Cirth

The Cirth are runes, and their shape follows from what they were for: the Sindar devised them in Beleriand and long used them only to cut names and short memorials into wood or stone, which is where the angular forms come from. In their older, simpler shape they travelled east in the Second Age and were taken up by Men, Dwarves and even Orcs, each altering them to suit themselves. Before the First Age ended they were rearranged in Beleriand under the influence of the Tengwar; that richest form is the Alphabet of Daeron. The Elves of the West largely abandoned runes, but Eregion kept the alphabet and passed it to Moria, where it became the Dwarves' own — the Angerthas Moria, in which Balin's tomb is inscribed. The Dwarves reassigned a number of the values, so a certh does not mean the same thing in both rows.