Shit Geeky Girls Say...

Last week, I came across this awesome video in which Toria (The Toria Show) tells us all the shit geek girls say. It's hilariously true.



She explains that this is all stuff she says, but she assumes other geeky girls may say similar things. She's right. I don't partake in all the realms of geekdom that she references (e.g. comic books, Doctor Who), but enough of these resonated for me that I was laughing very hard.

Yes, female armor is so much skimpier than male armor! I couldn't believe it in SWTOR when my Jedi had heavy armor that left her with a bare midriff. Ridiculous! Then there's the slave girl outfit (luckily only counts as light armor). Obligatory, I suppose. But I've yet to find the slave male outfit.

Picard, hands down!

RPG > FPS.

I'm usually pretty decisive about hair color, but the eye spacing... That's a tricky one. You don't want to spend the whole game thinking "I should have gone one tick closer" every time you see your character's face!

In Baldur's Gate, I definitely did give my fighter/thief more charisma than she needed. I wanted people to like me! What's wrong with that?

I showed this video to my boyfriend, to get a sense of what I really do say vs. just think silently to myself. He laughed particularly hard at the "My character is awesome!" line, and when she sings the Lord of the Rings Shire theme, plus the bit from "Still Alive". I sing those a LOT.

The funniest bit for me, though, came right at the beginning. "Did I ever tell you I speak Elvish?" The day I saw this video, earlier that morning I had just told a friend of mine that I speak (a little) Elvish. GET OUT OF MY HEAD, TORIA!

NPR's Top 100 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

NPR recently published its list of the Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books, as nominated by fans, weeded through by experts, then voted on by fans. It's a great list, though I should note that they left off all young adult sci-fi and fantasy (no Harry Potter or Narnia). They promised a separate list for the young adult books in future summers.

I'm sorry to say that I have only read a handful of the books that made the list*. Here are the ones I've read (if I've read at least one complete book in a listed series, I count that), with the brief description from the NPR list and my commentary:

#1 The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien's seminal three-volume epic chronicles the War of the Ring, in which Frodo the hobbit and his companions set out to destroy the evil Ring of Power and restore peace to Middle-earth. The beloved trilogy still casts a long shadow, having established some of the most familiar and enduring tropes in fantasy literature.

I actually didn't read this book/trilogy until shortly before the movies started coming out, and I have only read them through the one time. It's the movies that I have watched over and over; while Tolkien created this marvelous world, Jackson et al. may have had more...narrative finesse. But I still consider myself a huge fan of the books. I can speak a bit of Quenya, after all.

#2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

In the first, hilarious volume of Adams' Hitchhiker's series, reluctant galactic traveler Arthur Dent gets swept up in some literally Earth-shattering events involving aliens, sperm whales, a depressed robot, mice who are more than they seem, and some really, really bad poetry.

I finally got around to reading this one in college and found it absolutely delightful. The dolphins, the petunias, the galactic battle fleet swallowed by a small dog. It's a fun, fast read. The movie doesn't do it justice, but it does have some good bits (Alan Rickman is enjoyable, as always). The book is the first in a series, but the NPR list only credits this first one.

#5 A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin
Ummm, this description might count as spoilers (though ones you probably expected) if you've only read the first book/seen the first season. I'll let you highlight to read.

As the Seven Kingdoms face a generation-long winter, the royal Stark family confronts the poisonous plots of the rival Lannisters, the emergence of the Neverborn demons, the arrival of barbarian hordes, and other threats.

What is it about having two "R" initials in the middle of your name? (Martin has often been compared to Tolkien.) I read the first book in Martin's epic series, A Game of Thrones, a few years ago. Much darker than the fantasy I was used to, I liked it enough to buy the rest of the books, but at the time wasn't ready to dive into the second book. But this summer's excellent HBO show, Game of Thrones, brought me back to the series, giving me renewed appreciation for the world Martin created and strengthening my affection for his characters. As the first season of Game of Thrones conveniently covered the events of the first book, I'm now perfectly poised to start book 2, A Clash of Kings.

#7 Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit, in a chilling novel of a frightening near-future world.

Sadly, that summary is about all I remember of the book, beyond vague images of scenes and feelings I associate with it. I read this one in high school, and while I appreciated it for being a "great" book, I guess it didn't engross me enough to leave a lasting impression.

