Read by Tolkien

It seemed to us that a website featuring the pronunciation of Tolkien's invented languages would not have been complete without having called upon their author - the professor himself - to "speak". This is possible, for our greatest joy, since some recordings of Tolkien reading his own texts do exist. Those recordings are valuable for the study of pronunciation, although it may be necessary to take into account natural interference with English phonetics (for which Tolkien did apologise, of course!) - for that matter, an analysis of Tolkien's pronunciation has been led by Laurence J. Krieg at the Phonetics Laboratory of the Michigan University; the results have been published in An Introduction to Elvish pp. 152-159.

However, the total amount of these recordings being sizeable, it would have been impossible (for various reasons) to provide here the texts in full. Thus, for the sake of usefulness, we chose to give here the whole list of invented words/names pronounced by Tolkien and to provide for each one a short illustrative audio extract - save for these three integral Elvish texts, that we did not want to denature:

• Namárie / Altariello Nainie Lóriendesse (LotR II, 8)
• A Elbereth Gilthoniel (LotR II, 1)
• The spell "Mellon!" (LotR II, 4)

Tolkien's records are dated to 1952, August for the greater part. They have been reedited several times for various occasions:

• J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring: The Two Towers, The Return of the King. Caedmon Records, 1975. Vinyl record. Reedited in 1999 on audiotape, with the name J.R.R Tolkien Reads Excerpts from The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring. This tape can be found in the package JRR Tolkien reads excerpts from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, HarperAudio, 1999.
• J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Return of the King. Caedmon Records, 1975. Vinyl record. Reedited in 1999 on audiotape, with the name J.R.R. Tolkien Reads Excerpts from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Return of The King. This tape can be found in the package JRR Tolkien reads excerpts from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, HarperAudio, 1999.
• Poems and Songs of Middle-earth. Caedmon Records, 1967. Vinyl record. The A-side gives several extracts from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil read by Tolkien; the B-side gives a sung version (by William Elvin) of the poems and songs of The Road Goes Ever On. Reedited in 1999 on audiotape in the package J.R.R. Tolkien reads excerpts from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, HarperAudio, 1999.
• J.R.R. Tolkien Reads Excerpts from Lord of the Rings, a CD bound to the Lord of The Rings Millenium Edition, HarperCollins, 2000.
• The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection. HarperAudio, 2001. Contains extracts from the various sources given above.