New Tolkien Material from Vinyar Tengwar
Xoanon @ 9:35 pm EST

Ostadan writes: Carl Hostetter has posted the following announcement which may be of interest to both Elvish linguists and those interested in "Elvish culture" in general.

I am pleased to announce that 'Vinyar Tengwar' 47 will be published later this month. 'VT' 47 presents the first half of "'Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals' and Related Writings", a four-part collection of late texts (c. 1968) by J.R.R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by Patrick H. Wynne. Part I presents 'Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals' (HFN) proper, an unfinished "historical-philological" essay that provides an account of the Common Eldarin words for 'hand' and their descendants in Quenya, Telerin, and Sindarin, followed by a brief discussion of Elvish ambidexterity. The essay then details the Eldarin names for the fingers (and toes), including children’s "play-names" that treat the fingers as the members of an imaginary family: father, mother, and children; and it concludes by showing how the finger-names were closely connected with the development of numerical stems in Common Eldarin. Included after HFN is a related text on the invention of the Common Eldarin stems for 'neter' 9, 'kanat' 4, and 'enek' 6, which serves as a sort of alternative ending for the essay. Both of these texts are supplemented in the editorial notes by extensive citations drawn from Tolkien’s contemporary unpublished writings. Parts II–IV (the contents of which are described in the Introduction to HFN) will appear in 'Vinyar Tengwar' 48. [elvish.org]