#9 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Huxley's classic prophetic novel describes the socialized horrors of a futuristic utopia devoid of individual freedom.

I read this one in high school as well, but somehow I felt far more engaged with the dystopian world it imagined and the characters who populated it than with Fahrenheit 451. "Ending is better than mending," "I'm so glad I'm a beta," horror at the idea of someone being a mother... I liked this one but it also disturbed me, which I think is why it has stuck with me so well.

#12 Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan

At 13 volumes and counting, this sweeping — some would say sprawling – richly imagined epic chronicles the struggle between servants of the Dark One and those of the champion of light known as the Dragon Reborn.

I've talked about this series on this blog before (I chose one of its heroines as a Character I'd Like To Be), as it's easily the series for which I've read the greatest number of pages (each book is about 1000 pages in paperback form). My mom somewhat randomly gave me the first in the series, Eye of the World, before one of our trips to Hawaii when I was 15. By the end of our trip, I had finished the third book. While I've taken issue with some of the plot points, and I recognize how the series started dragging on...and on (I don't recall anything happening in book 10, except maybe Mat going shopping for silks--seriously), I still adore this series. I've been immersed in its world so long, seen the characters through so much, I can't help but feel attached. And Jordan did create a beautiful, complex story that is brilliant in its own way. Book 11 really picked up again, and now the end is in sight. Though Jordan passed away, he left enough notes for Brandon Sanderson to finish it up. I'll definitely see it through.

#13 Animal Farm, George Orwell

Farm animals overthrow their human owners and set up their own deeply (and familiarly) flawed government. Orwell's mordant satire of totalitarianism is still a mainstay of ninth-grade reading lists.

This is another one I read in high school that I barely remember. It's not that I didn't like it, I just didn't love it enough for it to stick. Sort of sad realizing how much of my education I've lost. I can't even remember which year I read this one...

#15 Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

As former members of a disbanded group of superheroes called the Crimebusters start turning up dead, the remaining members of the group try to discover the identity of the murderer before they, too, are killed. A graphic novel.

I'm a geek, I used to watch loads of cartoons based on comics (Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four), and I love comics-based movies, but I'm not actually a comics reader. One week, my Entertainment Weekly had on its cover a collection of people who were clearly superheroes...but I didn't have a clue who they were. Nerd shame! Well, I quickly ordered Watchmen off Amazon and got caught up. This is the one graphic novel I've read, but it's a really, really great one. The movie doesn't do it justice at all. You just have to read it.

#32 Watership Down, Richard Adams

An allegorical tale of survival about a band of wild rabbits who leave their ancestral home to build a more humane society chronicles their adventures as they search for a safe place to establish a new warren where they can live in peace.

My dad regrets not reading Lord of the Rings to me as he did to my brothers when they were young, but he did at least read me Watership Down as a bedtime story. I was seven at the time, and it was the longest book I'd ever encountered. But I loved it: the rabbits, their world--especially the exciting section about Efrafa. Perhaps foreshadowing my future Quenya studies, I pored over the Lapine glossary at the back of the book--hardly a developed language, but fun nonetheless. It was my love of Watership Down that attracted me to the Redwall books three years later, and these were the books that really sucked me into the fantasy genre. So, even if my dad didn't read me LotR, he guided me in the right direction.

#66 The Riftwar Saga, Raymond E. Feist

Evil entities have opened a rift in the fabric of space-time, plunging the world of Medkemia into peril. As the battle between Order and Chaos threatens to engulf everything, reluctant wizard Pug is the only hope of a thousand worlds.

My sophomore year in high school, one of my older brother's friends (a senior, like him) founded a school club he called the Fantasy Reader's Guild. We didn't actually read anything together, it was just an excuse for students to get together and geek out. After they graduated I became the "president" of the club, and following the suggestion of our club's faculty advisor, everyone in the club read Magician (in two parts: Apprentice and Master). In case anyone out there was doubting whether women ever read fantasy books willingly in their book clubs, I'm living proof the answer is yes.

#67 Sword of Shannara Trilogy, Terry Brooks

Over the course of three novels, several generations of the Ohmsford family find themselves retrieving magical artifacts in the desperate hope to fight evil.

