Tolkien's Tengwar and Cirth: A Guide to Middle-earth's Writing

J.R.R. Tolkien invented two complete writing systems for Middle-earth. Tengwar is the flowing Elvish script, used for Quenya, Sindarin, and the Black Speech. Cirth is the angular runic script, used by Dwarves and carved into stone. Tolkien described both in Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings.

Tengwar is not a simple substitution cipher. It is a phonetic writing system where the same symbol can represent different sounds depending on which mode you are using. This makes it genuinely harder to learn than game alphabets like the Standard Galactic Alphabet or Daedric, which are just English with different symbols.

Tengwar was added to the Unicode Standard in version 14.0, released in September 2021. It occupies the block U+1E000 through U+1E0FF. You can experiment with both scripts using our Tengwar and Cirth translator.

Tolkien was a philologist by profession. He taught at Oxford and spent his career studying Old English, Old Norse, and Gothic. His approach to fictional writing systems was informed by real historical scripts. He did not design fonts. He designed writing systems with internal logic, historical development, and multiple modes of use.

Tolkien described Tengwar and Cirth in Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, which serves as the primary source for how both systems work. The Tolkien Gateway and Omniglot's Tengwar page provide detailed references based on Tolkien's own writings and on Christopher Tolkien's posthumous publications.

Two systems exist because they serve different in-world purposes. Tengwar was created by the Elf Fëanor and is used for writing on parchment, in books, and for formal inscriptions. Cirth was created by the Elf Daeron of Doriath and later adapted by the Dwarves, who used it for carving into stone. The angular shapes of Cirth are practical for chiseling. The flowing curves of Tengwar are practical for brush and pen.

This mirrors real-world writing history. Runic alphabets like the Elder Futhark were carved into wood and stone, so they used straight lines. The Latin alphabet developed for pen-and-ink writing, so it could afford curves. Tolkien applied the same logic to his fictional scripts.

Tengwar is the primary Elvish writing system in Middle-earth. Tolkien invented it in the 1930s, years before The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954-1955. The word "tengwar" means "letters" in Quenya. Individual symbols are called "tengwa" (singular) or "tengwar" (plural).

The Wikipedia article on Tengwar provides a good overview. The system has approximately 24 primary tengwar arranged in a grid of four series (tengwar series, called "tyeller") and six grades (tengwar grades, called "temar"). The series relate to the point of articulation in the mouth. The grades relate to whether the sound is a voiceless stop, voiced stop, voiceless fricative, or voiced fricative, with additional grades for nasals and other sounds.

This is what makes Tengwar a phonetic system rather than a substitution cipher. The symbol for "p" and the symbol for "b" are related visually because they are both labial stops, differing only in voicing. The symbol for "t" and "d" are related because they are dental stops. The grid layout encodes phonological features into the shapes of the letters.

Additional symbols called "tehtar" (signs) are used for vowels and other modifications. In most modes, tehtar are placed above the preceding consonant. This is different from English, where vowels are full letters on the same baseline. The tehtar system is one reason Tengwar looks so different from Latin-script languages: the vowels float above the consonants rather than sitting beside them.

A Tengwar mode is a specific mapping of tengwar symbols to sounds for a particular language. The same set of tengwar can be used to write Quenya, Sindarin, English, or the Black Speech, but each language uses a different mode. The symbols stay the same. The sounds they represent change.

The General Use mode, also called the English mode, maps tengwar to English phonemes. This is the mode most English-speaking fans learn first. You write English words using tengwar symbols based on how the words sound, not how they are spelled. So "phone" would be written with the symbols for F, O, and N, not P, H, O, N, E.

The Beleriand mode is used for Sindarin, the Grey-elven language spoken in Middle-earth. In this mode, vowels are written as full tengwar rather than tehtar above consonants. This makes Beleriand-mode Tengwar look different from Quenya-mode Tengwar even though both use the same base symbols.

The Quenya mode is used for Quenya, the High-elven language. Quenya mode uses tehtar for vowels, placed above the preceding consonant. This is the mode used for most Quenya inscriptions in Tolkien's works.

