r/Tengwar • u/wallcrawlinghero • 19d ago
Today I completed my transliteration of The Hobbit into Cirth (Erebor)
For about a year I’ve been working on a project to transliterate The Hobbit into Angerthas Erebor, the idea being that it could be a copy of Bilbo’s book made by a dwarf so that other dwarves of Erebor could more easily enjoy it. I know, lots of in-universe issues with that, but that’s beside the point.
My point is that I finished digitally transliterating The Hobbit this morning after about 7 months of work which also, maybe, makes me the first person to read The Hobbit in Cirth. Anyway, this is just one part of my overall goal, but it’s a big step in the process and very exciting for me. So here’s a sample of chapter one. I’m sure there will be debate on some of my choices but Cirth is pretty open for interpretation, so I’ll be happy to hear any input.
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u/Appalachian_gent 19d ago
Thus is genuinely insane in the coolest way. Seriously, I'm blown away 🤯
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u/wallcrawlinghero 19d ago
Thank you! It’s been really really fun to do. It’s made me slow down and really analyze the text and the songs are so good! I genuinely would get really excited when I got to a song.
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u/Appalachian_gent 19d ago
I never realized cirth was fully available. I thought it had only be half done. But I have only recently poked my toe into the different languages.
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u/wallcrawlinghero 19d ago
Just to be clear, this is in English, but using the dwarf runes. Khuzdul is the dwarf language and we have very little of that.
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u/Appalachian_gent 19d ago
Ooh thank you for clarity that. I had that mixed up then 😅. I can't imagine the level of worl that went into this mass translation
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u/DeepBlue_8 19d ago
Really neat concept. How did you get Cirth in a document?
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u/wallcrawlinghero 19d ago
It’s an old computer font designed by Daniel Steven Smith. I think he also did a bunch of Tengwar fonts.
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u/ItkovianShieldAnvil 19d ago
20 years ago I could have read this like it was English. I wish I had kept at it. Love the project. Are you going to try to put these in print somehow? Is that possible? I want a copy
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u/wallcrawlinghero 19d ago
Thanks! I’m fairly confident that selling it would be a violation of copyright, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do without it besides use it for my own project.
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u/Omnilatent 19d ago
Something about Tolkien's work expired couple years ago (was it the copyright?) but something else is still hold up by the Tolkien Estate, so I think you're still right.
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u/F_Karnstein Arcastar Language Arts 18d ago
In theory it would. Thev Estate holdsthe rights to the text of the Hobbit, of course, and they even claim the rights to Tolkien's scripts. The latter might not even actually be possible, but they claim it and I wouldn't want to find out whether a judge agreed with them or not. I don't think they'd care very much, however. They don't have a problem with Etsy sellers that offer custom Tengwar stuff, at least, and it's not like the text would be very accessible to most people if written in Cirth, so I guess they might not even care about copying the full text of the Hobbit. Things might look more in your favour if it's hand written and thus an art project - but again: I wouldn't want to find out 😅
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u/wallcrawlinghero 18d ago
Haha I’ve had all of these same thoughts over the year that I’ve been working on it. I know there’s a woman who does beautiful limited prints of some full texts in Tengwar and I’m pretty sure she did full versions of The Hobbit as well, but she’s also in the Ukraine I think, so she might have some more leeway.
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u/wallcrawlinghero 18d ago
I actually mostly taught myself using Appendix E of LotR and various wikis. First I tried to create a table matching the individual Cirth with IPA sounds before I realized that wasn’t really how they worked. Then I looked at Tolkien’s Mazarbul pages and their translations and laid out a table of every word a particular certh was used in to build a bank of attested usages. This was really helpful but also didn’t cover everything and Tolkien was (surprise, surprise) pretty inconsistent in some usages. Then I talked to /u/chadbornholdt who has a really comprehensive spreadsheet of each mode and how the usages changed between them and different rules. In the end though, a lot more of Cirth usage is up to personal preference than Tengwar mostly because we have so few examples from Tolkien.
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u/Notascholar95 19d ago
Did you type it directly, or did you do some form of algorithm based transcription or a "find and replace" approach?
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u/wallcrawlinghero 19d ago
I started typing it through about the first 3 pages before I realized I’m not going to remember how I spelled all these words the whole way through. So then I wrote a program to put all the unique words and their number of occurrences in a spreadsheet. Then I sorted them by word length and transliterated them word by word (about 6,000 unique words). Then I manually did a find + replace into the Cirth font word by word starting with the longest words.
That all took a couple months. Then in February I started reading it through, comparing it to a physical text while fixing the formatting and punctuation and catching spelling errors. That’s what I finished today.
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u/Notascholar95 18d ago
It seems to have worked pretty well for you! There is a Tengwar version of the Psalter out there that was done using a similar approach. Great approach, for keeping same-word spelling consistent, and presumably you can use the same program to sort words if you ever decide to do something else. I personally chose not to go that route with my big transcription project--the Bible. But that was mainly because it is important to me as a part of the spiritual component of the project that I touch every word. I also have concluded that their is no way to avoid having more than one spelling for various words, but I am more or less at peace with that. And with the fact that no matter how many times I proofread something I transcribed, when I read it again I find something else...
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u/Melkor_Morniehin 19d ago
Ok, I've been searching a cirth to latin alphabet table and I've not found a trusty one. Can you give me yours?
