Some points about tengwar and cirth

I have come across a lot of misunderstandings regarding the different writing styles of Middle-Earth so I thought that I could make an attempt to sort some things out. First off, just to be clear, tengwar is NOT a language. It is simply a system of letters that can be used to write different languages, which is also true for cirth.

Quenya and Sindarin are two languages in Tolkien's Arda that use tengwar, though they do not use it in the same way. They both use consonants as separate letters while vowels are written (usually) as signs above the consonants. An obvious exception to this is a sindarin mode in which vowels are written as separate letters, as can be seen on the gate of Moria.

One would perhaps presume that the writing systems of Sindarin and Quenya are very similar, and it is true that they can appear to be, but they are in fact very different. In other words, tengwar is not a single style of writing. The Sindarin letter for "v" has the value "mp" in Quenya while the Quenyan "v" is a Sindarin "w". However, the most important difference between the two styles is probably how the vowels are placed. In Quenya, where words often end with a vowel, vowels are placed above the preceeding consonant. In Sindarin, where words often begin with a vowel, vowels are placed above the following consonant. So, when you are to write anything in tengwar, first of all decide what system you want to use. My recommendation is to always use the Sindarin system.

Cirth is unfortunately often confused with anglo-saxon runes, which is not really strange since Tolkien used the anglo-saxon runes in The Hobbit, before he created the cirth. There are three different cirth systems: Angerthas Daeron, Angerthas Moria and Angerthas Erebor. The Moria and Erebor systems are quite similiar but there are some important differences. The rune with the value "z" in Angerthas Moria is the value "ks" in Angerthas Erebor. The rune with the value "j" in Angerthas Moria is "g" in Erebor while the rune for "j" in Erebor does not even exist in Moria. The Daeron system is the oldest of the three but it is seldomly used since it was created for Sindarin and became replaced by tengwar.

There are a lot of similarities between the three types of cirth, the runes for "a", "e" and "o" are among several others identical in all of them. They are also very different from the anglo-saxon runes, there is in fact only one anglo-saxon rune that has the same value in Angerthas Moria and Angerthas Erebor.

Angerthas Erebor