A Beginner's Guide to High Elven/Quenya

An Introduction to Quenya

Quenya is a completely made up, or constructed to put it more politely, language that was created by JRR Tolkien for his novels set in the fictional world called Middle Earth. He also invented another language, Sindarin, which was based on Welsh, while Quenya was based on Finnish, with a little bit of influence of Latin as well. Out of the two Quenya is probably the most complete, as well as being the most understood of the two. It is recommended by some that you should learn Quenya first and then branch out to other languages. Both Quenya and Sindarin were based of an earlier "Primitive Elvish" language, but out of the two Quenya seems to be closer to the original.

Quenya in the world of Middle Earth was largely spoken by the High Elves, or Calaquendi who paid a long (several hundred years, give or take) visit to Valinor, The Blessed realm, before travelling back to Middle Earth again. I won't go into much more detail for now, I will go through Elvish History through the lessons as well as the language, but all I need to say is that while they visited their language changed from the Elves who stayed behind. As a result pretty much only High Elves use it fluently or even on a day to day basis. By the time of LOTR the main Elvish language spoken was Sindarin, not Quenya. It was kept mainly as a ceremonial language.

Unfortunately for those who wish to speak like Legolas this is not the book for you. However, don't be too discouraged, because Quenya was the 'special language' so to speak, of LOTR, kind of like how Latin was the special language for the Bible in antiquity. As a result, in the movie and books you can hear Galadriel and Gandalf speak in it to cast their spells, or to sing elegant poems. Quenya was the language of choice for poetry and lorekeeping.

I will be alternating lessons on language and history after the first three lessons. I hope this doesn't inconvenience anyone. I will be using the appendices of LOTR and the Silmarilllion to do this. I will also later make a dictionary of the elvish words for those who want to recap the words they have learnt easily.

I will have to add a couple of disclaimers here. I am not some awesome language teacher with a couple of Diploma's under her belt, I am really just a fan of LOTR who is pretty much learning her job as she goes along. Please be patient with me if I am not sure how to proceed. I will be mainly using a Quenya Course by Helge K. Fauskanger which was first published in PDF format on the 28th of February 2002. For history I will be using the Silmarillion and other books Tolkien wrote.

I will also draw on various other sources, for example the Quenya language function in Minecraft (so much fun to play in!) for random words (seems accurate enough) and others that I will attest as I use them. Lets get on with the show!