Tengwar (Quenya “Letters”) is a writing system invented by J.R.R. Tolkien for his fictional languages. In the internal history it was invented by elf Fëanor in the Year of the Trees 1250 for Quenya. Later Tengwar was adopted for almost all languages of Middle-Earth, but with various changes in representation of consonants, called “modes”.

Tengwar writing system resembles real-word “abjads” (type of writing system used for Hebrew and Arabic), where only consonants have their own letters while vowels are indicated by diacritic marks. One single letter of Tengwar is called “tengwa” in Quenya and diacritic mark is called “tehta” (plural “tehtar”). Tengwar is written from left to right (it's possible to write from right to left with mirrored letters, but this is extremely rare and not used for Black Speech mode).

Each letter (tengwa) of main series consists of two elements: stem (Q. “telco”) and bow (Q. “lúva”) attached to it.

Each stem (telco) could be normal (default, “hanging”), shortened, raised and extended (hightened). Each bow (lúva) could be single or double, open or closed, placed to the left of telco or to the right (and also turned upside down). Thus, 32 combinations are possible, but they rarely used all together in one language.

Usually only 24 of these combinations are used in the main series of Tengwar. They are grouped in 6 rows (grades, Q. “tyeller”): voiceless plosives, voiced plosives, voiceless fricatives, voiced fricatives, nasals and “weak”, and 4 columns (series, Q. “témar”): dentals, labials, palatals/velars and velars/labiovelars (depends on language).

Each mode has also additional tengwar ranging from 12 to 16 symbols, with their form and distribution not following the aforementioned rules.

Diacritics (called “tehtar” in Quenya) modify sound of letters. They may indicate long consonants, nasalised consonants, consonants followed by [s] sound, etc. But in Black Speech tehtar are rarely used for consonants (see next chapter). When you enter them manually¹⁾ they must be typed after the sign they modify, even if they denote previous sound.

Special diacritics used for vowels are called “ómatehtar”. The may be placed over or under the following or preceding consonant, but in Black Speech they are put over the following consonant. When it is not possible (for example word-initially), so-called short or long “carrier” is used (depending on vowel's length). Carrier is just a stem without a bow. However some vowels have their distinct tengwa in additional series.

First tengwar fonts were created in 1997 by Dan Smith before wide support of Unicode in applications, they used ISO 8859-1 encoding. But as there are no direct correspondence between Latin and Tengwar letters, author decided to map tengwar according to series and grades (but series became rows and grades became columns). In result one cannot simply type the text in elvish languages and apply a Tengwar font to it and get correct result (it will be some nonsense). So various tengwar transcribers were created to help entering texts in Tengwar. See Links section in the bottom of this article.

Pros for transcribers / Cons for manual typing:

• It's hard to memorize keymap for Dan Smith's fonts;
• Manual typing is prone to mistakes (e.g. even example of Black Speech mode at Amanye Tenceli article has at least two errors);
• Manual typing is slow

Cons for transcribers / Pros for manual typing:

• Majority of tengwar transcribers do not align tehtar with tengwar well enough;
• Not all transcribers have Black Speech mode;
• Older transcribers insert spaces in Black Speech mode after every word;
• Older transcribers do not benefit from Alt fonts (they cannot mix two fonts in one inscription);
• while Glǽmscribe is the most accurate one for most purposes, it uses Quenya spelling for diphtongs in Black Speech mode for some reason (instead of Sindarin or Westron);

So the best option is to transcribe the text with tool, but then correct it manually for better look and accuracy. For Black Speech mode there is a dedicated transcriber named BSSScribe.

The One Ring was made in the Second Age around year 1600, making it's inscription one of the earliest attested inscriptions using Tengwar General Use mode. However General Use mode was additionally modified for Black Speech²⁾:

• fricatives use different tengwa after consonant (regular fricative's row) and after vowels (took the grade intended for aspirated plosives), thus Black Speech mode uses all 8 rows of tengwar.
• sounds [r], [s] and [z] have different versions after consonant and after vowel (but [l] and [h] do not) – this feature is borrowed from Quenya mode;
• tehtar for [o] and [u] are swapped in comparison with Quenya and Sindarin modes, but this feature is not unique for Black Speech and is used in some other modes too;
• all words are written without spaces, but every word should start with new tengwa regardless of previous letter, which also affects glyphs of r, s, z, fricatives (as stated above) and vowels;
• space is used only after punctuation marks;

Finally the tables for Black Speech tengwar modes. Each sign entry consists of:

1. Tengwar character in 4 different font styles (Quenya, Eldamar, Noldor, Annatar Italic);
2. phonetical value according to IPA;
3. keystroke for Dan Smith's fonts;
4. it's Quenya name and translation in English;

*Please note that “after vowels” means only when vowel's tehta is placed above this tengwa. When previous vowel is long â or î and placed over a carrier, consonant with regular (before vowel) variant is used (we don't know for sure, but “Glǽmscribe” uses such convention).