This was the next fantasy series I tackled after Redwall, when Sword of Shannara was on my summer reading list going into 9th grade. Sword (the first book in the trilogy) is a blatant ripoff of Lord of the Rings, but Brooks does manage to one-up Tolkien in one way: Sword of Shannara has even fewer women than Lord of the Rings! That said, at the time I was blissfully unaware of the many, many parallels between LotR and Sword (I hadn't read LotR yet) and didn't care about the lack of women. I was just sucked into this exciting, complex world of magic and battles. The second in the trilogy, Elfstones of Shannara, was much more original and--what'd'ya know--featured several important female characters (one of whom went on my list of Characters I'd Like To Be). I am very fond of that book. The third in the trilogy, Wishsong of Shannara, was also good, and different, but Elfstones remains my favorite in the series.

I'd like to note that I've also read parts of two more books on the list:
#46 The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien
I wrote a paper in college on the story of Beren and Lúthien.

#47 The Once and Future King, T. H. White
I read The Sword in the Stone in seventh grade.


Looking at the NPR list, I realize how much reading I have to do. The Mists of Avalon (#42, Marion Zimmer Bradley) sits on my bookshelf, as does the rest of the Song of Ice and Fire series. I've wanted to read Neil Gaimon and Terry Prachett for years, now. And some day I'll read all of The Silmarillion, I promise!

If you're looking for something to read, this list is a great reference (at least, if you're looking for something sci-fi or fantasy--if you're not, then I doubt you'll have read down to this point in the post ;). And if there's anything else that I should add to my list, let me know!


* To be fair, while I've only read entire books from 11 of the 100 publications listed, by some counts that would come to 28 books encompassed by the list. Not too shabby.

Evangeline Lilly joins The Hobbit cast

Last week, Peter Jackson announced two new cast members for The Hobbit. Barry Humphries will play the Goblin King, who will be a CGI character, and Lost star Evangeline Lilly will play a woodland elf created for the movie named "Tauriel," which Jackson says means "daughter of Mirkwood." (theonering.net)

No. "Tauriel" does not mean "daughter of Mirkwood." It means "daughter of the forest". "Taur" is a generic term for forest, and "-iel" is a generic female name ending, usually translated as "maiden of" or "daughter of". This name is so generic that it's actually the name I made up when I was 17 to use to sign my Quenya poems. (This was before I chose the name "Eleni", which is equally generic but has the advantage of looking like a real-person name.)

Hobbit purists can debate the wisdom of adding yet another character who wasn't in the original book. I will reserve judgment until I see the film; Peter Jackson has earned my trust. And I don't really mind made up characters getting generic names easily constructed from a few minutes with an English-to-Elvish glossary (for example, the one in this book). But at least be honest and translate the name correctly. Claiming "Tauriel" means something more specific than it does comes off as pretentious. "Mirkwood", by the way, would be "Taur e-Ndaedelos". Hmm, "Tauriel e-Ndaedelos"... I guess that's a bit of a mouthful.


P.S. The second thing that went through my mind upon hearing this news, after my disdain over the name "Tauriel", was "Lord of the Rings--Dominic Monaghan--Lost--Evangeline Lilly--The Hobbit--squeeee!"

Wear Star Wars/Share Star Wars for Katie

I still haven't been posting much, as things are still pretty busy with family in town. The funeral is on Saturday and the burial is on Monday. Most of the visiting relatives will be leaving on Tuesday (including my mother, so I can finally get my car back--phew!).

You've likely heard elsewhere already, but today is Wear Star Wars, Share Star Wars in Support of Katie Day (or whatever people are calling it). A 7-year-old named Katie is a Star Wars fan who loves her new Star Wars water bottle, but one day she told her mom that she wanted to bring the old pink water bottle to school instead. When her mother asked why, Katie started crying and explained that kids at school told her that Star Wars is just for boys. Her mother took to her blog, and from there the word spread. Before long, hundreds (and now maybe thousands) of geeks--especially girl geeks--had left comments in support of little Katie. And she didn't just get comments. She got to accompany a Star Wars: The Clone Wars voice actor to a screening, and she's received numerous Star Wars gifts from ThinkGeek, Clone Wars cast members, and many other people moved by Katie's story. Most of the toys her mother will be donating to charity, and she recommends that anyone who wants to give Katie toys instead donate toys to needy children, as Katie has enough. She certainly has enough support to proudly carry her Star Wars water bottle and backpack around school. And Katie supporters have chosen today to honor Katie by wearing Star Wars clothing and donating Star Wars toys to charities.

