#and also the jirt letter i made up

[balrogballs]

Some have asked about the origin of the ‘Galadriel and Celeborn are nudists’ headcanon. It came to me a few months ago during an internship I held at Ancestry DNA, when I stumbled across the little known fact that famous Danish author Hans Christian Andersen was in fact—by means of an unbroken yet somewhat incestuous male line—the direct ancestor of the man we know as JRR Tolkien.

After a little more digging, I then discovered a little known pamphlet published by Tolkien and almost immediately (and justifiably) redacted by Edith, in which he described his attempt to pay tribute to his ancestor by including a reference to one of his old stories in a very early draft of The Silmarillion, as an event experienced by Finarfin, otherwise known as Arafinwë, High King of the Noldor in Aman. The story was called Kejserens nye klæder, and a summary of it is enclosed below:

This, my friends, is the origin of my headcanon. That Galadriel, in a burst of filial devotion after hearing of her father’s proud action, his refusal to let his chin fall in the face of the Valar’s machinations, designed Lothlorien to be a nudist paradise, where one could wander in the woods to their heart’s content, cheeks flapping like the very birds that nest in the treetops.

Celeborn has no such noble motivations. Celeborn just likes a balmy breeze on his bits.

[the-brit-with-the-words]

Conlangs in 8 Gold Pieces

before I start this nonsense waffle about how I made my language, I'm just gonna point out that I am not a linguist, have never studied linguistics, and am actually appallingly bad at languages.

anyway, here we go.

I never intended to actually create any languages for 8gp, let alone the 5-7 I'm currently trying to figure out (I'm only talking about one here, though), and when I finally decided 'hey, that might be important' I had no idea where to start.

so I started with a single language family tree I found on the internet.

This one, to be precise.

'huh,' I thought to myself, unaware of the rabbit hole I was about to descend into, 'cool'

So that's where I started. I drew a family tree for the languages I was going to be working on.

I like to think it came out pretty good.

(language names are mostly placeholder, as it stands)

'great,' i said, dusting my hands off and feeling good about myself, 'what next?'

An alphabet. Two alphabets, actually, since only three of the four modern languages in Order share an alphabet.

I thought about that, and thought 'where do alphabets come from.'

Preliminary symbols, as it turns out. (Or, the latin alphabet at least)

I printed this diagram off, spent some time being really angry about how some of the letters are related, and then moved on to creating my own alphabet, or at least Old Order, the first of many.

I like to think that came out pretty good too. (alas, also at a bit of a weird angle).

I then simplified that into a series of alphabets, as shown below:

And that was the alphabet. English equivalents may be jiggled around a bit in the future, but for now thats how they are (please pretend I know which order the alphabet is in)

And then I had to come up with a language.

I put this step off for several days. Languages suck. The other bits were fun.

I was not about to invent a whole entire language by myself because I am not mr. jirt and i have an attention span of approximately three seconds if whatever I'm working on is not particularly interesting, so i just came up with a set of rules for translating between English and what is currently called modern fire but will be called something different in future.

They're shown here.

And that was that. For now.

Next step is figuring out the other two languages which are very similar but not quite the same and then the other language which is also similar but different enough as to be distinct.

And this got long, so I will leave it here. I'm more than open to questions about anything I may have missed

Tagging @andiwriteunderthemoon (as promised, conlangs post)