This book was a fascinating reference source that I discovered during my middle school years. I became an instant languages-geek (even before I had studied any foreign languages). My friends and I used the writing systems in this book to pass notes to each other in class! So much fun.

An excellent little guide to the languages of Middle Earth. Sadly, as Tolkien died before fully fleshing out most of his languages, they now sit as half-lived husks, beautiful and unfinished.

Fascinating, and even inspired me to use Elvish in some of my art projects and to track down Elvish fonts for computers ...

This is a linguistics book - it`s pretty dry, but if you find linguistics exciting, it may be just the kind of dry you like. Grab a copy at the bookstore and page through it before you think about buying it.

I want to read this again. The languages are quite difficult.

This isn’t what I would call an easy read but it is a fascinating one. This really breaks down not just the roots of what became the many languages of Middle Earth but roots of language in general and how that can translate to characters and culture.

An excellent choice for any Tolkein lover. Ruth S. Noel does an admirably job of creating a readable overview of Middle Earth's many languages. Better, still, she connects it deeply to Tolkein's writing, so that cross-referencing and verification are simple matters.

I would recommend this for any serious lover of Tolkein and his Middle Earth.

I have read bits and parts of this book.

No regrets.

This book may not thrill you, but it will provide the Tolkienite with a lot of additional detail and information about the many languages that Tolkien invented as the underpinnings of his epic story.

This is basically an in-depth extension of the language section of the appendix to "Lord of the Rings" (usually found after "Return of the King" in mutli-volume sets).

Recommended by Brian

This book is, unfortunately, both very outdated and full of inaccuracies. Several quotations are mis-translated, and the vocabulary list contains a hodge-podge of words from different stages of the development of Tolkien's languages, which were never intended to co-exist within the same language. The corpus available when this book was published was also far smaller than that available now. The best sources for Tolkien's languages at the moment are online ones.