In 1931, J. R. R. Tolkien made a conference touching about his invention of languages, and claiming that this seemingly curious hobby was a peculiar form of art. The text, a very important one to get what his imaginary languages were to him, was published in the collection The Monsters and the Critics with the title A Secret Vice. Tolkien produced several poems as examples, three in Qenya and one in Noldorin; Oilima Markirya “The Last Ark” is one of these poems. Tolkien must have been cared for that poem for he came back to it repeatedly; as a consequence there are several quite different versions (their development has been studied in Parma Eldalamberon n° 16), although the content remains more or less the same. Included in the main text is the one we called Oilima Markirya II; it is annotated and completed at the end with variants, including this one. A note states that it is the first version of the poem ; so we called it Oilima Markirya I. We reproduce it here with its author’s own translation, arranged so as to approximately match the Elvish lines.

The text is transcribed in sarati or “letters of Rúmil”, written vertically from top to bottom and from left to right. The signs are used according to Tolkien’s valuation for Quenya. We made use of Måns Björkman Berg’s typeface Sarati Eldamar.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe