Parma Eldalamberon 16

Parma Eldalamberon 16 Early Elvish Poetry and Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets
Author	J.R.R. Tolkien
Editor	Christopher Gilson, Arden R. Smith, Patrick H. Wynne, Carl F. Hostetter, Bill Welden
Illustrator	Adam Victor Christensen (front and back cover)
Publisher	Elvish Linguistic Fellowship
Released	2006
Format	Paperback journal
Pages	150

Parma Eldalamberon 16: Early Elvish Poetry and Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets is the sixteenth issue of Parma Eldalamberon, a journal of linguistic studies of the Elvish languages and names in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

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Contents

• Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets, Part 1
  (contains 16 documents of various alphabets, they are assigned PF1 through PF16 and categorized into three groups)
  • Introduction
  • Qenyatic group (PF1 to PF4)
  • Falassin group (PF5 to PF11)
  • Noriac group (PF12 to PF16)

• Early Elvish Poetry
  • Oilima Markirya
  • Nieninqe
  • Earendel

• Qenya Declensions
  (contains version 1, 2, and 3)

• Qenya Conjugations

• Qenya Word-lists
  (contains about 170 entries)

• List of Abbreviations

Description

"Early Elvish Poetry" is our general title for a number of drafts of Tolkien's Qenya poems, Oilima Markirya, Nieninqe, and Earendel. These poems were eventually included by Tolkien in his 1931 essay called "A Secret Vice" as examples of the fruition of his private efforts at inventing languages. Accompanying the drafts of these poems are Tolkien's glossarial commentaries and his translations, from which also emerged the English poems, "The Last Ark" and "Earendel at the Helm". A version of the poem Nieninque from 1955 is also included. The documents for each poem have been edited and arranged to show their development, with commentaries on their relation to each other and to the contemporary and earlier writings on the lexicon and grammar of Qenya.

In his essay Tolkien mentions the need for a language inventor to abide by his own rules if he wishes to write poetry in it; and around this time he prepared charts of the "Qenya Declensions" and "Qenya Conjugations". These show the contemporary state of Tolkien's conception of the rules for inflecting nouns and verbs in the language of the poems. We have included these paradigms in this issue, along with analyses of their structure and development from the previous conceptions in "The Qenya Verb Forms" and the "Early Qenya Grammar" (Parma 14). Also contemporary with the poems are a series of "Qenya Word-lists" and these have been included to show how Tolkien's ideas about the vocabulary of Qenya at this period had changed in many ways but also retained much that in retrospect can be viewed as central to the "Qenya Lexicon" (Parma 12).

The "Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets" is an edition of Tolkien's charts and notes from about 1924 to 1929 dealing with the scripts that conceptually precede the Fëanorian Tengwar that would eventually be included in The Lord of the Rings. This issue of Parma Eldalamberon contains "Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets, Part I", with the alphabets called Qenyatic, Falassin, Noriac, Banyaric, and Sinyatic. Tolkien's examples of the scripts are reproduced in fascimile. These include charts of the sounds represented by the letters, and various Qenya, Latin, and English words and texts written in the scripts. Transcriptions of the examples, and commentary on the dating and historical background are provided.

External links

• John Garth, Review of Parma Eldalamberon 16, in Tolkien Studies. 5
• Official product on Eldalamberon.com (currently unavailable)