Bastardized Tengwar

So the last time I was really bored, this happened. It might not look like much to those unfamiliar with the Mass Effect series, but that is an original origami Reaper. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I can replicate it as I've already lost the piece and I didn't take notes on how it was folded.

Anyway, I've always been fascinated by Tolkien's affinity for creating fictional languages. His most famous one is Tengwar, which has been featured in most of his works about Middle-Earth as the basis for elven languages such as Quenya and Sindarin.

It's a pain to learn though. Well, not really. Some of the semantics are downright confusing, particularly rules on double consonants. I've searched everywhere on where to place the "wavy lines" because it seems different for each letter, so I gave up.

I decided that doing away with most of the rules would give me a variation of English Tengwar to call my own, albeit a bit bastardized. This version is extremely straightforward, uses vowels in the same way as the original and completely eliminates the vowel carriers (tehtars).

The image above is Tolkien's poem All That is Gold Does Not Glitter written in bastardized Tengwar. It still looks pretty cool and is still such a pain to write.

Now I'm pretty sure Tolkien got himself some pretty serious hand injuries while writing in Quenya.