The Peoples of Middle-earth by J. R. R. Tolkien Read Free Book Online Page A

(and still use) the languages of nobler creatures in such intercourse as they must have between tribe and tribe.(5)
    $10. The dwarves are a different case. They are a hard thrawn folk for the most part, secretive, acquisitive, laborious, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits), lovers of stone, of metals, of gems, of things that grow and take shape under the hands of craft rather than of things that live by their own life. But they are not and were not ever among the workers of wilful evil in the world nor servants of the Enemy, whatever the tales of Men may later have said of them; for Men have lusted after the works of their hands, and there has been enmity between the races. But it is according to the nature of the Dwarves that travelling, and labouring, and trading about the world they should use ever openly the languages of the Men among whom they dwell; and yet in secret (a secret which unlike the Elves they are unwilling to unlock even to those whom they know are friends and desire learning not power) they use a strange slow-changing tongue.(6) Little is known about it. So it is that here such Dwarves as appear have names of the same Northern kind as the Men of Dale that dwelt round about, and speak the Common Speech, now in this manner now in that; and only in a few names do we get any glimpse of their hidden tongue.
    $11. And as for the scripts, something must be said of them, since in this history there are both inscriptions and old books, such as the torn remnants of the Book of Mazarbul,(7) that must be read. Enough of them will appear in this book,to allow, maybe, the skilled in such matters to decipher both runes and running hands. But others may wish for a clearer key. For them the Elvish Script (in its more formal shape, as it was used in Gondor for the Common Speech) is set out in full; though its various modifications used in writing other tongues, especially the High-Elven or the Noldorin, must here be passed over.
    Another script plays a part both in the previous account and the present one: the Runes. These also, as most other things of the kind, were also an Elvish invention. But whereas the flowing scripts (of two kinds, the alphabet of Rumil and the alphabet of Feanor, only the later of which concerns this tale) were developed in Elvenhome far from Middle-earth, the Runes, or cirth, were devised by the Elves of the woods; and from that origin derive their peculiar character, similar to the Runes of the North in our days, though their detail is different and it is very doubtful if there is any lineal connexion between the two alphabets.
    The Elvish cirth are in any case more elaborate and numerous and systematic. The Dwarves devised no letters and though they used such writing as they found current for necessary purposes, they wrote few books, except brief chronicles (which they kept secret). In the North in those regions from which the Dwarves of this tale came they used the cirth, or Runes. Following the general lines of translation, to which these records have been submitted, as the names of the North have been given the forms of Northern tongues in our own time, so the Runes were represented by the runes of ancient England. But since the scripts and runes of that account interested many of its readers, older and younger, and many enquiries concerning them have been made, in this book it has been thought better to give any runic inscriptions or writings that occur in their truer form, and to add at the end a table of the cirth, with their names, according to the usage of Dale, among both Dwarves and Men. A list of the names that occur is also given, and where they are taken from the ancient records the language to which they belong is stated and their meaning, or the meaning of their component parts, is added.
    $12. The word Gnomish is used above; and it would be an apt name, since whatever Paracelsus may have thought (if indeed he invented the word), to the learned it suggests