therithere | Yule

Read today's comic.

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The large text is in Quenya, one of the Elven languages invented by Tolkien. I'm sure some of the people reading this have studied it more than I have, so let me know if I did anything wrong.

The words "Yule" and "Christmas" do not exist in Quenya, so I inserted both as loan words. Yule was a reasonable loan word because it exists in the Hobbit calendar, although I doubt the Elves would write it with a silent E. The dictionary doesn't have any equivalent of "happy" or "merry" in it, either, so I had to wish that the holidays were glorious and beautiful instead. It's really a shame that the language has such a small vocabulary, but Tolkien did not have enough years to unfold his whole creation. He deserved a few more decades to finish a few more books, if anyone ever did.

I had the idea for today's comic last December. A county-wide power outage made it impossible to finish it in time, so I saved it for the next Christmas.

The beauty of Elvish doesn't show up when you're using a single-thickness pen. It seems to have been designed specifically for use with a calligraphy pen. I was surprised to see what a difference it made when I inked it with a proper dip-pen, a tool I haven't seriously used before. When I'd penciled in the cirth (Elven letters), they seemed both irregular and repetitive, but when I inked them, then they flowed and looked right. It made it look like I had more skill than I have. I'm probably blind to my beginner's mistakes, but I'm very satisfied with how it turned out.

Be glad that I spared you the horror of what I had in my original sketch: bubble cirth.

Theri There

A comic about therianthropes and otherkin

Yule

Yule

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