Question, As I was watching one of the Stargate SG-1 episodes, Sg-1 finds themeselves on one of the Asgard installations. On the Asgard display there were alien symbols…then towards the end of the show it clicked in…they are teh runes used by Tolkien in his made up alphabet. I tried translating the runes that were used in Stargate, but they made no sense to me.
I wonder if I just messed up the translations, or if the producers simply put them on the show cause they looked cool, and never really bothered to look up the proper letters/runes. IN which case, it would be very dissapointing–it would have been nice to find a hidden message to be placed there.
Just thought id let ppl know
CHeers
The letters he invented for Quenya and Sindarin are the Tengwar, which have a rounded look to them. The runes he invented are Cirth, which have a more edged appearance. The Cirth are adaptations of Anglo-Saxon runes.
It would make sense for them to use Anglo-Saxon runes as (I believe) they were used by the Nordic peoples, and the Asgard are supposed to be the Norse Gods.
that makes a lotta sense. But were straying from my point :P…which is that basically stargate slacked off and threw some runes in cause they looked cool, rather than them actually forming words and such
Well, if you were translating from Tolkien’s Cirth, then I imagine you got the wrong letters. Then there’s the thing about English not being the only language…
Except they probably do form words - if, that is, you translate them using the futharc that in Stargate continuity would be the alphabet given to humans by the Asgard, and from which Tolkien lifted his Dwarven runes.
Well until someone prooves otherwise…i really do think that they just threw runes in there to look ‘cool’
Someone mentioned that i messed up teh translation…how do you know??? Rather than just saying that…why don’t you actually explain your comment?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they just threw in some random runes that mean absolutely nothing. On the other hand, I wouldn’t put it past them to include a secret message… like “Peter DeLuise is a git” or something along those lines.
The point is, it’s supposed to be a foreign language, not just an English cipher. You can’t translate Russian into English just by replacing the Cyrillic letters with Roman characters. They’re different words, with their own grammar, syntax, declensions, etc. If SG1 was using Nordic runes on the display screen, why should the runes represent English words? Shouldn’t they represent Nordic words? And if they’re in one of Tolkien’s made up languages for Middle Earth, shouldn’t they represent words in that language, and not ours? But really, they shouldn’t be translatable into either language, since the Asgard are ancient space aliens, not dwarves or vikings, and ought to have their own language.
At any rate, odds are they don’t mean anything in any language, and were just added because they looked cool. I’m still impressed that they went to the effort of looking up what Nordic runes actually looked like, instead of just making shit up, like most other TV shows would.
Slightly off-topic, but Tolkien did use the futhark runes as an English cipher in The Hobbit. I remember first noticing something that looked like “Hobbit” and “Tolkien” on the outer edge of the book cover, and being able to decipher before knowing what the futhark were. It appears as an indication of dwarvish writings on the maps, too.
So maybe they did throw in some meaningful cipher in imitation of Tolkien.
The burden of proof is on you to prove your claim, not on us to disprove it.
How on Earth can anyone prove the runes translate accurately when you can’t tell us what ep they appear in?
panamajack, this may come as some surprise to you, but not everyone who uses Nordic runes in set decoration is imitating Tolkien. This goes double for anyone whose set decoration has deliberate Nordic overtones and influences.
Ahh excellent for saving me the trouble, but if you still want the episode that I saw it in…its season 5 - Revelations (last episode-when they are in the secret research facility with an Asgard scientist)
I was using the assumption (at the time unproven) that they were using Tolkien’s own Cirth or Tengwar, per the OP. Turns out I was wrong. I wouldn’t think that any old runes would be an homage to Tolkien (and even if they’d used his I wouldn’t assume it either).
