Akallabêth

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In the narrative frame of The Notion Club Papers, these fragments with others in Qenya are heard in dream by Alwin Arundel Lowdham; they are evidently extracts of a lament about the fall of Númenor. The translation is composed after the interlinear glosses of the source.

The development of these texts is very complex; we give the final version from Sauron Defeated p. 247. The same book gives earlier versions at pp. 311-312. We heartily recommend to those who wish to delve deeper in these matters Aleš Bičan's excellent essay The Atalante Fragments, that can be downloaded on his website Elm (http://www.elvish.org/elm/index2.html) and is available too in the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship's article collection (http://www.elvish.org/articles/).

Nothing is known about Adûnaic stress, its nature and position. In the records we chose this system: each word bears an intensity stress on the last heavy syllable, i.e. containing a long vowel or a vowel followed by more than one consonant; when there is no heavy syllable the word is stressed on the first syllable. This stress system is loosely inspired by Classical Arabic; but it must be remembered that it is ultimately arbitrary and not supposed to reflect Tolkien's conceptions.

Follwing Tolkien's statement in Sauron Defeated p. 434 we treated the v encountered in the Adûnaic text as a spelling variant of w (that appears too).