Cirth


The Cirth is a semi‑artificial script, based on real‑life runic alphabets, invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the constructed languages he devised and used in his works. Cirth is written with a capital letter when referring to the writing system; the runes themselves can be called cirth.
In the fictional history of Middle-earth, the original Certhas was created by the Sindar for their language, Sindarin. Its extension and elaboration was known as the Angerthas Daeron, as it was attributed to the Sinda Daeron, although it was most probably expanded by the Noldor in order to represent the sounds of other languages like Quenya and Telerin.
Although the Cirth was later largely replaced by the Tengwar, it was adopted by Dwarves to write down both their Khuzdul language and the languages of Men. The Cirth was also adapted, in its oldest and simplest form, by various races including Men and even Orcs.

External history

Concept and creation

Many letters have shapes also found in the historical runic alphabets, 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. A similar system has been proposed for a few historical runes but is in any case much more obscure.
The division between the older Cirth of Daeron and their adaptation by Dwarves and Men has been interpreted as a parallel drawn by Tolkien to the development of the Fuþorc to the Younger Fuþark. The original Elvish Cirth "as supposed products of a superior culture" are focused on logical arrangement and a close connection between form and value whereas the adaptations by mortal races introduced irregularities. Similar to the Germanic tribes who had no written literature and used only simple runes before their conversion to Christianity, the Sindarin Elves of Beleriand with their Cirth were introduced to the more elaborate Tengwar of Fëanor when the Noldorin Elves returned to Middle-earth from the lands of the divine Valar.

Internal history and Description

First ''Certhas''

In the Appendix E of The Return of the King, Tolkien writes that the Sindar of Beleriand first developed an alphabet for their language some time between the invention of the Tengwar by Fëanor and their introduction to Middle-earth by the exiled Noldor.
This alphabet was devised to represent only the sounds of their Sindarin language and its letters were entirely used for inscribing names or brief memorials on wood, stone or metal, hence their angular forms and straight lines. In Sindarin these letters were named cirth, from the Elvish root *kir- meaning "to cleave, to cut". An abecedarium of cirth, consisting of the runes listed in due order, was commonly known as Certhas.
The cirth used for voiceless stop consonants were constructed systematically by the combination of a "stem" and a "branch". The attachment of the branch was usually made on the right side. The reverse was not infrequent, but had no phonetic significance.

Other consonants were formed following two basic principles:
  1. adding a stroke to a branch added voice ;
  2. placing the branch on both sides of the stem added voice and nasality.
The cirth constructed in this way can therefore be grouped into series. Each series corresponds to a place of articulation. This earliest system had three series:
There are also additional cirth that do not have regular shapes. These include liquid consonants and, the voiceless glottal transition, the voiceless alveolar fricative, and vowels.
The original display of Cirth should have been this:


The known ancient cirth do not cover all the sounds of Sindarin: there is no certh for,,, or. Perhaps this system had been devised for Old Sindarin, since the above-mentioned sounds do not exist in that language.

However, still frequent and are missing, too. This indicates that some ancient, unknown cirth could have existed, but did not make it to the later systems. Therefore, a fuller table cannot be reconstructed.

Long vowels were evidently indicated by doubling.

''Angerthas Daeron''

Before the end of the First Age the Certhas was rearranged and further developed, partly under the influence of the Tengwar. This reorganisation of the Cirth was commonly attributed to the Elf Daeron, minstrel and loremaster of king Thingol of Doriath. Thus, the new system became known as the Angerthas Daeron.
Unlike the previous system, the flipped form of a certh had now a phonemic significance: it signalled the lenition of the original rune. These new cirth were needed in order to represent fricatives that were developed at one point in Sindarin.
Some new runes were introduced in the Angerthas with the purpose of writing:
  1. the frequent sounds and ;
  2. long vowels, that evidently originated by doubling and joining the certh of the corresponding short vowel ;
  3. two front vowels, probably originated as ligatures of the corresponding back vowel with the -certh ;
  4. two common consonant clusters.
However, the principal additions to the former Certhas were two entirely new series of regularly-formed cirth:
Since these new series represent sounds which do not occur in Sindarin but are present in Quenya, they were most probably invented by the Exiled Noldor that spoke Quenya as a language of knowledge. By loan-translation, the Cirth became known in Quenya as Certar, while a single certh was called certa.
Back to the fictional history, after the introduction of the Tengwar in Middle-earth, the Angerthas Daeron was relegated primarily to carved inscriptions. The Elves abandoned the Cirth altogether, with the exception of the Noldor dwelling in Eregion, who maintained it and made it known as Angerthas Eregion.
Please note that, in this article, the primitive Certhas is transliterated using the regular Sindarin spelling, whereas the Angerthas is rendered using its own peculiar transliteration, introduced by Tolkien in the Appendix E, given that this script was meant to cover a much larger set of sounds than its primitive form. For example, the Sindarin spelling for is ; in the transliteration of the Angerthas instead, the sound is spelled, while represents the sound.
In this article, each certh of the ‑series presents two IPA transcriptions. The reason is that the palatal consonants of Noldorin Quenya are realised as palato-alveolar consonants in Vanyarin Quenya.

For example, the Quenya word is pronounced in the Noldorin variety, but in Vanyarin. The very name of the language, whose archaic form is , is spelled in Noldorin, but retains the spelling in Vanyarin.

