Just got back from the wedding of Sarah “Daughter of TMatt” Mattingly and Jeremy Wagner, at Sarah’s home parish, Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church, in suburban Baltimore. If you had any doubt that these great kids were meant for each other, they would have been settled when Jeremy explained their wedding cake to the guests before the couple cut it. It seems that both Jeremy and Sarah, who met in college, are Tolkien geeks who are also enamored of all things Celtic. Jeremy began courting Sarah by, get this, writing her notes and letters in Elvish … which she translated using a dictionary. Tolkien, as you may know, was a brilliant philologist who invented the Elvish language.
Check out their (green, naturally) wedding cake: the writing you see is an Orthodox wedding troparion prokeimenon written out in Elvish. Is that not the most wonderfully geeky thing? The Wagners are so meant for each other. God grant them many years!

UPDATE: Lily Grunzweig Rowe, the creator of that awesome cake, sends a better photo of it (my iPhone camera was using the “saturated” setting on the Toy Camera app). Click below the fold to see the color green the cake really was. BTW, TMatt says the Elvish inscription is from Psalm 21:
“Thou hast set upon their heads oh Lord, crowns of precious stones; they asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest it them.”