While at Philadelphia Flyers training camp there are a number of little answers being shared. Small things like who Matvei Michkov might start the season playing with, how Porter Martone is looking, or what the blue line is going to look like with both David Jiricek and Oliver Bonk battling hard for a spot that might already be decided due to the waiver rules.
Lots of fun little discoveries during the first couple days before the season really gets going. But there is one thing that remains a mystery. It’s a giant mystery and maybe the biggest unknown on the entire Flyers roster ahead of the 2026-27 season.
What does Joseph Woll’s new and very cool goalie mask say?
As with every first few days of training camp, new goalie masks are popping up around the NHL. Some go with just a refresh of some current designs, but those who are lucky enough to find themselves on new teams get to potentially run with a whole new color palette and let their mind wander with ideas.
For Woll, he decided to tap into his nerdom and go with a Lord of the Rings theme and it’s absolutely gorgeous. On the left, a giant Flyers logo with a need little brick texture that might very well represent the path to Mount Doom. On the right, a depiction of a Balrog, which is an extremely cool thing to have on your mask.
But we’re most interested in the very top of Woll’s mask.
In between the very cool side decals, there is something written in the Tolkien language of tengwar on the top and we need to know what it says.
Tengwar is the language that is written inside The Ring, so naturally it would be cool if he just had the saying written out to really express his fandom. But to go the extra length in a way only a Tolkien fan would, it is not the Ring-verse. Of course it is not because that would be something a pretty basic fan would do. Woll went the extra mile and put something custom in the Tengwar language on his mask.
So, I had to find out what it said.
I’m not the biggest Lord of the Rings fan that I know all the ins and outs of the entire Tolkien world, but I have at least watched everything and read a couple books. I’m a novice when it comes to this stuff. So, I turned to go search if there was any resource that could find this out for me.
Luckily, in my very first search of “tengwar translator” the website Tencendil.com came up and it is literally what I need. God bless these fans.
It’s hard to really try to find something out when you don’t even recognize a single character. But, thankfully there is an option on Tencendil that has different fonts — it took me roughly 15 minutes of trial and error, typing in various words and nothing looking right to find this. It appears that what is on Woll’s mask is in Tengwar Artano font, since it has the thin and slightly curved lines coming out of some characters.
My initial guess is that since he is a goaltender, and since the entire concept is titled as “You Shall Not Pass”, it is going to be something about stopping pucks. So, is it something like “You Shall Not Score”? No, because that looks like this in Tengwar Artano:
There are some similar characters, like how the first M-like symbol in the third word of the phrase also starts the third word of the four-word phrase on Woll’s mask. But it’s still not even close to being right.
Maybe it’s something more specific to the Flyers? Maybe it’s one of the season slogans like “Brick by Brick”. Okay, no it’s not that either because that looks like this:
Again, nothing! The first character in “brick” is the same that pops up a couple times but that only gets us one teeny tiny step closer to finding this out.
Unfortunately, we don’t have hours and hours to keep on guessing and typing in Flyers-related and goaltending-related phrases into this wonderful resource for lovely nerds. But, we can at least give it one last shot and just type in the name of the team he now plays for. Since, you know, sometimes the team name is on the goalie mask.
No. It does not just say “The Philadelphia Flyers” on Woll’s mask, but that might be the coolest script so far. Look at all the little accents and flourishes. We need to call up Dan Hilferty and get his opinion on replacing some signs with Tengwar Artano at the Xfinity Mobile Arena this upcoming season.
We did notice fellow long-time hockey blogger Ryan Lambert also post about this issue over on Bluesky. Naturally, I reached out to Lambert to see if he had any more luck than I did trying to decipher what this said.
Unfortunately, he did not and was also just playing around with the same website Tecendil to try and get an answer purely out of curiosity. But, his best guess is that it’s just pure gibberish and the artist Dave Gunnarsson just went and found some cool-looking characters related to The Lord of the Rings. Which, is also perfectly understandable.
That’s where we are now. Hopefully we can get an answer soon and one of the other Flyers beat reporters will ask Woll about this at some point during training camp. We need to know.
