork, but fun with a decent “guide to Middle-Earth” handy).
Although I never did anything with using Elvish lettering for anything other than phonetically spelled “sekrit” messages on friends’ message boards in the dorms, it was a relaxing hobby, and much more challenging than ordinary italic calligraphy in English.
At the time, black chisel-point felt tip pens were just coming on the market, but Pilot fine-point felt tips were fine for some styles of lettering (for example, the lettering on the Ring inscription).
From the sounds of it, Dorothea and her husband may be using chisel-point highlighters – unorthodox, maybe, but easily embellished with black ink details here and there. The point (heh) is in getting the right angle, anyway. And that nice swooping line on certain strokes – very satisfying, once you get the hang of it.
Makes me want to dig out the calligraphy pen and ink set again; I’ve had several sets over the years. But in case I can’t find it, Michael’s and other craft stores carry the black chisel-tips.
And then, of course, for the third or fourth time in my 46 years, I’ll have to re-learn the letters, but this time there are a lot more resources besides the title page of LOTR and the tables in the appendix.