I totally support the sentiment of the occasion. I don't remember it very well, but as my mom tells it, in pre-school when all the other girls wanted to play dress-up, I wanted to play Star Wars. Sure, I was a pink princess and little mermaid for Halloween, but I also had a Superman cape (with my initial on it instead of an S, of course) and SilverHawk wings. Social norms, and some interest on my part, kept me only half geeky in elementary school--I really did love The Little Mermaid, and my dad would read me books like A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, which were all right (to his credit, my dad still regrets not reading me Lord of the Rings when I was little, as he had to my brothers). But it wasn't until I reached middle school and began devouring the Redwall series that I really started to grow into my true geeky self. This led to my high school reading of Lord of the Rings, Shannara, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, and more. Both of my parents were Star Wars fans so we'd been brought up on the original trilogy, and about the time that I got to high school, the prequels came out in theaters. Around the same time we got The Matrix, and it wasn't long before the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies were coming out, too. Yes, there were plenty of great reasons to be a geek.

I was lucky that I was never really teased for my geekiness--at least if I was (chances are I was at some point), I found it so insignificant that I've forgotten it. I'll be clear here: by "geekiness," I'm referring to my love of fantasy, sci-fi, and gaming. I have been teased about my nerdiness--being smart (not teased badly, but enough to make me embarrassed at times about good grades)--and about my dorkiness (I didn't really "fit in" with other kids in middle school). But by the time that I was flying my geek colors, I was in high school, and I had a strong group of friends who loved me for my geeky interests (many were geeks themselves). I even felt perfectly confident doing my presentation on Quenya (one of Tolkien's Elvish languages) for my senior year English class, and that's a pretty intense level of geek.

But I can totally understand Katie's situation. Stores with toy departments split into a Boys' section and a Girls' section are one of many ways that young children are taught what things they "should" be interested in, and what things are "just" for the other gender. I always cite this one commercial I saw about three or four years ago for a Playskool kitchen/laundry set: sink, dishwasher, oven, stove, washer, dryer. As a little girl played and giggled, the voice over cheerily told us something to the effect of "Give her the tools to learn and grow into whatever she wants to be." That is, as long as it's a housewife. Cooking can be fun, but washing dishes and doing laundry are really just chores. Really, who could blame any little girl for having more fun pretending to be a Jedi saving the galaxy than pretending to do the laundry? I recognize that there may on average be some innate differences in boys' and girls' interests, but they are not as great as out-of-date social norms imagine--or force--them to be.

So I am in full support of Katie today. One problem: I have realized that I don't actually have any Star Wars clothing or accessories to wear today! Total geek fail. Hmm, I have things related to Firefly, and Mass Effect, and Dragon Age...but no Star Wars. Maybe I can figure out how to put these lightsaber chopsticks in my hair.* At the very least, I'm with Katie in spirit. May the Force be with you, Katie.

* P.S. Success!

It happens sometimes when you're a geek...

So today I happened to do a Google Image search for

namarie tengwar

"Namárie", of course, is the Quenya (Tolkien's "high Elvish" language) word for "farewell", but more importantly in this case it is a commonly used title for a poem that Galadriel says in The Fellowship of the Ring. Tengwar is the Elvish script invented by Tolkien. Basically, I was looking for an image of the poem written in tengwar. Because that's what I do sometimes.

The top result for this search was from Wikimedia Commons. That page also happens to be the top hit for a regular (web) Google search of the same terms. The second top result and several other top hits use this same image. However, I was shocked to find that this image--the first, seemingly most authoritative one someone would find when looking for "Namárie" written in tengwar--has an egregious error! It is missing an entire word!

I am loathe to reproduce it, but for the sake of education I will put it here.

Bad example from Wikimedia Commons. DO NOT USE THIS ONE!


You see it, right? Appalling! I mean,

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date...

Seriously! OK, for those of you who don't see it (our minds do tend to fill in missing words we know should be there, right?), it's missing the word "lumbule", or "shadow", at the end of what appears to be the shortest line in the poem (but it shouldn't be! It should have lumbule there!). It makes me so mad that this is the top search result. It must be fixed!