Although in the fictional history of Middle-earth this series of consonants was introduced by the Noldor, it is deemed necessary to show the Vanyarin pronunciation as well, given that the very transliteration used by Tolkien is more similar to the Vanyarin phonotactics than the Noldorin.

Angerthas Moria

According to Tolkien's legendarium, the Dwarves first came to know the runes of the Noldor at the beginning of the Second Age. The Dwarves "introduced a number of unsystematic changes in value, as well as certain new cirth". They modified the previous system to suit the specific needs of their language, Khuzdul. The Dwarves spread their revised alphabet to Moria, where it came to be known as Angerthas Moria, and developed both carved and pen-written forms of these runes.
Many cirth here represent sounds not occurring in Khuzdul. Here they are marked with a black star.

Angerthas Erebor

At the beginning of the Third Age the Dwarves were driven out of Moria, and some migrated to Erebor. As the Dwarves of Erebor would trade with the Men of the nearby towns of Dale and Lake-town, they needed a script to write in Westron. The Angerthas Moria was adapted accordingly: some new cirth were added, while some were restored to their Elvish usage, thus creating the Angerthas Erebor.
While the Angerthas Moria was still used to write down Khuzdul, this new script was primarily used for Mannish languages. It is also the script used in the Book of Mazarbul.


Angerthas Erebor also features combining diacritics:
File:Balin sp2.PNG|thumb|right|400px|The bottom inscription of Balin's tomb is written in English using the Angerthas Erebor. It reads left-to-right: "Balin sʌn ov Fuin lord ov Moria"
The Angerthas Erebor is used twice in The Lord of the Rings to write in English:
  1. in the upper inscription of the title page, where it reads "ə·​lord·​ov·​ə·​riŋs·​translatᵊd·​from·​ə·​Red Book of Westmarch|red·​bk..." ;
  2. in the bottom inscription of Balin's tomb—being the translation of the upper inscription, which is written in Khuzdul using Angerthas Moria.
The Book of Mazarbul shows some additional cirth used in Angerthas Erebor: one for a double ligature, one for the definite article, and six for the representation of the same number of English diphthongs:

CerthEnglish spelling
,
,
,
,

Other runic systems of Middle-earth

The Cirth is not the only runic writing system devised by Tolkien for Middle-earth. In fact, he invented a great number of runic alphabets, of which only a few others have been published. Many of these runic scripts have been included in the "Appendix on Runes" of The Treason of Isengard, edited by Christopher Tolkien.

Runes from ''The Hobbit''

According to Tolkien, those used in The Hobbit are a form of "our ancient runes" deployed in the book to transliterate the actual Dwarvish runes. They can be interpreted as an attempt made by Tolkien to adapt the Fuþorc to the Modern English language.
These runes are basically the same found in Fuþorc, but their sound may change according to their position, just as the Latin script letters do: the writing mode adopted by Tolkien for these runes is mainly orthographic.
This system has one rune for each letter, regardless of pronunciation. For example, the rune can sound either or or even and .
A few sounds are instead written with the same rune, regardless of the way it is spelled with the Latin script. For example, the sound is always written with the rune either if in English it is written as in, as in, or as in. The only letters that are subject to this phonemic spelling are and.
In addition, there are also some runes which stand for particular English digraphs and diphthongs.
Here the runes used in The Hobbit are displayed along with their corresponding English grapheme and Fuþorc counterpart:

RuneFuþorcEnglish graphemeRuneFuþorcEnglish grapheme
phonemic
phonemic
,
,
phonemic


Two other runes, not attested in The Hobbit, were added by Tolkien in order to represent additional English graphemes:

Rune
English grapheme

Gondolinic Runes

Not all the runes mentioned in The Hobbit are Dwarf-runes. The swords found in the Trolls' cave bore runes that Gandalf allegedly could not read. In fact, the swords Glamdring and Orcrist, forged in Gondolin, bore a type of letters known as Gondolinic runes. They seem to have been obsoleted and forgotten by the Third Age, and this is supported by the fact that Tolkien writes that only Elrond could still read the inscriptions of the swords.
Tolkien devised this runic alphabet in a very early stage of his shaping of Middle-earth. Nevertheless, they are known to us from a slip of paper written by J.R.R. Tolkien, a photocopy of which Christopher Tolkien sent to Paul Nolan Hyde in February 1992. Hyde then published it, together with an extensive analysis, in the 1992 Summer issue of Mythlore, no. 69.

The system provides sounds not found in any of the known Elven languages of the First Age, but perhaps it was designed for a variety of languages. However, the consonants seem to be, more or less, the same found in Welsh phonology, a theory supported by the fact that Tolkien was heavily influenced by Welsh when creating Elven languages.



Encoding schemes

Unicode

Equivalents for some cirth can be found in the Runic block of Unicode.
Tolkien's mode of writing Modern English in Anglo-Saxon runes received explicit recognition with the introduction of his three additional runes to the Runic block with the release of Unicode 7.0, in June 2014. The three characters represent the English, and graphemes, as follows:
A formal Unicode proposal to encode Cirth as a separate script was made in September 1997 by Michael Everson.
No action was taken by the Unicode Technical Committee but Cirth appears in the Roadmap to the SMP.

ConScript Unicode Registry

Unicode Private Use Area layouts for Cirth are defined at the ConScript Unicode Registry and the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry.
Two different layouts are defined by the CSUR/UCSUR:
Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols below instead of Cirth.