Orcrist ruins and tengwar

Mmmm very nice. That sword looks much more as the sister blade to glamdring than the sword they designed for the films.

Once again Luna, you prove that your skills with the pencil are just brilliant. I'll second Luna choices, but will add Raven Armories as well thought their waiting period is over two years and counting.

Thanks a lot, guys!

That's what I was aiming for. I don't totally dislike the movie version, I just got a little irked by the backwards grip and the fact that it has more in common with Sting than with Glamdring. :lol:

What would you have written on the sword. Would you do it in ruins, tengwar or both and we're would you put it?

I would defiantly have Orcrist (goblin cleaver) in ruins on it. I was thinking maybe something about it being entombed with Thorin. So maybe guardian of the kingdom under the mountain. And maybe something about it glowing and the goblins calling it Biter.

Just a couple of things,..
ruins= " a place in an extreme state of direpair "
runes - symbols used to represent words, sounds etc.

Given that Orcrist was created looooong before the third age when found by the dwarves, shouldn't the language for engraving be qenya? This always confuses me when it come to Tolkein's languages.

Quenya is older than Sindarin, but not by much. Sindarin was largely used in Middle-Earth before the great return of the Elves from Valinor. You can see this distinction in the 'High Elves' and the 'Grey Elves', thanks to its origin in the kingdom of Elwe Singollo, "Greycloak", Thingol of Doriath who built one of the strongest Elven kingdoms in Beleriand with the aid of Melian the Maia.

It's always been an interesting question to me as to whether the city of Gondolin would have spoken primarily Sindarin or Quenya... it strikes me that if you think of the Silmarillion as sort of a "Roman Empire" or "Classical Age" period of Middle-Earth history, it makes some sense to think of Quenya as Greek, the classical language of antiquity, used by scholars and the intellectuals. Sindarin, on the other hand, is like Latin, the lingua franca-- everybody knows it, but it's not necessarily the 'fancy' language. But then that does raise the question of why it's used in runes on prestige weapons...

Hah! Cross-post, Findlithui!

Not sure where the Elven 'languages' came from, but my understanding:

The Elves spoke one tongue when they were born under the stars.

Then the greater part of them migrated to Valinor, and the tongue they spoke there became Quenya. The Elves that were left behind in Middle-Earth were the Sindar, Grey-Elves that had never seen the Light of the Trees of Valinor, thus Sindarin.

Quenya is the 'higher' tongue as it's been exposed to the Valar and Maiar, the angelic beings in charge of Middle-Earth.

If you want to draw more parallels, Numenor was more of a Roman Empire than the Silmarillion-era Middle-Earth was... but that's kinda off topic