New Unicode runes Tolkien

[jallanite]

When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in 1937 he pictured his dwarves as writing Old English runes, probably because Old English runes on a map just seemed so neat to him. Then he even included the runes on the book’s dust jacket.

Of course Tolkien later decided that Old English runes must have really been created long after the time in which Bilbo Baggins existed and so now claimed that the set of Old English runes that he had used merely resembled the Old English runes in some features, but were not the same. He made up the story that the Dwarves had never actually used Old English runes but that he, himself, had put them in to substitute for the supposed real runes that were known as the Cirth which somewhat resembled Old English runes, just as the writing on the map was now not supposed to be real English writing in the Latin script, but just a substitute for some other old writing that somewhat resembled it, and just as the Dwarf names were no longer supposed to be the names from the Old Eddas, but merely substitutes for older real names.

But Tolkien had invented too much in his introduction of the Old English runes. He made a place for runic-k which also included a variant form of the c-rune with a hook which would do to ape the modern distinction between c and k. Then at a later period Tolkien wrote in a letter to a certain Mrs. Katherine Farrer in which he added to his Old English runes a letter like a reversed s to represent the sh of shush and a runic letter oo, differentiated from normal Old English runic ee or oe or œ.

The cirth (and tengwar) were to be eventually inserted into Unicode, although this has not been done yet. But these codes have been assigned an unofficial private use encoding. For the application for tengwar encoding see http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/tengwar.html and for the cirth (or certar) see http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/cirth.html . Michael Everson assures those who ask that the project is still going forward but that writing systems felt to be more urgently needed in the world have been getting priority in Unicode.

Meanwhile regular runes, Germanic, Old English, and Scandinavian, have been in Unicode for years. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runes#Letters . But perhaps matters are now beginning to move. For Unicode version 7 released on June 16, the regular runic block of Unicode gets eight new characters, six calligraphic symbols found on the Frank’s Casket (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks_Casket ) and the three special symbols invented for J. R . R. Tolkien for his personal use. See http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Un...0/U70-16A0.pdf and http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4013.pdf for Michael Everson’s personal official application. Yes, soon now the three characters, called officially the Tolkienian extensions, will be available with most fonts on the web that contain runic characters.

One font at least is available already. Download and install it from http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/MoonRunes.html . Then you can print out all Tolkien’s letters at least on a word processor. Doing it on this editor will probably not be possible with most systems. You may have to reboot your system to get your font installation to work.