Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #228796 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

Want to know about Tolkien's languages? Don't buy this Book!
Having started to learn elvish and some of tolkiens other languages, I bought this book. At first I thought it was fantastic, but now that I've read more into it, there are a lot of inaccuracies, and I don't feel the author has used the texts written by Tolkien to their full potential. If you are looking to learn elvish/Tolkiens languages, try Jim allen's introduction to elvish. Its a little heavy going but very comprehensive.

In short,if you are really looking to learn about tolkiens languages, don't waste your money on this book- there are better resources out there!

Outdated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of the information on Quenya (I am not expert enough on the other languages to judge those parts) is incomplete and outdated.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

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.