Cirth

"Can you see anything?" "Nothing. There's nothing." The descriptive majority of this article's text is unsourced, and should be supported with references.

Chart showing the runes shared by the "Angerthas Daeron" and "Angerthas Moria"
Cirth
Made by	Daeron
Origin	Doriath

The original Certhas Daeron, known in short as the Cirth, was the script of runes created by Daeron, the minstrel of king Thingol of Doriath and was later expanded into what was known as the Angerthas Daeron. Although the Cirth were later largely replaced by the Tengwar (which were enhanced and brought by Fëanor), they were adopted by Dwarves to write down their Khuzdûl language (Angerthas Moria and Angerthas Erebor) because their straight lines were better suited to carving than the curved strokes of the Tengwar. Some examples of Cirth writings are the inscription on Balin's tomb in Moria and the inscriptions on the top of the title pages for The Lord of the Rings. The black helm of the Dark Lord Sauron's ambassador and lieutenant, the Mouth of Sauron had Cirth runes that was translated to "Voice of the Abhorred Dead". 

Some of the cirth had different values for the Elvish and Dwarvish languages and some were used in only one system or the other.

Cirth is plural and is written with a capital C when referring to the writing system — the runes themselves can be called cirth. A single rune is a certh.

Many letters have shapes also found in the historical Futhark runes (used in The Hobbit), but their sound values are only similar in a few of the vowels. Rather, the system of assignment of sound values is much more systematic in the Cirth than in the historical runes (e.g., voiced variants of a voiceless sound are expressed by an additional stroke). A similar system has been proposed for a few historical runes (e.g. p ᛈ and w ᚹ as variants of b ᛒ) but is in any case much more obscure.

The Cirth are not part of the Unicode Standard. However, the ConScript Unicode Registry has potentially reserved the U+E080–E0FF range of the Unicode "Private Use Area" for Cirth based on a proposal made in 1997.

Inspiration

J.R.R. Tolkien clearly adapted the northwest Germanic or Scandinavian runic alphabet called Elder Futhark for his legendarium. Cirth is largely just a superset of Futhark or its descendant Anglo-Saxon runes.

See also

• Angerthas
• Angerthas Daeron
• Sarati
• Tengwar
• Sarati

External links

• Cirth.de - Explore the appearances of runes in Tolkien's work
• Dan Smith's Cirth article Information and font to download
• History of Elven writing systems
• Official proposal to encode Cirth in Unicode
• Cirth proposal for ConScript Unicode Registry