In the narrative frame of The Notion Club Papers, these fragments with others in Qenya are heard in dream by Alwin Arundel Lowdham; they are evidently extracts of a lament about the fall of Númenor. The translation is composed after the interlinear glosses of the source.

The development of these texts is very complex; we give the final version from Sauron Defeated p. 247. The same book gives earlier versions at pp. 311-312. We heartily recommend to those who wish to delve deeper in these matters Aleš Bičan’s excellent essay The Atalante Fragments, that can be downloaded from his website Elm and is available too in the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship’s article selection.

Nothing is known about Adûnaic stress, its nature and position. In the records we chose the following system: each word bears an intensity stress on the last heavy syllable, i.e. containing a long vowel or a vowel followed by more than one consonant; when there is no heavy syllable the word is stressed on the first syllable. This stress system is very loosely inspired by Classical Arabic, on the one hand in recognition of Tolkien’s self-admitted reliance on some patterns of the Semitic languages to compose his Adûnaic, on the other hand on account of the relative likeness of the vowel systems and arrangement of sounds in the two languages. But it must be well remembered that this stress system is ultimately arbitrary: we chose it for convenience and it is not supposed to reflect Tolkien’s conceptions on those matters.

Following Tolkien’s statement in Sauron Defeated p. 434 we treated the v encountered in the Adûnaic text as a spelling variant of w.

The Adûnaic text is transcribed in tengwar or “letters of Fëanor” according to an adaptation of ours of the general use of the Third Age, in which the fourth row of tengwar (with raised stem and double bow) spells the prenasalized voiced stops nd, mb and ng. We made use of Måns Björkman Berg’s typeface Tengwar Eldamar.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe