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The Runes of the Dwarves are one of the oldest writing systems in Alagaësia. They were later adopted by the humans as their own writing system.

History[]

Early runes[]

The first runes, handed down by Sindri to Hruthmund in dwarven legend, were the Hruthmundvik or Gnostvik. In this carved form of the language, words were permitted to run into each other and capital letters were not used. The words were carved from left to right and an individual rune existed for each vowel sound. This runic system was the basis for the human alphabet.

Updated runes[]

As the dwarves began to write with quills and brushes, the Hruthmundvik was mostly replaced by the curvilinear Thrangvik inspired by the earlier runic system. Additional runes were developed to represent punctuation in this system and the wide array of vowel sound runes were replaced by added diacritical symbols to represent the phonic component. These diacritics were adopted as part of the Hruthmundvik. Uppercase letters were still not used.

Alternate systems[]

The priests of Dûrgrimst Quan developed the secret Mahlvikn for transcribing their secret lore. Many words and characters differed from the mainstream systems, although a full study was impossible as the priests did not teach this knowledge to others.

The runic alphabet[]

  • G
  • N
  • O
  • S
  • T
  • D
  • B
  • K
  • C
  • Q
  • W
  • M
  • TH
  • F
  • V
  • Z
  • J
  • CH
  • H
  • U
  • E
  • I
  • Y
  • A
  • R
  • L
  • ZH
  • EI
  • IE

Real-world connections[]

The dwarven runes are similar to the dwarven language known as the Khuzdûl from The Lord of the Rings.

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