The Tolkien Language List

Welcome to the home page of the Tolkien Language List, otherwise known as TolkLang.

The TolkLang list has not operated for many years. This page remains to give access to the past messages.

What is TolkLang? It is a mailing list whose purpose is discussions of the linguistic aspects of J.R.R. Tolkien's works. This covers everything from Elvish vocabulary and grammar to his use of Old English. The list is (lightly) moderated.

Miscellaneous useful things

Here are some of the items in the archive:

A list of books by Tolkien.
Information on Quettar, the bulletin of the linguistic group of the Tolkien Society. There is also an index of Quettar provided by Anthony Appleyard.
Some fonts for the tengwar and cirth, designed with Metafont for use with TeX (and a pointer to Truetype fonts).
A page of PostScript (64 Kbytes) describing the numerals used with the tengwar.
An experimental pronunciation guide to the Elvish languages.

TolkLang messages

The individual messages sent out on TolkLang are not currently formatted in a manner suitable for Web browsing, but you can find them here. Note: in order to prevent spammers harvesting the messages, they are protected by password authentication. The username is tolk, and the password is lang.

You can also find previous messages packed into gzipped tar files, one file per volume, in the directory Packed.

Unfortunately, the archive does not currently have a search page. However, Harri Perälä provides a combined search service for TolkLang and other lists..

The Elfling and Lambengolmor mirrors

Elfling, run by David Salo, was a very active list in the late 1990s and 2000s, but now appears to be defunct. Lambengolmor was/is run by Carl Hostetter, though it appears defunct at present. This site holds mirrors of these lists up to about 2012.

Longer articles

A collection of fairly substantial articles on Tolkienian linguistics can be viewed here.

Poems

A collection of poems in Elvish that have been submitted to TolkLang. This collection was maintained by Anthony Appleyard.

Prose

A similar collection of prose in Elvish.

Other Web pages of interest

Recommended for beginners (and others): Helge Fauskanger, with some help from others, has produced the most comprehensive description of languages of Middle-earth available on the Web; come to that, it's more comprehensive than any of the paper resources in my collection. The only disadvantage is the truly horrible misuse of colours, which can make it hard to read, and results in invisible words on monochrome screens. However, anybody with any questions about anything to do with Tolkienian linguistics should investigate this site first.
The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, including Vinyar Tengwar, and Parma Eldalamberon.
The home page of the Mellonath Daeron, the linguistic guild of the Stockholm Tolkien Society.
The home page of the Tolkien Society
The page for the Oxford Tolkien Society, Taruithorn.

Julian Bradfield

tolklang-request (at) quettar.org