Olympic Verse

Olympic Verse was made in times of Barcelona Olympics (1992) by The List Goddess a.k.a. Lalaith (LL) in TOLKIEN email periodical (tolkien@jhuvm.hcf.jhu.edu) and sent from there by Klaus Ole Kristiansen to TolkLang 4.25:

Crak nazgu bugdatuluk
crak nazgu prakhatul
crak nazgu srinkhatuluk
agh Barcelonum ghashum-ishi throquatul

The translation:

Five Rings to call them all,
Five Rings to lure them
Five Rings to gather all
and in Barcelona's heat devour them.

It seems that Lalaith didn't care for diacritic marks (attested Tolkien words ûk and ghâsh were without them here), used strange spelling “crak” (should be either “krak” or “crac” if c here is not a distinct sound like [t͡s]) and sound “qu” unusual for Black Speech. However adding or omitting diacritic marks is often used in Neo-Black Speech dialects for word derivation. She used -u as plural suffix which became a rule in Shadowlandian (compare with -i in Elerrina's ring verse translation). Finally, the word list borrowed from Olympic Verse excluding Tolkien roots:

English Black Speech Etymology and comments
call bugd- LL
devour throkh- LL “throqu-”
five krak LL, spelling normalized
gather srinkh- LL
heat ghashum TK BS “ghâsh” (fire)
lure prakh- LL
olympic_verse.txt · Last modified: 2023/09/07 19:38 by 127.0.0.1