Luckily, the third hit for my search yielded this lovely image by Danny Andries that does not omit any words (you can see "lumbule" at the beginning of the line just above the center point of the first yellow leaf on the left):


Very pretty. Though he does make a few stylistic "corrections", such as writing "sindanóriello" and "hísie" with súle insted of silme, which is kind of snobby, going into way more technical detail than I would be interested in myself. Man, what a geek.


If you need a refresher, the non-tengwar text of the poem and its translation can be found here.

Geek Girls Unite! blog award

I know I just posted about my first blog award, but I've actually just been given a second blog award. It's the Geek Girls Unite award from RAY J at Point Me to the Sky Above, an awesome geek girl who I only recently discovered as she was doing a giveaway on her blog to celebrate five years of World of Warcraft playing (a real veteran!). As a proud geek girl, I am very honored! The award was just created by Angela of High on Life, another geek girl I recently found--see, we geek girls are uniting!

And here are the rules:

List ten geeky facts about yourself and...

Pass this award onto your favorite female geeks!

Now my geeky facts. Some of these I've talked about on my blog before (one of my blog's themes is celebrating my geekiness, after all) but some are new little geeky gems!

1. I didn't start loving to read until I read Brian Jacques' Redwall series about woodland animals who (mostly) live in an abbey and take up swords and slings and bows and arrows when their peace is threatened by cruel invaders. It was my invaluable introduction to fantasy.
2. I've always enjoyed math and science. Now I'm working towards a PhD in physical oceanography (i.e., the physics of the ocean). Field work is all well and good, but what I really like is modeling--and I don't mean strutting down the runway. Computer programming is fun!
3. I can speak a little bit of Quenya (one of Tolkien's Elvish languages). Not much, but more than just direct quotes from Lord of the Rings; I know some grammar and a small vocabulary and can make my own sentences. What's more, I learned it for a self-tailored high school project which culminated in a presentation to my class. (All the gory details can be found here.) And I can write in the tengwar script.
4. Of course, my high school classmates already knew I was a geek. I was the president of my high school's Fantasy Reader's Guild. I even got our guild's picture in the local newspaper as we stood in line, in costume, waiting to see Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
5. I love musicals and I love memorizing songs from musicals. I can sing from memory all or most of the songs from Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Mulan, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Into the Woods, Wicked, Avenue Q, Guys and Dolls...
6. I'm a huge fan of Firefly, among many other sci-fi- and fantasy-related TV shows. In college, I got a bunch of friends hooked on Firefly, and when we watched the movie Serenity, I threw a theme party with Chinese food, ice-planets, and costumes. (I did a post on that one here.)
7. In my Ivy League civil engineering course called Mechanics of Solids, I did my term paper on The Bridge of Khazad-dûm: A structural analysis of a bridge of Dwarven engineering (that is, the bridge that Gandalf and the fiery Balrog fall off of in LotR). I got an A+. (Find the full story here.)
8. Up until I was 24 years old, the only boyfriends I'd ever had were non-player characters in my computer games: Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect. (Get the juicy details here.)
9. Once I did get boyfriend, I proceeded to geekify him. So far we've covered Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Horrible, Fringe, and The Guild, and our current projects are Big Bang Theory and Pushing Daisies.
10. Last but not least, what has been until now a closely guarded secret: When I was in 9th grade, I was in a youth bowling league. Not geeky enough? We named our team the Rolling Voltorbs. Yes, a voltorb is a Pokémon. Shaped like a ball. We were clever.


Now, I bestow this noble award upon these lovely geek girls:

Hezabelle - A Canadian studying towards a master's degree in the U.K. and enjoying her travels in Europe, she knows a lot about Greek history and mythology. She's also the only other girl I know who says she knows a tiny bit of Elvish.

Holly of Sorcery and Glue - Another girl who shares my love of BioWare games, she makes awesome costumes related to her favorite geeky things. Current projects: Mass Effect N7 armor and a Grunt costume with animatronic head!

Megan of Hollywood Jane - A fantasy and sci-fi fan and Joss Whedon lover trying to make it as a writer in L.A. She has a funny web series called "Quest for Comic-Con."

