Last modified: 2010-11-06 by antónio martins
Keywords: quenya | elf | elvish | high elvish | middle earth | tolkien | mellonath daeron | quill | ando | | star: 8 points (white) | star: 8 points (faceted) |
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Quenya, the High Elvish “tongue”, is the most popular and widely
known of the many languages devised by J. R. R. Tolkien i.a. for
his “Middle Earth” book series (The Lord of the Rings,
The Hobbit etc.). This is mainly due to the fact that Quenya is the only
language described fully enough to became “alive”. There might be
around a thousand of speakers (all of them as second language, I guess). I
don’t know of specific symbol for Quenya as a constructed language: As a
“re-enactors”’ language, the only flags used may be only
those native to Middle Earth itself.
António Martins, 02 Sep 2004
At its website, a great deal of importance is given to the real-world armourial bearings of the Mellonath Daeron, a very exclusive and serious academy of Linguistics applied to Tolkien’s fictional world Arda; focusing mainly on Quenya (High-elvish) and Sindarin (Grey-elvish). The blazoning here given is «Gules on a bend sinister or between a Feanor star and an elven letter 'ando' argent, a quill pen sable with point gules and rod argent». Could we assume that these arms are also used as a banner-of-arms? Potentially, surely so, and the image on line, showing a square, seems to imply it, though there's no mention of such use.
Whose flag/arms is it? It’s Mellonath Daeron’s, of course, which is a real-world entity, based in Stockholm with worldwide membership. It is, it seems, not a language flag, but the flag of a non-governmental international organization: This is clearly not a suitable “language flag” (just like most flags are not) for Quenya, as Mellonath Daeron deals with all Tolkien’s Arda fictional universe languages, mainly with two of them (Quenya and Sindarin).
Concerning the design, the mentioned Feanor star is an eight pointed white/silvery starry polygon, presented as a four pointed faceted star superimposed on a four pointed star rotated from it half a quadrant. The quill seems to be similar to the one used in white on the green Hobbit flag. The mentioned elven letter ando looks like an "m" whose first “leg” has a descender, like a "p", not unlike a Georgian nuskhuri "ღ", and it is proposed to be added to Unicode (plane 1, a.k.a. S.M.P.) as U-0016004 : TENGWAR LETTER ANDO ("") — Tolkienites may have fonts encoded with the Conscript PUA standard, under U+E004 ("").
António Martins, 25 Nov 2005
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