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Akallabêth
English
Adûnaic
Tengwar

    
Kadō Zigūrun zabathān unakkha...
And so the Wizard came humbled...



   ⸱ 
...Ēruhīnim dubdam Ugru-dalad...
...the Children of Eru fall under the shadow...



 ⸱   
...Ar-Pharazōnun azaggara Avalōiyada...
...Ar-Pharazôn was warring against the Valar...



  ⸱   ⸱  
...Bārim an-Adūn yurahtam dāira sāibēth-mā Ēruvō...
...the Lords of the West broke the earth with the assent of Eru...



  ⸱  
...azrīya du-phursā akhāsada...
...so that the seas gushed into the chasm...



    
...Anadūnē zīrān hikallaba...
...Númenor the beloved fell down...



   
...bawība dulgī...
...the winds were black...



   ⸱  
...balīk hazad an-Nimruzīr azūlada...
...the seven ships of Elendil eastwards...



   
Agannālō burōda nēnud...
The shadow of death is heavy on us...



   
...zāira nēnud...
...longing is on us...



      ⸱     
...adūn izindi batān tāidō ayadda: īdō kātha batīna lōkhī...
...in the West there was once a straight road ; now all roads are crooked...



  :
Ēphalak īdōn Yōzāyan.
Far away now is the Land of Gift.



   ⸱:
Ēphal ēphalak īdōn hi-Akallabēth.
Far, far away now is the Downfallen.

Commentary
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 from his website Elm and is available too in the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship’s article selection.

Nothing is known about Adûnaic stress, its nature and position. In the records we chose the following 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 very loosely inspired by Classical Arabic, on the one hand in recognition of Tolkien’s self-admitted reliance on some patterns of the Semitic languages to compose his Adûnaic, on the other hand on account of the relative likeness of the vowel systems and arrangement of sounds in the two languages. But it must be well remembered that this stress system is ultimately arbitrary: we chose it for convenience and it is not supposed to reflect Tolkien’s conceptions on those matters.

Following Tolkien’s statement in Sauron Defeated p. 434 we treated the v encountered in the Adûnaic text as a spelling variant of w.

The Adûnaic text is transcribed in tengwar or “letters of Fëanor” according to an adaptation of ours of the general use of the Third Age, in which the fourth row of tengwar (with raised stem and double bow) spells the prenasalized voiced stops nd, mb and ng. We made use of Måns Björkman Berg’s typeface Tengwar Eldamar.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe

References
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. Sauron Defeated – The End of the Third Age: The History of The Lord of the Rings, part four & The Notion Club Papers & The Drowning of Anadûnê. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2002. 482 p. (The History of Middle-earth; IX). ISBN 0-261-10305-9.

The works of John Ronald Reuel and Christopher Tolkien are under the copyright of their authors and/or rights holders, including their publishers and the Tolkien Estate.
Quotations from other authors, editors and translators mentioned in the bibliography are under the copyright of their publishers, except for those whose copyright term has ended.
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