Some time back in relation to another thread, I posted copies of Tokien's handwriting from a book that had been in his personal library. He took great liberties at marking and making notations in his books. Also in the book were numerous lay-ins, items he had written on scraps of paper that were laid in the book. Due to hard-drive crashes, car crashes and other trivial matters, I'm way late fullfilling that promise ... but here are several more items for some of you to enjoy. I'll load them in a couple of posts witout comment, except to say the first one is a page used as a blotter for what might appear to be "elvish writing"!?! I'll let those of you who are interested do your own figuring on the rest.

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More, with a signature also!

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That's fantastic, thanks a lot!

I hope the various crashes left no lasting injuries.

Inkling

(edited owing to atrocious spelling)

Hey, thanks for sharing! That's great to see Tolkien is my favorite author ^^

Glad you enjoy the samples, and no, the crashes were generally recoverable with no great bodily injury. And hey, you spelled "atrocious" right, what more could anyone want!

Fascinating! Thanks much for posting. I hope you (and your computer) are back at 100%.

Doug

Glad to do it, certainly a great favorite of mine too.

What I find interesting is the blotter with the Elvish bit on it. What's interesting about it, if you're a Tolkien geek, is that it definitely looks Elvish, but doesn't look like most of the Elvish script seen in LOTR. To me it looks like a blotting from a sample of an earlier script Tolkien developed, called the Sarati of Rumil, which in the history of middle-earth was one of the systems of writing developed by the Elves before the "standard" Elvish letters, the Tengwar of Feanor, were invented.

AFAIK examples of writing in Sarati by Tolkien are extremely rare.

And this is where I admit that one of the things I usually write with any new FP when I'm testing it out is the ring-inscription in cursive Tengwar - the one written in the black speech which starts "Ash nazg durbatuluk" : "One Ring to Rule Them All".

My excuse is that my penmanship in Tengwar is much better than in the Roman alphabet! (Being a bit of a Tolkien geek helps as well...)

Paul.

He has fans all over the world! I love his work.

I see uncial inspiration. Very nice handwriting.

Tolkien could do a lot of different handwrittings. Just have a look at the Letters From Father Christmas. They're fun!

You sure can tell he spent a LOT of time reading pre-10th century manuscripts. That looks very like some unintelligible Latin script I saw in a monastic item from about the time of the first Viking events.

Tolkein's signature really exudes his personality.

Looking at the slant of the letters (to the left at times) and the sidewise slides Tolkien used, he knew a bit about the black-letter Secretary hands that were used from the 13th to the 16th century. As a professor at Oxford for most of his life, he would have spent time reading in the Bodleian Library, amongst others. Today, the Bodleian publishes many excellent examples of early scripts on the Internet. Click to visit the <a href="http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/browse.htm">Bodleian Library</a> and see a few of the scripts used over the centuries.

It is a real treat to eye these samples and see and pick out the various influences, especially given the fact these are for the most part everyday handwriting. (With the exception of the blotter piece--PaulTOO you have a better grasp of elvish than I, I'll have to look into that.) These are lists and letters, outlines and the starts of notes apparently about the ins and outs of life and politics at the college.

Tolkien's signature is really the perfect logo for the creator of Middle Earth, isn't it? And from a time before goofing around with computer graphics, it makes it all the more telling of the man. He had it nailed by 1923 even before Middle Earth became something "valuable" to care about. To me, it really shows how the life of the stories pre and post the Lord of the Rings era really came out of the man and was a collection of his interests and fascinations and maybe even compulsions rather than a ploy to sell books and merch. He was really in love with the task at hand and the weaving of the language, look and tales more than hitting it big. The professor through and through. To bad he, nor his heritage, really enjoyed the major financial fruits from the work that you might expect, but still even that gives it an old world sense of the satisfied writer at his desk in dimly lit chambers telling the tale, creating the world with a whole storehouse of tools from calligraphy to inventive languages and age-old stories of the faire.