Departures from the canon, and why I made them.

A link to the image I made as the background to my Facebook page. I composed the Angerthas font myself. It turned out a bit too spidery for a carven inscription, and I made a mess of the kerning (I had to kern this inscription by hand), but if I ever find the time to set this font right, I’ll release it.

Book progress chart
- After a year spent writing the first fifty thousand words I realized that writing was actually something I could do, and I moved into high gear. Flat bits prior to 2018 represent periods of unavoidable human interaction.
  
  Since the end of 2018 I’ve been editing!
Some remarks about formatting:
- Font: I am a bit of a font junky. I’d like to design my own, but to do this properly takes a lot of time. For Beren, I went through a long and ultimately disappointing cycle through various possibilities. I composed the book in LibreOffice, which offers many native fonts, relatively few of which alas I found attractive. I wanted a Roman-ish font; something dignified, but also stylish. The default font of the application, Liberation Serif, I find dull. For a long time I was reasonably happy with URW Palladio L, but the Achilles heel of this font as far as I am concerned is the ugly angular quote marks. Very late in the editing process I discarded this font in favour of Nimbus Roman No9 L. However, latest of all, I have now come back to Times New Roman. It’s a reliable font; just a little dull. TNR is like that uncle who will always be there for you but who has some slightly fusty views about social media. So why am I back in the TNR blanket fort? Because this was the only half-way decent font that I could reliably get to print well from PDF.
- Capitalisation: whether to capitalize names of the peoples of Middle-earth is something I puzzled long about. I wanted to be guided by Tolkien’s useage, but I found his consistency to be spotty. In the end I decided to capitalize the names of all the races of Middle-earth.
So far as I was able, I have avoided composing in the languages of Middle-earth. Partly this was because I was more interested in writing a story than in wallowing in the glamorous trappings of Tolkien’s world. I am also well aware of how fertile a field for error is opened up whenever one attempts to write in a foreign language. For those few excursions I have ventured on, I am indebted to the following resources:
- Quenya: I referred most often to Helge Fauskanger’s excellent pages.
- Sindarin: there are online resources by Didier Willis (a.k.a. Hiswelókë) and David Salo, but I also made frequent (and grateful) use of Salo’s book ‘A Gateway to Sindarin’.
- (Neo-)Khuzdul: Salo also has important things to say about the Dwarvish language, but I have relied most heavily on the online material of ‘Roy’ a.k.a. The Dwarrow Scholar.
How do you pronounce ‘Nixenárë’? According to my understanding of Quenya, in four syllables, as follows:
- NIX, same as ‘fix’
- E, a short ‘e’ as in ‘Ben’
- NÁR, long ‘a’ as in ‘far’
- Ë as in ‘whee’.