Well, unlike Noldorin (banned!), or Khuzdul (sacred!), there is absolutely NOTHING secret about Sindarin! There’s nothing hindering anyone in the whole of Middle-Earth from learning it.
Considering that Sindarin has been basically the Lingua Franca of Middle-Earth since the First Age, it’s probably a really good idea that Gimli learn it. More Elves in Valinor will speak Sindarin than Westron, I expect!
(begs the question also – did Frodo, Bilbo, Gimli etc. have to learn Quenya to converse in Aman? I honestly don’t know… but imagine older!Gimli doing lots and lots of language lessons, a frown on his white-bearded face 🙂
Oh, we are DEFINITELY going to see Thranduil’s reaction to Gigolas! But I am taking a sliiiiightly different approach to the ‘telling the parents’ situation. 😀
Here are some useful resources I’ve found while I’ve been in the community, so I thought I’d share! PLEASE ADD YOUR OWN IF YOU HAVE ANY! And please reblog and share!
References
askmiddlearth – A great blog where you can send in questions and receive answers regarding just about any aspect of the Legendarium.
coco.raceme – A collection of quotes, songs, and important passages from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, arranged by book and chapter.
Fish in Middle Earth – Did you ever want to know what kinds of fish there were in Middle Earth? No? You’ll probably end up reading this anyways. The curiosity will get to you.
henneth-annun – The HASA story archive has mostly moved to AO3 now, but this website still contains hundreds of timelines, character bios, quotes, object descriptions, and more.
silmarillionwritersguild – Essays, meta, biographies, and more – all about the plot and characters of the Silmarillion.
Languages
almare – Tumblr user almare has a great collection of Tolkien language resources, including a handy graphic of the relations between Elvish languages.
councilofelrond – A good resource for translations of canon texts, glossaries, conlang discussions, a dictionary, etc. Of particular interest is their Sindarin mutation chart, which is necessary pretty much whenever you’re stringing more than two Sindarin words together.
Hiswelókë’s – A delightfully thorough dictionary available in a variety of arrangements ( English-Sindarin, Sindarin-English, thematic, etc. ). Available in English, French, and German.
midgardsmal – The blog of David Salo, one of the people who worked on the languages in Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films.
realelvish – A handy phrasebook that provides categories for easy searches, dialects, pronunciation, and multiple translations of the same phrase. Includes fun categories, such as ‘in the bedroom’ and ‘on the internet’, as well as many others that are more in keeping with Tolkien’s tone.
sindarinlessons – A collection of rules, references, and explanations of Sindarin grammar.
your-sindarin-textbook – On this site, a duck teaches you Sindarin. What more could you want? Includes exercises and references.
Books
All the books in PDF – These two posts both contain links to Tolkien’s works and where you can find them online.
HoME reading order – tumblr user lintamande has put together a list of Tolkien’s texts beyond the Silmarillion, in case you were wanting to dip your toes into HoME but didn’t know where to begin. They also have a general Silm resource page that’s worth looking at, as well as all their meta.
Tolkien’s letters – A collection of many of Tolkien’s transcribed letters, useful for all those really obscure facts you need to check and to impress your friends.
Non-Tolkien
A shameless plug– I do my best to collect useful references, notes, and masterposts on writing, Tolkien, and more in my ‘references’ tag.
howtofightwrite– This blog contains discussions on weapons and how they’re used, as well as some particularly useful weapon primers that will give you the basics on the weapons your character uses.
Medieval references – A collection of a few useful references for medieval-type jobs, terms, and more.
Mood music – Themed music playlists for just about anything you could ever want to write.
Traveling – The methods of traveling in the Middle Ages, and the time it would require.
Adding links for the Lord of the Rings Family Project, which has the best set of genealogies hands down and I constantly reference it.
Ardalambion is a high quality language resource and has extensive wordlists. Good for obscure languages like Nandorin and Taliska. It’s more in-depth than a dictionary and has notes on in-universe and out-universe history for the languages.
Textual Ghosts Project, a list of unnamed and missing female characters from Tolkien’s works.
Notes: some of the book links don’t work any more.
The working link for OP’s resources tag is now here.
This is really useful! Thanks to OP for collecting these! (I totally looked at the fish essay.)
Also adding the LOTR Project – it has a helpful interactive map and timeline of events, and I’ve found it amazingly useful.
No, this is not “Can I touch your butt” in Elvish. This is “Can I touch your butt?” in English, transcribed using the letters of the Elvish alphabet. There is a difference.
In Elvish, the letters of the alphabet correspond to sounds, not to words. The above text spells it out using one symbol to represent one letter of the original English, which is incorrect:
c-a-n i t-o-u-c-h y-o-u-r b-u-t-t
If you really want to spell out an English phrase using the Elvish alphabet, you would do so phonetically, which would basically equate to one symbol per phoneme (sound):
c-a-n a-i t-u-ch y-o-r b-u-t
If you actually wanted to write “Can I touch your butt?” in Elvish, one (very rough) translation would be:
Annog nin daf pladan tele ci?
Which, in Sindarin Elvish, roughly translates to, “Would you give me permission to touch your rear?”
Written in tengwar (the Elvish alphabet), it would look like this:
one of my favorite lotr facts is that gondorians speak sindarin as a first language and yet when faramir was talking to frodo and sam about cirith ungol he was like “we don’t know what’s in there.” like faramir. cirith ungol is sindarin for “pass of the spider.” do the math
Aw Yiss 