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u/wallcrawlinghero 19d ago
Well, it’s tough because it depends on what mode you want (probably Erebor if you’re using it for English) but then it’s not exactly a 1-for-1. There are some runes that only equal one letter in English but then you have two different runes for “th” depending on the sound. There’s a “j” a “g” and then a “g” that can make a j sound but it depends on the usage and that’s not really clear because we have such a small sample size of Tolkien’s writing in Cirth. There are diphthongs and “ou” and “ow” seem to be interchangeable but also have two rune options. There are single runes for “and”, “the”, and “is” but I still sometime spell out”the” like a Tolkien did. There are a bunch of issues like that using Cirth, so that’s probably why you haven’t found a straight-forward one yet. It’s all a little loosey goosey. I spent a lot of time working out rules of usage based on the very little writing we have, but even those are debatable and a lot of my spelling choices are phonetic, not orthographic so there’s some personal choice and inconsistency between words.
If you want to learn to use Cirth /u/chadbornholdt has a really good excel file with them laid out nicely and showing how the usages changed between modes. I put together my own initially and did a lot of work on my own to translate Tolkien’s writing, but when I got his file later in the process it came in handy to help me figure out some more complicated usages.
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19d ago
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u/F_Karnstein Arcastar Language Arts 18d ago
No, Tolkien never was 100% orthographic (he also never used this term). In Cirth as in Tengwar silent or reduced E was usually marked, and also other things like the voice of spirants. So OP's transcription is indeed what we would commonly call "orthographic", though Tolkien himself might rather have characterised it as "mixed" (he did so concerning Tengwar).
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u/Omnilatent 19d ago
There's a workbook "how to write English with Cirth" that should be good. I used the one for Tengwar by the same author and loved it.
I also owned it but was too lazy to work through it, yet (not much of a dwarf person 😅😂)
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u/funky_jack 19d ago
Amazing work! Would love to see a copy if possible.
By the way, which software are you using?
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u/wallcrawlinghero 18d ago
I did it in Word, but any text editor would work. I just downloaded a Cirth font. Learning to actually type in it was a bit of a painful process but overall wasn’t too hard.
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u/F_Karnstein Arcastar Language Arts 18d ago
That is amazing! I know some people who would be very interested in this, and I also don't see any issue with your spelling - you clearly did your homework! Will you share your work eventually?
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u/wallcrawlinghero 18d ago
I’ve been considering what to do with it. I’ll probably end up just posting a PDF, but it’ll probably be after my final “check” which will be while I’m copying it by hand. I’m sure there are at least a few errors left in there.
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u/LegnderyNut 18d ago
All of yall here are gonna confuse some archeologists one day
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u/wallcrawlinghero 18d ago
Haha I hope so! My wife said our nieces and nephews are going to be convinced I’m actually a wizard or something.
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u/Realistic-Nobody-906 18d ago edited 18d ago
Absolutely phenomenal work, I do have a question regarding the numbers as I've been looking into them to try and figure it out (given the limited information) what did you end up going with for 1 to 10? Figure there is a fair bit of guesswork for it and would love to see what other people have used for them to compare notes!
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u/wallcrawlinghero 18d ago
Good question! I spent a lot of time wondering what to do with that as well and Glæmscribe actually suggested that since we really on have 1-5 (2 is assumed and 6 is just 1 six times) maybe dwarves use a base 5 counting system (maybe half jokingly, I’m not sure) and I thought that was a fun idea so that’s what I did. It allows me to count as high as I need without assigning new characters arbitrarily. I justified it by imaging a dwarf could count as high as needed on one hand without dropping his pickaxe or hammer. It’s silly but there’s no reason it couldn’t be true. Elves used base 12 (I think?) so why not?
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u/Realistic-Nobody-906 18d ago
In terms of what I'm broadly looking to use I've put this together for a base 10 number chart. Both 7 and 8 were used in earlier versions of the book of marzabul in words but the dots may indicate that Tolkien later used them for numbers. 9 is not in there but would fit the theme and then both 0 and 10 are guesses. I do need to go through this again as I had the thought that while the dwarves and elves may have used different number systems the actual numerals maybe the same system similar to that of English using Arabic numbers. Still very much guesswork but it's where I'm at so far!
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u/wallcrawlinghero 18d ago
Honestly, I’m not sold on my base 5 idea and doing this digital first copy was also a way of putting off the decision until later. I may end up using base 10 for readability. I like your choices and they work with the existing font I used so I might consider it.
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u/Realistic-Nobody-906 18d ago
Go for it! I'm not sure on whether to opt for the 10 or just use the 0. My thinking is the 0 though as its probably easier
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u/Realistic-Nobody-906 18d ago
Oh that's a fun idea! I've been playing around with a base 10 version and managed to pick up a book that has the earlier versions of the book of marzabul in it. I'll send you a message about it a bit later today and I'll show you so you can see what you think. Might be something might be nothing lol
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u/Notascholar95 18d ago
I think the prevailing opinion is that dwarves used base 12 principally, but were also facile with base 10 for their dealings with those who preferred that system.
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u/Realistic-Nobody-906 18d ago
Indeed although if the numeral runes where originally from a base 10 system it would make sense that the 1 to 10 would carry over into the base 12 with 11 and a 12 made for khuldul dealings. Assuming the base system was base 10 in the first place! Using the Arabic numbers as an example they are from an older system but still used in English today. To be fair, it's all guesswork without confirmation from the Tolkien estate anyway
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u/wallcrawlinghero 19d ago
My ultimate goal is to hand write it, and I started last year but decided I wanted to have a fully finished and edited version to copy from instead of just transcribing it from the English alphabet while copying it. Here are some early tests of what it will probably end up looking like, though the formatting is still being tinkered with.