by the London merchant Francis Lodwick of 1686, both on grounds of the correspondence between shape features and sound features, and of the actual letter shapes. Tengwar The tengwar script was probably developed in the late 1920s or in the early 1930s. The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, the first published Tengwar sample, dates to 1937. The full explanation of the tengwar was published in Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings in 1955. The Mellonath Daeron Index of Tengwar Specimina (DTS) lists most of the known samples of tengwar by Tolkien. There are only a few known samples predating publication of The Lord of the Rings (many of them published posthumously): The Lonely Mountain Jar Inscription, published 1937 Middle Page from the Book of Mazarbul Last Page from the Book of Mazarbul, Last Line, this and the above one originally prepared for inclusion in The Lord of the Rings Steinborg Drawing Title Ilbereth's Greeting from The Father Christmas Letters, dating to 1937 The Treebeard Page Edwin Lowdham's Manuscript from The Notion Club Papers has Old English language text written in tengwar (with a few Adûnaic and Quenya words), dating to 1945/6. The Brogan Tengwa-greetings, appearing in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, No. 118, tentatively dated to 1948 The following samples presumably predate the Lord of the Rings, but were not explicitly dated: Elvish Script Sample I, II, III, with parts of the English poems Errantry and Bombadil, first published in the Silmarillion Calendar 1978, later in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, So Lúthien, a page of the English Lay of Leithian text Description Letters The most notable characteristic of the tengwar script is that the shapes of the letters correspond to the distinctive features of the sounds they represent. The Quenya consonant system has five places of articulation: labial, dental, palatal, velar, and glottal. The velars distinguish between plain and labialized (that is, articulated with rounded lips, or followed by a sound). Each point of articulation, and the corresponding tengwa series, has a name in the classical Quenya mode. Dental sounds are called Tincotéma and are represented with the tengwar in column I. Labial sounds are called Parmatéma, and represented by the column II tengwar; velar sounds are called Calmatéma, represented by column III; and labialized velar sounds are called Quessetéma, represented by the tengwar of column IV. Palatal sounds are called Tyelpetéma and have no