{"id":1156,"date":"2008-08-31T20:49:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-01T03:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/08\/31\/riddle-me-dhis\/"},"modified":"2008-08-31T20:49:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-01T03:49:00","slug":"riddle-me-dhis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/08\/31\/riddle-me-dhis\/","title":{"rendered":"Riddle Me “DHis”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend at PAX, Turbine–makers of The Lord of the Rings Online<\/span>–had a bunch of banners up promoting their new Mines of Moria<\/span> expansion. Each banner had a riddle on it, written in Tolkien-ish runes, and Turbine’s ad in the program book provided the translation guide.<\/p>\n

D teased me about not trying to solve the cryptograms without the alphabet, but the runes were a very loose “phonetic” translation. I use quotation marks there because their phonemes were not consistent–they put a caret (^) over some letters to indicate a long vowel sound, but the runes themselves didn’t always spell words as they should have sounded. (I know, taste of our own medicine<\/a>, laugh it up.) And they kept using the “dh” rune for “th” sounds, which was mildly annoying.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the first five riddles were pretty easy, but the last one–which you had to go to the exhibitor’s booth to see–was a bit of a bear. I didn’t actually end up solving it, because I lost interest after learning that the “prize” was just an entry into a drawing for unspecified stuff. Lame.<\/p>\n

Here’s my translation of the final riddle:<\/p>\n

My twin dark reds(?) no longer hide
The greens once set so deep inside
Below a pair of rows(?) is found
Of jagged silvers up & down
This indigos(?) a barren bin
A brown(?) was once contained therein<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The original runes:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
(Photo from forums.lotro.com<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n

And here’s the “Cirth alphabet.” See what I mean? How is an ampersand<\/span> a phoneme? Sigh.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Post a comment if you think you know the answer. It’s a five-letter word, and it’s not<\/span> “mouth.” (For reference, the other answers were “treasure chest,” “ring,” “spark,” “tombstone,” and “gem.”)<\/p>\n

Read more about CKL+D@PAX on Travels With Our Cats<\/a>!<\/span><\/p>\n

~CKL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weekend at PAX, Turbine–makers of The Lord of the Rings Online–had a bunch of banners up promoting their new Mines of Moria expansion. Each banner had a riddle on it, written in Tolkien-ish runes, and Turbine’s ad in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}