Re:When real world mapping meets Tolkien
by danaris on Monday April 12, 2021 @10:36AM
(#26779892)
Urgh. Yet another place using the terrible example of the movies where it comes to the LotR typography.
The three little dots over the letters are a diacritic used in Tengwar (the elven script). The movies used them (and, IIRC, a couple of the other Tengwar diacritics—there are several) to give the English maps drawn in-universe by Bilbo a "Tolkienian" quality. It would be like pûttïng ràñdóm åccênt marks over letters to give it a "foreign" quality: sure, it looks all fancy and exotic to your average American who never learned a second language, but those marks mean something and you're using them wrong.
For reference, here's[0] what part of the map Tolkien made actually looks like. Some of the words do have diacritics, but they're meaningful ones (eg, Gwathló), and none of them are elven diacritics.
The three little dots over the letters are a diacritic used in Tengwar (the elven script). The movies used them (and, IIRC, a couple of the other Tengwar diacritics—there are several) to give the English maps drawn in-universe by Bilbo a "Tolkienian" quality. It would be like pûttïng ràñdóm åccênt marks over letters to give it a "foreign" quality: sure, it looks all fancy and exotic to your average American who never learned a second language, but those marks mean something and you're using them wrong.
For reference, here's[0] what part of the map Tolkien made actually looks like. Some of the words do have diacritics, but they're meaningful ones (eg, Gwathló), and none of them are elven diacritics.
[0] http://topazgryphon.org/middleearthnorthwest.png