Author:

• Name: Anonymous 2004
  Location: SG - Republic of Singapore (Singapore)

To build:

    make

To use:

    ./anonymous 'foo' > bar.pgm

Now open the output using your favourite pgm viewer. If you don’t have a pgm viewer then we suggest the netpbm toolkit to convert the image to a graphics format that you can view. Most graphical web browsers can display PNG or JPEG images. See the FAQ on “netpbm” for help.

Try:

    ./try.sh

NOTE: technically the text is supposed to be in all lower case but the script does use some upper case letters for demonstration purposes.

Judges’ remarks:

Did you know that in the first edition of The Hobbit, Gollum was willing to give up the ring? It was not the Ruling Ring, the One Ring, the Ring of Power or anything like that: it was simply a literary device that could make one invisible. When Bilbo won the famous Riddle-game Gollum went to fetch the Ring - not to kill and eat Bilbo but to give it to him! But Bilbo had already found it just like in the later editions. Gollum profusely apologised and begged for forgiveness. Bilbo told him never mind because he would have had it anyway. But he’d let him off on one condition: that he show him the way out. It was at this point that Bilbo slipped the ring on (in the same way as the later editions) and Gollum saw him vanish and understood that Bilbo had the ring. But there was no call of thief and no hatred of Bilbo. It was not until a sequel was called for that this was changed.

If you want to read the first edition they reprinted it some years back: The Hobbit Facsimile First Edition. The details are also discussed in History of Middle-earth (HoMe) VI, The Return of the Shadow, part one of the history of The Lord of the Rings of a twelve volume set - as well as in The History of the Hobbit.

Fun fact: at first Gollum was akin to a goblin-kind but this was immediately struck out and he became a Hobbit.

p.s. Frodo lives!

An important aside :-)

BTW: if you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings what are you waiting for? :-) You’ll find out the source of the text above though you’ll see that there are some circumflexes missing! That’s okay though due to I/O of the entry and in earlier drafts sometimes the û had no diacritic but h after the u in it (and other times nothing). The real text is:

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

which when translated from Black Speech:

into the Common Tongue reads:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Author’s remarks:

This program takes a single command line argument, transcribes the argument text into Tolkien’s Elvish letters, and writes the transcription to standard output as a portable graymap (PGM) file.

The specific transcription mode is the Black Speech (Tengwar mode), as used in the inscription on the One Ring. The program handles the following digraphs:

• gh, sh, th: the corresponding tengwar are output for these specific sounds.
• mh denotes the full tengwa for [m]; m by itself means a horizontal bar above the next letter.
• rh denotes the [r] tengwa.
• uh denotes the tehta for long vowel [u:].
• zh selects the up-reaching tengwa for [z], while z selects the down-reaching one.

Punctuation marks other than commas and periods are ignored, as are whitespace characters. In addition, the argument text must be entirely in lower case.

The following command thus writes a rendering of the Ring inscription to the file ring.pgm:

    ./anonymous "ash nazg durhbatuluhk, ash nazg gimbatul, \
        ash nazg thrakatuluhk, agh burzhumh-ishi krimpatul." >ring.pgm

The source code assumes the ASCII character set; also, due to space constraints, the program uses rather inefficient algorithms, so it may waste a lot of time and space even when rendering moderately long strings.

The code contains a vector font which was derived by toying with Harri Perälä’s Tengwar Cursive font. Currently, only the glyphs used in the Ring inscription are included in the font.

Primary files

• anonymous.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• anonymous.orig.c - original source code
• One_Ring_inscription.png - image of inscription on One Ring (in Black Speech)
• try.sh - script to try entry

Secondary files

• 2004_anonymous.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• index.html - this web page

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