Lord of the Rings: Cirth Test Page
Cirth is (along with Tengwar)
the script used to write the languages of Middle-Earth,
which were invented by J.R.R. Tolkien and
appear in his Lord of the Rings trilogy and other works.
Display of Cirth on the web so that it can be read by a wide range of platforms and programs,
without resort to graphics, pretty much requires that it be encoded according to
Unicode standards.
The Cirth script has not yet reached this stage officially. It has been proposed
by Michael Everson for incorporation
into Unicode Plane 1 but lacks approval at this time. For more info on this see the
proposal and the
"Roadmap to Unicode."
Using this proposal (revision 1997-11-03) as a basis, Cirth has been included in James Kass' Unicode font
Code2001 in Plane 15, which is
a Private Use
Area (PUA). This font also includes Cirth glyphs for the PUA of Unicode Plane 0, where a
similar proposal is under consideration by the
ConScript Registry
These proposals are subject to possible future revision, and it is uncertain if or when they might
be finalized or approved.
Below is the inscription from the Title Page of Lord of the Rings in Cirth
script in Plane 15 UTF-8 and NCR encoding, as well as in Plane 0 PUA UTF-8.
The inscription is in English and says: "The Lord of the Rings translated
from the red book."
Good sites for information on Tolkien languages are:
Cirth,
Ardalambion,
History of Elvish Writing,
Fellowship of the Word-smiths, and
TheLordoftheRings.com.
Also another test page by James Kass.
If you want to create UTF-8 web pages or send email in Cirth, a useful tool is James Kass' Cirth Screen Keyboard. This page, when used with the most advanced browsers (like Opera 6 or Netscape 6 for WinXP or OmniWeb for Mac OSX), allows you to generate Cirth text strings which can be copy/pasted into HTML documents or a mail program.
To make comments on this page or obtain info on Cirth input methods, write to tom@bluesky.org
Browser Notes: As of 3/03, most of the latest Windows and Mac OS X browsers can read UTF-8,
both in Plane 0 and 15. Mac IE 5.2 cannot. The font Code2001 (Version 0.915 or higher) must be used.
(Plane 15 UTF-8)
(Plane 15 NCR's)
(Plane 0 PUA UTF-8)
A picture of the text follows:
