Parma Eldalamberon
Parma Eldalamberon 'The Book of Elven-tongues' is a journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship a special interest group of the Mythopoeic Society.  The current issue presents previously unpublished writings by J. R. R. Tolkien concerning his Elvish languages.  These have been edited and annotated by Christopher Gilson, under the guidance of Christopher Tolkien and with the permission of the Tolkien Estate.
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This issue has three sections containing linguistic writings by J. R. R. Tolkien: "Early Qenya Fragments", edited by Patrick Wynne and Christopher Gilson; "Early Qenya Grammar", edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Bill Welden; and "The Valmaric Script", edited by Arden R. Smith.  Each of these has been prepared with the guidance of Christopher Tolkien and with the permission of the Tolkien Estate.  
"Early Qenya Fragments" is a collection of Tolkien's tables and name-lists associated with The Book of Lost Tales, including early names of the Days of the Elvish Week and the Valinorian Fortnight, and names of the Valar and various Creatures of the Earth, as Tolkien conceived of them in his earliest mythology.  Also included are paradigms of the Regular Qenya Verb conjugation associated with the Qenya Lexicon.  
"Early Qenya Grammar" includes early writings on Qenya Phonology, together with the earliest complete Qenya Grammar, describing the forms and inflections of the Article, Nouns, Adjectives, Adverbs, Numbers, Pronouns, and Verbs.  Both of these texts date from the 1920s.  Annotations and commentary are provided for all of the Early Qenya texts, detailing their interconnections and the evolution of the linguistic conceptions contained within them.
"The Valmaric Script" is an edition of various documents relating to an Elvish writing system devised by Tolkien in the 1920s.  One example of the script was published previously in a drawing for the story Roverandom.  This edition incudes various charts of the sounds represented by the letters, tracing Tolkien's experimentation with their forms and applications.  There are also examples of the Valmaric script used for writing both Qenya and English, including an excerpt from the Old English poem Beowulf.  Transcriptions of these texts and commentary on the chronology of the documents and their conceptual evolution are included in this edition.*

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"Sí Qente Feanor" is a prose excerpt written in Qenya.   It was composed by Tolkien in the same notebook that contains the tale called "The Nauglafring" and the Gnomish Grammar.  Other writings from the Lost Tales period presented in this issue include a list of Qenya and Gnomish "Names and Required Alterations" connected with "The Cottage of Lost Play"; two charts laying out the sound system of Gnomish; and various early notes on Elvish words and names not found anywhere else.  Also presented here is the full text of the "Name-list to The Fall of Gondolin," excerpts from which were published in The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two.  Editorial commentary is provided on the connections of these various texts with the contemporary tales and lexicons.
"Early Runic Documents" is an edition of Tolkien's charts and notes from about 1918 to 1925 dealing with runes and various rune-like alphabets.  Tolkien's examples of the scripts are reproduced in fascimile — charts of the sounds represented by the letters, and Elvish words and English texts written in the scripts.  These include English and Gothic runes; Gondolinic runes; and two invented scripts, one called simply "Runic" and the other called "Gnomic Letters".  Transcriptions of the examples, and commentary on the dating and historical background are provided.  Also published in this issue is an "Addendum to The Alphabet of Rúmil and The Valmaric Script."  This is a document recently encountered among Tolkien's papers which includes texts written in both of these early invented scripts. 
Tables of "Early Qenya Pronouns" provide a glimpse of the transition in the conception of the language between the Lost Tales period and the "Early Qenya Grammar" that Tolkien composed while at Leeds.  And closely connected with the grammar we also present the beginnings of an "English-Qenya Dictionary" which Tolkien started to compile at this time.  A remarkable feature of this dictionary is that most of the Qenya words in it are transcribed into the Valmaric script, providing one of the more elaborate examples of Tolkien's own representation of an Elvish language using an Elvish writing system.  From about the same period, a partial "Index of Names" for The Lay of the Children of Húrin is also presented in this issue.  Detailed annotations and commentary on the conceptual developments in these texts are included.*

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"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."  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."

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.

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"Words, Phrases and Passages" is a collection of notes on the Quenya, Sindarin, Dwarvish, Rohirric and Black Speech examples occurring in The Lord of the Rings, with detailed translations and syntactic explanations, together with a discussion of the etymologies of the various words and names.  For the Elvish examples these are traced back to their Common Eldarin roots.  The entries were arranged by Tolkien in the order in which the words and phrases occurred in the story and this arrangement has been preserved in this edition. 

Although Tolkien never completed the commentary as originally planned, he retained the more cursory list of words and names from which he was working; and he continued to compose further notes on the grammar and history of the Elvish words and names in the story.  Many of these were placed together with "Words, Phrases and Passages," and the main commentary has been supplemented by these notes in this edition.  Together these texts give the clearest picture we have of how Tolkien conceived of his linguistic inventions in the forms they were revealed to his readers. 

In many of the notes in "Words, Phrases and Passages" Tolkien expresses hesitation about his preliminary explanations, or notices discrepancies between elements occurring in more than one context.  The notes show how his reconsideration at this time of his invented languages sometimes led to revisions in the text of The Lord of the Rings as it was published in the 2nd edition of 1965.  They also show how Tolkien achieved new insights into the etymological explanation of certain words and names.

Many of the entries in "Words, Phrases and Passages" mention the roots of the Elvish components under discussion, and this edition includes an index of these roots.  During this period Tolkien also compiled several lists and collections of roots and the words derived from them.  These etymologies have been combined with the index into a single list alphabetically arranged by root, providing a fairly comprehensive overview of his conception of the stock of basic elements that underlie the Elvish languages.

The entries in "Words, Phrases and Passages" have been annotated to point out their connections with the examples of Tolkien's invented languages included in his other writings, such as The Silmarillion; Unfinished Tales; Letters; and The History of Middle-earth.  This edition also includes an index, arranged by language, of all words and phrases that are glossed within the entries of main list and the list of roots.*

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Mountain View, 2010. 1st edition. Paperback. Contains the Tehngwesta Qendrinwa, a grammatical description of the phonology, root-structure and word-stem formation of Quendian, the original speech of the Elves, written by Tolkien in about 1937.