“Markirya” is a name often given to our longest Quenya text from Tolkien’s hand. Il is a highly transformed version of poems written in Qenya tens of years before. These bear the title of Oilima Markirya “The Last Ark” ; the last form presented here has no title. The word oilima does not seem to be valid any longer at that stage, in its stead métima is found; on the other hand Markirya is made of the elements mar “dwelling, home” and cirya “ship” well attested in Quenya, and so could be valid even at that time; consequently this poem is often called “Markirya”, an apocryphal but convenient title. There are two versions; the second was published as an addition to the essay A Secret Vice in the collection The Monsters and the Critics, with the differences of the first version, Tolkien’s last corrections and a glossary.

Here we give the second version with Tolkien’s ultimate corrections. We edited the spelling to adapt it to the uses of The Lord of the Rings, save the diaeresis that we utterly removed (it is but a purely graphic sign to help English speakers to get a correct pronunciation). We adopted the usual correction in the first line of men into man and fáne into fána: crosschecking with other Quenya sources allows to make sure these are indeed typographical errors. The English version was reconstituted by Édouard Kloczko after Tolkien’s translation of the first Qenya version and the vocabulary of the glossary.

The text is transcribed in tengwar or “letters of Fëanor” according to the classical mode for Quenya described by Tolkien in the Appendix E to The Lord of the Rings and used for instance by the Namarië manuscript in The Road Goes Ever On p. 65. We made use of Johan Winge’s typeface Tengwar Annatar.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe