Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #199659 in Books
• Published on: 1984-07-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Synopsis
Explains the fourteen different languages and assorted alphabets of Middle-earth, translates Elvish poetry, war slogans, and sayings, and features a complete dictionary of non-English words in the Middle-earth classics.

Customer Reviews

A Must for LOTR Freaks
I bought this for my ten-year old son, who is reading the LOTR trilogy after thoroughly enjoying the films. He is finding it an excellent reference work to accompany the book and is enjoying looking things up in it.

Easy and informative
If you are intrested in the subject and want to know more about it, this book is very nice to start with. The writer doesn't expect you to have any foreknowledge, exept that you have read Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings'.
After you have read it, you have some background information and some base-luggage before you start studying more comprehensive and hard-to-read works like 'An introduction to elvish'.
But if you are a somewhat more studied into the subject, like me and some of my co-rewriters, you'll find that it contains lots of inaccuracies. It is quite incomplete and more then sometimes incorrect.

But still I recommend it to those who're just starting their study as an enrichment of their base-knowledge. But it's absolutely useless and even misleading as a reference.

Outdated
As a long time student of Quenya, one of Tolkien's Invented Languages, I have come across The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-Earth quite often, and almost never in a positive way. Much of the information on Quenya (I am not expert enough on the other languages to judge those parts) is incomplete and outdated. This is not necessariy a fault of the writer, but it does make this book a bad companion for beginning students of Quenya.

I would never recommend this book to anyone