When I received my Lord of the Rings keyboard, it was a gift that I had been looking forward to since I had agreed to write a review of the new Lord of the Rings special edition. After debating between the Elvish and the Dwarvish, I decided that I was actually an Elf Boy, and requested that version for review.
I set it up right away. I had just disembarked from an international flight three hours before, but I thought it would be a good idea to get crack-a-lackin. I replaced some of the green keycaps with orange caps because the keycaps will pop off before you can break them. I began typing away after plugging everything in.
It was all good. The Valar remained in the Undying Lands and the dead Nmenrean kings remained undisturbed. For a full 12 hours, the tippy tappies were tip-tapping, and I was so pleased with this neat little keyboard that it gave me so much room and allowed me to write quickly and easily.
An illustration of the twin trees of Valinor over the arrow keys is one of the cute little extras on the Lord of the Rings keyboard.
I felt like a professional writer with my big keyboard because I was blinded by nostalgia. I reveled in this sense of power and control and ignored the darkness that grew in a land far to the east. I used to enjoy the way that mechanical keyboards felt. I have never owned a mechanical keyboard, at least not since my family computer in the early aughts, and I didn't notice what was right in front of my eyes. The shadows were waiting in the dark of my office.
I noticed something odd in the cold morning after I received this wonderful piece of technology. I noticed last night that the function keys were presented with an Elvish numeral and a Tengwar for F. I was reassured that everything was okay with my keyboard. It's a fun fact. The base-12 system is used to develop Elvish math. I stopped. I looked at the key.
The latinate and the Tengwar legends are printed on the cap, but the letter anca is not. The labiovalar nasal "gh" is not the Tengwa formen, but it is still a Tengwar letter, unqu. I assumed the keyboard would use the Sindarin-Tengwar transliteration, since some of the keycaps had Sindarin phrases, but I was wrong.
By and large, you can imitate a one to one, or at the very least make an attempt, since the vowels in Sindarin are generally indicated by Graphs that adjust the pronunciation of the succeeding phoneme transliteration letter. If you wanted to write in the Beleriand style, you could use letters, since Beleriand fell into the sea at the beginning of the First Age. I love little dots and swirlies and will not give them up despite the fact that Beleriand-style Sindarin is again completely without a use case.
This keyboard, for all its delightful presence, its charming mein, its wonderful sounds and well-translated Sindarin phrases, ultimately fails in what should be the basic consideration of this keyboard: to match up similar sounds in the same alphabet. At first glance, the keycaps seem to be a random assortment of letters and sounds, but I tried to understand it. The keyboard was sorted according to the sound series of each letter by J.R.R. Tolkien. If you weren't familiar with the collection of Middle-earth language already, you're in for a rude shock.
The shape of the letters themselves can be seen in the chart above which shows how to group them. When letters are written downward, they are called témar. It's in short.
The témar is crossed against the tyeller in the rows.
Looking at the keyboard, it appears that the first row starts with a tilde or dash, and proceeds down the tincotéma column to the next row. The first row contains seven sounds that correspond to the romen, eight to the silme, and nine to the hyarmen. The second row of letters goes down the parmatema column and includes a random assortment of additional sounds, none of which correspond to any of the English legends. The spare keys for the third and fourth rows are filled with extra letters after the six vowels.
The keyboard is arranged this way because I figured out why. Maybe three people will notice the structure of the letters and not align the Tengwar to the keyboard. The keyboard is not an alphabetized one, so why did the keycaps come in different colors?
I consulted with my colleague on the tech side. She has been doing keyboard reviews for years and helped me figure out what to do for this one and how to test everything out. Mass-produced custom keyboards have led to a decline in quality for die-hard fans. When the hobby was smaller and the barrier for entry was higher, custom keycaps had to be crowdfunded via a mass buy-in, but this meant they were of a higher quality. The clarity of the key caps is not expressed well. Drop hasn't let their production slip, but the fact is that this keyboard is not aesthetically correct.
How could you make it better? There is an issue of space, the main Tengwar alphabet has twenty-four letters, plus an additional eight symbols for more nuanced diphthongs and distinctions that only a man like Tolkien would feel the need to identify within an alphabet. The difference between the words "n" and "NJ" in new is reflected in Tengwar, with "n" represented by the numen letter and "NJ" by the oldo letter. The oldo and numen are reversed characters so they could have been illustrated on a single key cap. If one had just taken the time to line up a few key similarities, there would be a lot of these. There are options for space-saving within the keyspace provided if this was really meant to be a usable Tengwar keyboard.
I have a cute little keyboard on my desk that is delightful to use, but I would have to go through a whole song and dance to find it if I were to attempt to transliterate it. I should create a glyph map on my own, rather than trying to translate it from one language to another.
I apologize that I am like this. A transliteral Elvish keyboard and an expressed thesis of the constructed Elvish languages are what I have. There is a part of me that is not happy about it. There is a version of this keyboard that is innovative and clever, utilizing both the Tengwar and Latin glyphs to create a usable Elvish keyboard that you can use to write in Sindarin, should you have the alt/command control to adjust the vowels or indicate whether you want to write in It could have been all we had.
I regret to inform you that the keyboard does not appear to line up with any latinate transliterations, even though I mentioned that it came in Dwarvish. It's possible that the phonetics were a little sleight of hand. I will not get into a breakdown of the keyboard, as I have already gone crazy.
This cute little mechanical keyboard is great for anyone who wants the Elvish aesthetic, with no way to use the keyboard efficiently to mimic the character. There is salt in the wound and it is printed on the translated key caps. I picked out a few that showed the breadth of their right and wrongness. It's correct that the word br is used for home. They printed the word meth on the end key cap, which is incorrect because meth is a word and not a sentence. The transitive prefix tel- or something like metta is what the Sindarinverb for end is. As far as I can tell, the insert key that reads, in Sindarin 'nest' but with no Sindarin word, is an example. We have some correct words, some incorrect forms, and some keycaps that have a substitution.
It is well made and has a lot of cute additions in different colors and fun designs. I received the standard version, but I want the hardcore version to see if I can program it to write in a different language. The Drop ENTR keyboard is nice. I am going to use it. The thing does what it is supposed to do. It is a great keyboard for beginners, but I wish I had one.
Drop has keyboards from Lord of the Rings such as Elvish, Dwarvish, and Black Tongue.
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