This isn’t from Lord of the Rings, but it comes close. The front of this gold ring is inscribed in Greek with the words, “Havriknidas [or perhaps Aphrikanidas] dedicated [this ring] to the white-armed goddess, Hera.” In Greek mythology, Hera is the goddess of women, marriage, family, and childbirth.
Signs of considerable wear on the ring’s outer edge indicate that it had been worn for a long time before the inscription was added.
In the 500s BC, the way Greek letters were written differed significantly from city to city. The inscription on this ring uses the script of Argos, a city in southern Greece, and represents the earliest form of the Argive alphabet, suggesting a date in the early to mid-6th century B.C.
This week we present examples of American type founder Dan Carr’s archaic Greek typeface named after the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea, released in 2000 by Carr’s Golgonooza Letter Foundry in Ashuelot, New Hampshire. Carr designed, cut, and founded the typeface for an 2004 edition of The Fragments of Parmenides printed in Berkeley, California by Peter Koch, with a translation by fellow typographer Robert Bringhurst.
These specimens were printed as an insert for Dan Carr’s article “Cutting Parmenides,” published in Matrix 22, Winter 2002, pp. 114-128. The specimen was handprinted at Golgonooza using a text from the Oxford edition of Richmond Lattimore’s line-for-line translation of the Odyssey, with the English printed in Regulus, also designed and cut by Carr. Koch asked Carr to design a typeface with a “somewhat rustic or crude look” and some “rock and roll” put into it. As source materials, Carr used Ionian Greek script (Parmenides was from the Ionian colony of Elea) found in Lillian Jeffrey’sThe Local Scripts of Archaic Greek and examples of Ionian Greek inscriptions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In meeting Koch’s requirements, Carr also wanted to design a type that captured Parmenides’s specific way of thinking. Carr writes:
Typography is a way of thought, much as poetry is a way of thought… . The typography of different languages and different times can provide useful clues to the thought of the people… . Typography reflects so much of its culture and language that it may be one of the most evocative artefacts of a literature.
