Cirth

The Cirth ("Runes") are the letters of an artificial script which was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the constructed languages he devised and used in his works. The initial C in Cirth is pronounced as a K, never as an S. The runic alphabet used by the Dwarves of Middle-earth was adapted by J.R.R. Tolkien from real-life runes. In The Hobbit, the Anglo-Saxon futhorc was used in the publication with few changes; in The Lord of the Rings a new syst... more

The Cirth ("Runes") are the letters of an artificial script which was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the constructed languages he devised and used in his works. The initial C in Cirth is pronounced as a K, never as an S. The runic alphabet used by the Dwarves of Middle-earth was adapted by J.R.R. Tolkien from real-life runes. In The Hobbit, the Anglo-Saxon futhorc was used in the publication with few changes; in The Lord of the Rings a new system of runes, the Cirth, was devised. Since the Cirth is an alphabet, one rune generally stands for one sound (phoneme) and sounds that would be written with a digraph in English (such as "sh" and "th") are written with one rune. Words are separated by a dot rather than a space, and double consonants are grouped together into one rune, the same as if it were a single consonant. Presumably this alphabet was meant to be used in conjunction with a Dwarf language, but mostly it is used for transliterations. In the fictional history of Middle-earth,... less