The Black Speech mode is used for the inscription on the One Ring. It is the rarest mode in Tolkien's published works, appearing primarily in that one inscription. The Wikipedia article on Tengwar documents the mode differences.

This mode system is why you cannot simply create a 1:1 English-to-Tengwar lookup table and call it done. A proper Tengwar translator needs to know which mode you are using and apply phonetic rules for that mode. Our Tengwar and Cirth translator handles mode selection so you can see the difference.

Cirth is Tolkien's runic writing system. It was originally devised by the Elf Daeron of Doriath to represent Sindarin, but the Dwarves adopted it and extended it for their own use, particularly in Moria. The Wikipedia article on Cirth covers the system's history and structure.

Tolkien based Cirth on real-world runic alphabets, particularly the Elder Futhark (used by Germanic peoples from the 2nd to 8th centuries) and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc. The visual similarity is intentional. Tolkien was drawing on his expertise in Old English and Norse philology. The angular shapes of Cirth runes are practical for carving into stone and wood, which is exactly how the Dwarves use them in Middle-earth.

Cirth has two main forms. The original Cirth of Daeron had a limited set of runes. The extended Cirth, used by the Dwarves of Moria, added runes for sounds not present in Sindarin but needed for Khuzdul, the Dwarvish language. The inscription on the tomb of Balin in Moria, which the Fellowship encounters in The Fellowship of the Ring, is written in Cirth.

Unlike Tengwar, Cirth does not have official Unicode support. It uses the ConScript Unicode Registry (CSUR), which assigns Cirth runes to codepoints in the Unicode Private Use Area. This means Cirth can be encoded and transmitted digitally, but it requires specialized fonts that map the Private Use Area codepoints to Cirth glyphs. The Tolkien Gateway documents the CSUR mappings.

For comparison with real-world runic systems that inspired Cirth, our Linear B translator covers another ancient carved script, and our Egyptian hieroglyphics translator handles a writing system that, like Cirth, was designed for carving into hard surfaces.

The most famous Tengwar inscription in Tolkien's works is the writing on the One Ring. When heated in fire, the Ring displays two lines of Tengwar written in the Black Speech mode:

"Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul."

This translates to: "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

The inscription uses Tengwar with tehtar for vowels, consistent with the Black Speech mode. The word "nazg" means "ring" in the Black Speech, which Tolkien derived from the same root as the Irish word "nasc" and the Welsh word "annasg," both meaning ring or bond. Tolkien noted this etymological connection in his letters.

The inscription is a single couplet, not a full text. Gandalf recites it at the Council of Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring after throwing the Ring into the fire at Bag End. The fire reveals the Tengwar inscription, which is otherwise invisible at room temperature. This is one of the few places in The Lord of the Rings where the Black Speech appears in full, because Tolkien deliberately kept the language sparse. He found it ugly and unpleasant to write, which was the point: the Black Speech was designed by Sauron to be a language of domination, and its unpleasantness reflects its purpose.

Tengwar was added to the Unicode Standard in version 14.0, released in September 2021. The Tengwar block occupies codepoints U+1E000 through U+1E0FF. The Unicode 14.0 release notes document the addition. This means Tengwar can now be encoded, transmitted, and rendered using standard Unicode-compatible fonts.

Before Unicode 14.0, Tengwar relied on the ConScript Unicode Registry (CSUR) Private Use Area mappings, the same system Cirth still uses. The move to official Unicode was a significant step because it means Tengwar text can be copied and pasted between applications, indexed by search engines, and processed by standard text tools without requiring custom encoding schemes.

Google's Noto Sans Tengwar font supports the Unicode Tengwar block. Other fonts, including several maintained by the Tengwar community, have been updated to use the official Unicode codepoints. The standardization effort took years and involved coordination between the Tengwar community, font designers, and the Unicode Consortium.

Cirth remains in the CSUR Private Use Area. There is no current proposal to add Cirth to official Unicode, though the CSUR mapping is widely used in fan communities. The practical difference is that Tengwar text is portable across systems in a way Cirth text is not, because Private Use Area codepoints can be mapped to different glyphs by different fonts.

You can write in both scripts using our Tengwar and Cirth translator, which supports mode selection for Tengwar and the extended Cirth rune set for Dwarvish inscriptions.