Ori's writing

[Galin]

By the way, you can see Ori's script -- he does employ the tengwar -- in the pictures Tolkien himself made of parts of these pages. JRRT made them look like burnt and torn pages, and I think the illustrations are now being published in an anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings.

You can find them in some books that contain Tolkien's illustrations too... or at least one of them.

So we have torn and burnt pages of both runes and Feanorean characters, and I think 'page III' (again with respect to Tolkien's illustrations of the 'pages') has runes and also a line of tengwar.

[Tar-Jêx]

I doubt that Ori would know Sindarin, let alone Quenya, and if he did, what purpose would he have for writing in them rather than his first tongue? It's probably more of a writing style thing, as he may shape his letters similar to that that the elves do.

[Galin]

Well, Ori wrote in the Common Speech, using the tengwar.

Short version

[shadowfax]

Just my two cents worth on this.

In The Hobbit, we discover that the moon runes and other runic writings on the map are formed of runic characters but the language is ... Modern English.

Tolkien later attempted to explain this by claiming he was translating from the Red Book of the Westmarch, and that somehow the map had got translated as well (although otherwise it is still a completely authentic document).

In other words, when he was working on The Hobbit, Tolkien wasn't too concerned about authenticity. Initially he wasn't even aware that this children's story was set in the same world as his high mythological Silmarillion.

Maybe Ori's book was added in a similar vein. It is a remarkable coincidence, is it not, that such a book should accidentally open to the page that explains what's going on rather than some description of what we had for dinner and what a pain my rheumatism is. Maybe the fellowship didn't find out out what had happened until afterwards (Gimli took the book with him, remember, but it is never mentioned again, is that not strange?), so the book was added as a narrative crutch so the reader would know what they were fighting about.

[Galin]

But Gandalf 'pored over it [the book] for some time' and had guessed that 'the pages seem to have numbers referring to the years after their arrival.'

Meaning Gandalf didn't just open the book, by coincidence, to the right page.

Translating Westron into English for the book of Mazarbul is in step enough with translating Westron into English for the Red Book or its copies. The 'problem' is, once you show a document in an illustration (which Tolkien at least planned to do here), the implication, at least, is that one is looking at a depiction of the real thing...

... but JRRT didn't invent enough Westron for that in any case, nor even the real Mannish names for the Dwarves that appear on the Doors of Moria for example (or Balin on the tomb) -- thus the illustrations are to give a 'sense' of the original, real thing, with respect to which the runes and Elvish letters help visually.

Of course in The Hobbit Tolkien, in theory, went the extra league when using his Anglo-saxon like runes there... I believe Tolkien waffled a bit about that (how to explain them), but finally landed on the conceit of the translator.

[Alfirin]

Given that Gandalf admits he really doesn't know much dwarfish, his reaction to what Ori wrote could simply have boiled down to "AT LAST, some part I can READ"

As for why the book isn't mentioned again, the fact that it was no longer relevant to the story is the most likely. But an alternate explanation may be that the rest of the book never got read because it couldn't. If the book was already so aged and in such poor condition that Gandalf had to be careful as he read lest the pages crumble, I would question how well it would LAST on the rough and tumble journey Gimli went through. Unless Gimli actually left the book in Lothlorien with the elves for them to carry to the dwarves (which seems massively unlikely, given how the average elf feels about the average dwarf and how well an elven messenger could expect to be received by Dain's court) or in Rohan (more or less the same sorts of problems) the book may have been dust long before Gimli ever got to read the rest, or get it into the hands of someone who could.

[shadowfax]

Originally Posted by Alfirin

Given that Gandalf admits he really doesn't know much dwarfish, his reaction to what Ori wrote could simply have boiled down to "AT LAST, some part I can READ"

As for why the book isn't mentioned again, the fact that it was no longer relevant to the story is the most likely. But an alternate explanation may be that the rest of the book never got read because it couldn't. If the book was already so aged and in such poor condition that Gandalf had to be careful as he read lest the pages crumble, I would question how well it would LAST on the rough and tumble journey Gimli went through. Unless Gimli actually left the book in Lothlorien with the elves for them to carry to the dwarves (which seems massively unlikely, given how the average elf feels about the average dwarf and how well an elven messenger could expect to be received by Dain's court) or in Rohan (more or less the same sorts of problems) the book may have been dust long before Gimli ever got to read the rest, or get it into the hands of someone who could.

Could be.

But why would Tolkien even bother mentioning that Gimli took the book. Surely it was not the only souvenir that was acquired along the way?

And there is nothing in the narrative that would not work if Gandalf had not read the book there and then.

It could easily be that the reading occurred in a quiet moment at a much later point in the narrative, but to make things coherent for the reader, Tolkien decided to take that moment forward and so not leave any threads dangling that would only have made the narrative unncessarily complicated further downstream.