The only consonantal diacritic sign (tehta) used in Black Speech is tilde or stroke (they have the same value) used for nasalized consonants, like final ng, nk (and rarely nt and nd) and both initial and final mp and mb. Please note, that sign is the same for 6 possible sounds. It must be placed after the consonant when typed manually, even if [ŋ] sound precedes them. This tehta has various height and length variants for more beautiful alignment with different consonants, however in Black Speech only different width is used, as tengwar for p, t, k, b, d and g have the same length.

“Following s” tehtar is not described here because the only possible consonant cluster in Nûrlâm with it is ps which occurs only in Quenya-borrowed words, there are no genuine Black Speech or Orkish words with such cluster. It makes sense to use so-called “za-rince” hook in very frequent adjective ending -ûrz, but these hooks are not supported in Unicode fonts. And besides these points, all hooks are very tricky for smooth rendering with old tengwar fonts.

Vowels in Black Speech mode are placed above the following consonant. But when typing manually you must enter them after the consonant above which it should go, to get correct result. Thus, to enter the word “ronk” you should transform it first into “r, k, ŋ, o” and then search tengwar and tehtar in character table (type “7zp&” to get beautiful 7zp&). Each vowel tehtar (ómatehtar) has 4 different variants for better alignment with various tengwar. Long â and î are not attested in Ring Inscription, so we don't know for sure how they should be written in Black Speech mode, but in General mode they were usually written as separate symbol over long carrier.

* as you can see double tehtar (for ô and û) look particularly ugly with legacy fonts. Tengwar Annatar Alt and Eldamar Alt have additional glyphs for double curls (please note that Alt fonts do not contain regular tengwar, only additional symbols):

Diphtongs are encoded according to general use mode: the first element of a diphthong is represented by a vowel's tehta placed over the second element represented by a tengwa.

In Black Speech mode words are written without spaces but always start with new tengwa regardless of ending of previous word. End of the sentence in the Ring Inscription is indicated with single dot in the baseline (just like Latin script's stop) and space after it (while in other modes including General Use, dots are middle-aligned, usually transcribed with Latin comma, and spaces are placed both before and after punctuation marks). The whole Ring Inscription is also bounded by decorative marks.

Nûrlâm uses decimal numbering system (standard 10-based), however some elvish modes suggest duodecimal numbering system (Base 12: 0 – 11), which is not covered on this page. Digits have special signs (unlike Roman or Greek numbers that were written with alphabetical symbols with marks). They are written as:

Unlike Arabic/Indian system, in Tengwar numbers are written “backwards”, from the least significant digit on the left to the most significant digit to the right. So, a number like “1590” will be written as “0951”: ðùõñ. Sometimes overdots (the same as tehtar for “i” sound) or overbars (the same as for nasalised consonants) are used to distinguish base-10: ðGù%õ%ñT or ð[ù{õ{ñ[.

Orcish curse “Uglúk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob búb-hosh skai” will look like this written in Tengwar (with Tengwar Eldamar font series):

There are 38 tengwar and 7 tehtar used in Nûrlâm (vilya not included), short roots and agglutination leading to repetitive grammar markers, together make composing a short pangram a hard task. Current example consists of 59 tengwar (~1.5x longer than perfect pangram would be, but partially due to repetition of grammatical suffixes):

• Tengwar overview at Amanye Tenceli
• Tengwar at Tolkien Gateway
• Tengwar at Wikipedia
• Tengwar Black Speech mode at Amanye Tenceli
• Cirth

• BSSScribe – Nûrlâm's official transcriber (see also documentation page)
• Glǽmscribe – The Tolkien language transcriber – supports also Cirth and Sarati!
• Online Tengwar Transcriber (mirror)
• Tecendil – the most popular online transcriber
• TengScribe (The Tengwar Scribe – the oldest tool for writing Tengwar)
• YaTT - Yet another Tengwar Tool (may be installed on Linux via package managers)