Caveat Lector

So David and I have the design-team track playing on the Extended Fellowship DVD set when the movie gets to the Chamber of Mazarbul. Suddenly we are listening, slack-jawed with stupefaction and horror, to this awful bit (we transcribed it; any errors should be presumed ours) about “irrelevancies” written in dwarf-runes on the walls.

Neither of us heard anything about this until we played the DVD.

The design crew is very careful not to identify the so-called “Tolkien-language scholar” who caused all the fuss. I will do the same (though I have my suspicions about who it was). I just want to be utterly, un-misunderstand-ably, crystal clear that it was not David! David never visited the set, not once.

(And David would never have “written the production” a nasty letter over something that went wrong. David is not that kind of guy; after twelve years with him, I should know!)

David was, however, the person who did what Mr. Major is calling “translation.” Most of it wasn’t, really; all he did was take the names and stuff that were sent him on behalf of Mr. Major and render them in runes so that the WETA calligraphers could copy them onto the walls. (He just showed me the fax he sent to WETA.)

There’s not enough attested Khuzdul to do genuine translations, unfortunately, so for the sentences they sent him he had to invent some words out of whole cloth (sticking to known Khuzdul phonology, naturally). David was careful to tell them what he invented, though, so that they could “conveniently efface” anything they didn’t like. (I don’t know if they did; I’ll have to check the DVD.)

(The Khuzdul on the score is invented nearly from whole cloth also—again, Khuzdul phonology is fairly simple, so David could get the sound right, but there’s just not enough vocabulary to work with as far as getting a sense right.)

I am completely apoplectic that this pompous jerk had the unutterable gall to accuse David and the hard-working WETA people of dishonest and intentional traducing of Tolkien’s work when he either didn’t or couldn’t (honestly, I don’t know which is worse!) read the runes himself.

Whoever it was owes David and WETA a humble and public apology.

David’s going to set the record straight on Elfling also. He’s almost as appalled at this as I am.

I’ll teach Mr. Tolkien-Language Scholar to read dwarf-runes any time he likes, by the way. It doesn’t take an expert. I can get somebody well on their way in a couple hours. Probably less.

Update: David has weighed in on Elfling.

Somebody pointed out to me in email that nobody on the DVD actually says that “Joe was here” was in runes. Yes, but everything written in that room was in runes. Something in another alphabet would have stuck out like a sore thumb; the WETA calligrapher wouldn’t have had to go over the entire set looking for it.