Geek Girl Diva - She keeps us geek girls updated on news to make us squee and geeky merchandise to make us drool.

Snow Day!!!

I losse alántie linteve,
Caita bale or i nóre.
Ilye ná dín ar ninque.
Sulime utúlie rá.*

Yes, March has come in like a lion indeed. In the two winters I've been working here, we've had a few delayed openings and early closures at the lab, but today is my first ever full snow day here. Of course, I live just a five minute walk from the lab, so I have no good reason why I shouldn't be able to work today. But no one else is going to be there, so there's no way I'm going in. Snow day! Yay!!!

I went out and took a bunch of pictures this morning. Unfortunately, my digital camera's screen isn't working at the moment, so taking good pictures is a little difficult at the moment. Oh well. The snow has stopped, and while it isn't sunny it is much brighter than this morning, so maybe I'll go outside and take some more photos. Happy March!



A cardinal


Reeds and ice


Swans


Snowdrift, bushes, tree, river

* There's only one language for a geek like me to use when writing about nature.

Quenya

I have a confession to make. Eleni is not my name; it is the name I chose as my blogger alias. And it is not pronounced "eh-LAY-nee" (as an acquaintance of mine named Eleni pronounces her name), but "EH-leh-nee". Pronounced this way, "eleni" is the Quenya word for "stars".

For those who are asking, "Quenya? What the heck is Quenya?" Quenya is one of J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish languages. Yes, there are multiple Elvish languages; Quenya may be described as "High Elvish". Almost all of the Elvish spoken in the Lord of the Rings movies is Sindarin--basically, the vernacular at the time of the events of LotR--but Quenya can be heard on a handful of occasions, including Galadriel's farewell to the Fellowship ("Namárie"), a couple of incantations, the song Aragorn sings at his coronation, and the Enya song that plays over the credits of FotR (mornie utúlie = darkness has come; mornie alántie = darkness has fallen). Tolkien based Quenya loosely on Finnish and based Sindarin loosely on Welsh. Quenya is supposed to be related to Sindarin in much the same way that Latin is related to English, both linguistically (their structures are different but they share many word roots) and historically (Quenya is extinct as a vernacular but is still used on certain occasions). Quenya is a complicated artificial language with an advanced system of grammar, complete with irregulars to give it a "realistic" feel. Why did Tolkien bother creating his Elvish languages? The real question is, Why did Tolkien bother writing The Lord of the Rings?

Tolkien was a linguist. He was a professor of linguistics at Oxford and had at least a working knowledge of around twenty languages. Language was both his profession and his hobby. He had played around with creating primitive languages as a child, and as an adult he continued to make up languages, now more complex, for fun. During World War I, he started developing the language Qenya, which would evolve over the years into the Quenya of the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien created other languages as well, though Quenya was the most fully developed. Once he had these languages, he needed people to speak the languages, a world for those people to live in, and stories about that world and its people. Tolkien once said that, in a way, he wrote the Lord of the Rings books in order to give a context to the languages that he had created.

