The Elvish Meme is pretty simple, at its core: transliterate your name into Tolkien’s elvish script. What better way to express your Hobbit excitement? I recommend Ned Gulley’s guide to the Tengwar; I find it to be concise and simple. There are plenty of sources out there, of course; Tolkien is sort of the gold standard for constructed languages, after all.
For extra credit, you can translate your name’s meaning; I like Hiswelókë’s Sindarin dictionary, personally. I translated my name by phoneme…I figured, with a prefix like “Mor-” in front of it, I sort of had to, right? “Mor” means dark, “di” means beneath, and “cai” means hedge…so basically, my name means the place where Frodo and company hid from the Nazgûl on the road out of the Shire. If you want to, you could translate the meaning of your name into Sindarin (or Quenya, if you really want to) and then transliterate that, too! You can do all kinds of neat things; Sindarin & the Tengwar are both very flexible, so there is plenty of room to individualize your own name.
Emily and Ryan showing off their names.
Miz Bridget.
Irene’s finger got into the meme.
Natalie elfing it up.
Theresa DeLucci and some of the Tor folks: Leah, Liz, Angie & Audrey!
Sherene!
Another Theresa, but a different elvish name than the above Theresa.
Owen!
Peter went all out; he even translated his name into proper Elvish.
Cole; short & sweet!
Antonio.
General Jinjur figured “gwiniggur” was the best fit for her name.
Last but never least, Terra!
Mordicai Knode’s favorite character in Tolkien’s legendarium—heck, in all of fiction—is Galadriel, but Fëanor, who invented the Tengwar, is a close second. You can post your Elvish Meme entries in the comments, or share them with Mordicai on Twitter or Tumblr. Even better, you can add it to the Elvish Meme Flickr group!
