Wedding Rings

by Stephen and Juli Pfeiffer

Here is the story of the wedding rings of Stephen and Juli Pfeiffer from the USA. The tengwar Quenya inscriptions on the rings are composed by Helge Kåre Fauskanger and are very closely based on the style of Tolkien's own Ring inscription (indeed the Tengwar text was not handwritten, but a cut-and-paste job made from photocopies of Tolkien's inscription). I present one of the rings that was made for Juli Pfeiffer. It is Helge Fauskanger who advised the couple to contact our website and to publish their photo here.

Stephen and Juli Pfeiffer Juli's wedding ring

The ring inscription is:

Júli meldanyan, cuilenya ar melmenya

'To Juli my beloved, my life and my love'

Stephen Pfeiffer writes:

The story of these rings starts with the notion that I wanted to do something unique for our wedding rings. I wanted to personalize them somehow so that they belonged to us, and only us and that there would be a story behind them. All of the people that hear the story of these rings are astounded and amazed at the undertaking and devotion that took to create them and what they stand for. Since Juli and myself share a great interest in fantasy and science fiction, I thought it only appropriate to incorporate it into our wedding somehow. Unfortunately there are no real castles here on the east coast of the United States to get married in, and we probably couldn't have afforded one anyway. So let's make some rings, shall we.



I thought of using the elven runes from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to decorate the wedding bands. I have a cousin who is a big fan of Tolkien and he got me interested in it about twenty years ago when I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. Through many late night D&D sessions and a little partying mixed in, I learned quite a bit about Tolkien himself as well as the books, their characters, and the history preceding them. I also learned that Mr. Tolkien didn't just write these books, he created an entire world with everything. Even real languages. Now, how do I translate these runes into what I want to say about Juli. I looked on Amazon.com for I had heard that some books did exist that translated these languages to English. I found one of these books and scanned the various reviews that followed. That is where we found Mr. Helge K. Fauskanger. The review told

us that the book was very inaccurate and if we need an expert on the subject to seek him out. Mind you, I figured that Mr. Fauskanger lived a couple of states away and had no idea that it was a quarter of a world between us.



Through e-mail we started a correspondence to work out the undertaking of this project. I explained to Helge what I wanted to say on the rings and what he sent back to us was utterly unbelievable. He included hand-written and printed art and translation of the runes and the Elven language with the English equivalents.



Now I took that art and recreated it in Adobe Illustrator and printed high quality films to give to a man that I worked with by the name of James Fent. Mr. Fent is a director of purchasing and sourcing of jewelry and precious stones and metals for The Franklin Mint. Jim also helped me design and created my wife's engagement ring. Jim sent the artwork to an engraver in Russia who created master plates in which the rings could be fashioned from. Once the master plates were returned to him, he set about the task of fabricating the rings. I cannot tell you how pleased we were with the final results. So there you have it, the story of our rings.