ramblingsofamoonwatcher:

sarahmongie:

fandomearth:

In the Unfinished Tales it is mentioned that Sindarin and Silvan elves living in Mirkwood were mostly illiterate. Therefore, Oropher, Thranduil and Legolas did not know how to read or write in Tengwar script.

And then it just clicked. That is the reason Legolas doesn’t say anything about the text at the gates of Moria in FOTR. Why? Because even through it is in elvish, it is written in Feanorian characters, Tengwar.

So then everyone is staring at Legolas, who is probably mortified because nobody is supposed to know that he and his father, the great elvenking, are illiterate. Gandalf knows and so he just reads the script, trying not to laugh at his horrified expression.

Also to add:

“When the Noldor rebelled and came to Middle-earth, they adapted their writing for the new languages they learned. Quanta Sarmë was used for languages where the tehtar were not useful which could have been the origin for the Mode of Beleriand.”

This is super interesting!! Perhaps I will need to look further into this and alter Hithfaeril’s character. I love the idea.

Alright, from a purely historical perspective, widespread literacy only became a thing after the invention of the printing press. Because otherwise, written material took so much time and effort to produce there really wasn’t anything to read even if you could invest months, if not years of resources and lost income from not working into learning.

And I think it helps that I grew up in a country that could only reasonably be considered ‘developed’ or ‘industrialised’ in the last 45-ish years? Because even now, most people know at least one person who is maybe semi-literate at best. Illiteracy and poor education is not alien to me. I’m Y2k spawn, and even my paternal grandmother was illiterate. My paternal aunts would never have been literate if the law hadn’t forced my grandparents to send them to school. Literacy really wasn’t that much of a universal, essential skill until maybe the last century or two at most in human history.

Information was passed orally, though, through songs and rhyme and sheer repetition, and if that’s your only source of information, you can bet your brain is going to retain it like nothing else purely because there isn’t much else to retain. Even better if, like an Elf, your brain is built to handle presumably infinite amounts of information due to your infinite lifespan.

tl;dr literacy as a vital and common skill is a very recent thing and realistically, probably isn’t too essential for the pre-Industrial Revolution, seemingly pre-printing press Elves.