Why do I know about Quenya? Well... I've studied it. For school. Sort of. Here's the deal: When I was a junior in high school, my best friend, a senior at the time, explained that the English department was beginning a program in which all seniors would be responsible for carrying on a year long project called their "Hero's Journey". It was unclear what this had to do with developing skills in English, because the project could be about anything. Really--just about anything, as long as there was some sort of goal that one could at least attempt to achieve. To give you an idea, I remember one kid trained to run in the marathon, another learned to cook French food, another wrote songs on her guitar, another worked on being nicer to people.... Anyway, at the time, Lord of the Rings was in the midst of a surge in popularity with the release of the movie trilogy. My friend and I were among those fans high on the LotR buzz. I suggested that she learn Quenya for her Hero's Journey, and directed her towards the Quenya course I'd found on the Ardalambion site, a site that had been recommended to me by another friend. Well, being the crazy person that she is, she learned Quenya for her Hero's Journey project. And I, being equally if not more crazy than she, did the same the next year when the English department continued the Hero's Journey program (we had different teachers, so it's not like my teacher was sick of crazy Elves by the time I got there). And I am very proud to say that I got an A+ on the project. To the skeptics saying, "How could your teacher grade you on Quenya?" I would say that they have a point. I got a little lazy in the spring of my senior year (understandably) and didn't actually learn the second half of the Quenya lessons, and in my final presentation, I showed a clip of FotR where they were actually speaking Sindarin (the class didn't need to know the difference). Aside from the Sindarin intrusion, my final presentation was pretty awesome: I dressed up as an Elf (well, I wore a full length velvet cloak; I take this incident as evidence that media depictions of high schoolers as petty, cruel, and image-obsessed are grossly unfair), showed a clip from the movie, played a little of the "Aniron" song from FotR (also Sindarin--shhh!), recited a portion of the "Namárie" poem, taught the class a Quenya greeting (interestingly, I was never able to find a Quenya word for "Hello" so settled for the more lengthy "Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo" from the first book: "A star shines upon the hour of our meeting") and the Quenya word for farewell (the much simpler namárie), and even handed out index cards to the whole class and the teacher with their names roughly translated into Quenya. My teacher loved the presentation, partly because he had encouraged us all to give "multi-media" presentations, which I certainly did, and partly because on each Quenya name index card I had glued a thumbnail portrait of a different LotR character and on his had put Gandalf, the wise, powerful wizard. The fact that this was a less than subtle suck-up move is balanced by the fact that at the end of the presentation, the teacher proudly announced to the whole class how appropriate it was that I had given him Gandalf, the wise, powerful wizard. He was like that; did I mention that he had us clap for him when he entered class every day? No? Well, he did. I am not kidding.

Now, I can't play guitar or run a marathon (or probably even a quarter marathon, for that matter), but I would never say that devoting time to the study of a language not only extinct but also artificial was not beneficial or useful. I actually learned a lot about linguistics in general--just look at all the detail, references, and side notes in Fauskanger's Quenya course. I've always had an interest in language--grammar, etymologies, and similarities and differences between languages--and studying Quenya introduced me to linguistic concepts I never knew and gave me an interesting perspective on languages. Learning Quenya also gave me some significant geek cred. I am not your classic Lord of the Rings nut; in fact, I think many LotR fanatics would look down on me. I have seen the movies many, many times but have only read each of the books once (I have read The Hobbit nearly twice). I have never read The Silmarillion (I did read the chapter on Beren and Lúthien, though--I actually wrote a paper on Beren and Lúthien in college, but that is a tale for another day). But learning Quenya illustrates a high level of devotion to LotR, and studying an artificial language in general advances me to a higher tier of the geek elite.

My friends in college all liked to say that I was fluent in Quenya, but I would quickly correct them: I am not fluent--I have a "working knowledge" of Quenya. It is not actually possible to be fluent in Quenya. Tolkien developed the language extensively, but he passed away before publishing a definitive, comprehensive grammar or a dictionary with enough vocabulary to survive usage in daily life. Unlike, say, Klingon, which was (as I understand) developed enough to allow fluency and can be heard spoken at Star Trek conventions, Quenya is mostly used by those who know it in poems, rather than in speech. Besides, as I already admitted, I kind of cheated on the second half of the Quenya lessons, so I'm not even good at the Quenya that does exist. I have written simple poems, but my vocabulary is mostly Elf-like words such as "star", "moon", "tree", "horse", "warrior", and "maiden". Once my roommate dragged me downstairs to a study room where someone had scrawled Tengwar across the chalkboard, but at the time, I hadn't even learned the Tengwar alphabet so couldn't begin to interpret the message (I have since rectified this ignorance, and can now read and write the beautiful script). Another time, though, I did know enough Quenya to sound knowledgeable. A friend called me excitedly to tell me that Stephen Colbert was on Conan O'Brien speaking Quenya! It turns out he was watching a rerun of the July 12, 2006 episode in which Colbert illustrates how much of a Lord of the Rings geek he is by sharing some random LotR trivia and speaking Quenya. Now, I love Stephen Colbert--I think he's smart, brilliantly funny, gutsy, and overall just pretty awesome, all the more so because he is a total fantasy/sci-fi geek (I know he is also a fan of Star Wars and D&D). But what did he say that night on Conan O'Brien? Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo: "a star shines upon the hour of our meeting." Really, Stephen, that's all you got? That's all you have to show off your Quenya knowledge? Please--my whole 12th-grade English class knows that one.