My class really got into The Hobbit this year. We read the book as a class and we saw the movie the Saturday after it came out. One of the activities I had the students do while reading the book was to come up with their elvish name. Names and language are such an important aspect of Tolkien's work, so much so that he even said he wrote the story in order to have a place for the language. In his mythology the language was not made for the story, the story was made for the language.
I explained to my students that Tolkien was a philologist and was fascinated with names and language. I asked my students if Tolkien had written your name into the story, what would it be? We first looked at the meaning of our given names and then incorporated that with some descriptive words that our friends and family ascribe to us. We then looked up the words in a Sindarin (one of the elvish languages) dictionary to find the elvish equivalent. I was then able to find a Tengwar (an elvish sript) transcriber and write their elvish names. They loved it and many of them went on to make their own languages after this assignment.
For their Christmas presents I decided to make bookmarks with their elvish names and the classic picture of Smaug and the Lonely Mountain. They loved them and I think the finished product was pretty neat myself.
First I drew the template for the bookmark and sketched in the dragon and the mountain. I outlined this in pen and did some hatching to create dimension. I made copies of this and printed them on cardstock. Each one was hand-colored with colored pencils. On the flip side I did a scrolling motif on the seam of the book mark. I wrote their elvish names in Tengwar and then wrote their actual names in a Bilbo style script.
I then laminated the bookmarks but that ended up being a mistake because they wouldn't fold without creating a bubble in the laminate where the seam was. So they ended up being big flat bookmarks; but, the students didn't mind.
What is pictured is the template in my sketchbook and my own unfinished bookmark with my partial name in Sindarin written in Tengwar script.
I explained to my students that Tolkien was a philologist and was fascinated with names and language. I asked my students if Tolkien had written your name into the story, what would it be? We first looked at the meaning of our given names and then incorporated that with some descriptive words that our friends and family ascribe to us. We then looked up the words in a Sindarin (one of the elvish languages) dictionary to find the elvish equivalent. I was then able to find a Tengwar (an elvish sript) transcriber and write their elvish names. They loved it and many of them went on to make their own languages after this assignment.
For their Christmas presents I decided to make bookmarks with their elvish names and the classic picture of Smaug and the Lonely Mountain. They loved them and I think the finished product was pretty neat myself.
First I drew the template for the bookmark and sketched in the dragon and the mountain. I outlined this in pen and did some hatching to create dimension. I made copies of this and printed them on cardstock. Each one was hand-colored with colored pencils. On the flip side I did a scrolling motif on the seam of the book mark. I wrote their elvish names in Tengwar and then wrote their actual names in a Bilbo style script.
I then laminated the bookmarks but that ended up being a mistake because they wouldn't fold without creating a bubble in the laminate where the seam was. So they ended up being big flat bookmarks; but, the students didn't mind.
What is pictured is the template in my sketchbook and my own unfinished bookmark with my partial name in Sindarin written in Tengwar script.