Greetings all,

My friend Benjamin Babut and myself would like to present a new website
about Tolkien's languages we just released, entitled : _Glaemscrafu -
Tolkien's linguistic cellar_.

Its purpose is to allow all kinds of interested people, advanced students as
well as newcomers, to taste and enjoy how Tolkien's invented languages look
and, especially, sound, by means of actual texts, presented, translated and
read aloud with MP3 files to download. A large selection of languages is to be
found: Quenya and Sindarin of course, but also their forerunners, Qenya and
Noldorin, together with lesser studied languages: Telerin, Adûnaic, Khuzdul,
Black Speech, Valarin. We found it interesting to include too some samples of
primary world languages that were of significance to Tolkien and influenced
him: Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, Finnish, Welsh and Latin.

In another part of the website, we give very short excerpts of Tolkien's own
records to illustrate how he himself pronounced many of the names that
appear in his works. It should be especially helpful to say them aloud
correctly, and will also give an idea of Tolkien's reading styles.

Finally, there are a few links to similar projects and a bibliography.
Though Glaemscrafu is not intended to be a _thorough_ study of each text, we
systematically list our sources at the end of each page in order to allow
everyone to check. Regarding the pronunciation, we tried to do our best
according to the documentation we gathered - but inevitably some linguistic
habits of ours will have crept through. (Hence the interest of having several
websites featuring record with people from different linguistic backgrounds)

We wish to thank Petri Tikka, who helped us with the Finnish part of the
website, and Didier Willis for his support and encouragements.

The website is wholly bilingual in French and English. It is hosted as a
specialised wing by the Tolkien-related website JRRVF <http://jrrvf.com>.
Thanks also to its webmaster Cédric Fockeu for his hospitality!

The general URL for _Glaemscrafu_ is: <http://jrrvf.com/glaemscrafu>.

You can reach the English version of the homepage directly at :
<http://www.jrrvf.com/~glaemscrafu/texts/index-a.htm>

If you wish to contact us, please use the e-mail address of the website (at
the bottom of every page). Do not hesitate especially to tell us about the
various typos that will inevitably remain despite proofreading.

We hope you will enjoy the visit !

Yours,
Bertrand Bellet