These few sentences appear in a set of essays dated from the 1950s and gathered by Christopher Tolkien under the title Teachings of Pengoloð in The Peoples of Middle-earth. They are supposed to be answers given by Pengoloð, the loremaster from Gondolin settled in Tol Eresseä, to some questions of Ælfwine, the Anglo-Saxon seafarer of the Early Middle Ages and Tolkien’s longtime imagined mediator of his legendarium into the later ages.

Both characters are mentioned by their Quenya name, which is adapted by form and meaning from their respective names in Sindarin (or Noldorin) and Old English: Pengoloð becomes Quendingoldo and Ælfwine becomes Elendil. Unlike the glosses in the sources, we have chosen for narrative clarity to revert the proper names to their original form in the translation.

The text is transcribed in tengwar or “letters of Fëanor” according to the classical mode for Quenya described by Tolkien in the Appendix E to The Lord of the Rings and used for instance by the Namarië manuscript in The Road Goes Ever On p. 65. We made use of Johan Winge’s typeface Tengwar Annatar.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe