Help please: A gift for a friend

Hi everyone,

I'm a casual fan but my friend (basically my sister) is a huge, astronomical, can info-dump for weeks without repeating herself, fan.

In fact, she is such a huge Tolkien Nerd (lovingly labelled so), that she is about to do her PhD on the topic. (Message to my friend, if you're on here: no looking, this is going to be a surprise! Go away! lol)

Of course, she needs a gift, and I've settled on a nice leather messenger bag for her to take her things to university in, and I want to have a message in Elvish engraved/embossed onto it. The thing is, me being the casual fan I have no idea how to do this.

I could just whack the message into a translator and have the English characters converted into elvish text, however she deserves better than this which is why I'm here asking for help.

I' m manifesting a bit with the message, but basically I want to put: Doctor [her full name] Tolkien Scholar and Feminist Critic

I've seen that there are multiple versions of the elvish language, and I've had a play with the translation/dictionary tool and got totally overwhelmed. Please help before my brain turns to soup and she gets the half-arsed translation I managed to slap together.

Thank you!

My current best guess is: istyar [Name] Tolkeiningolmo a cenyainimeitë

(Scholar [Name] Tolkein-loremaster and see-perceive-female)

I may not be extremely qualified, but this is my best guess (In Quenya, which should fit since Quenya, in the Third Age, is primarily used for ceremonial purposes/special occasions):

Istyar [Name], ingolmo Tolkeino ar hamro melesníono

(Scholar, learned man [Name] loremaster of Tolkein and judger of love-of-women)

Are you planning to use the Tengwar (runes) for the inscription?

I can offer Istyarë [Name], ingolmo Arcastaro ar inyavalëa navallë.

Lit. "scholar (f.) [Name], loremaster of Tolkien and female-power-adj. judge (f.)", Arcastar being Tolkien's translation of his own name.

However, inyavalëa is an extremely tentative construction. I realize that you want to honor your friend with a full translation, but the community generally agrees that, given the incompleteness of Tolkien's languages and the ever-changing material on them, you should not trust any inscriptions to be completely accurate. It may be better to simply transcribe the English.

Or, conversely, you could go with the Quenya and explain the reasoning for the possible discrepancies.

I do think that the last translation for 'Feminist Critic' is better than mine

Amazing, thank you both so much.

Yes, I'm translating it into the runes too, and I'm not going to tell her what it says so she will have to decode it :)