Symbols in stories

The forerunner is Arthur Conan Doyle with "The Dancing Men" in 1903. But Doyle’s ambition stays modest: his code is a substitution.

The alphabet is not meant to exist beyond the short story. It is a diegetic object in the service of a case, not an autonomous writing system — Tolkien will have to cross that line.

From 1937 onwards, J. R. R. Tolkien changes the game by publishing The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings. He lays down two complete writing systems (tengwar and cirth) with phonology, calligraphy, regional variants and a fictional history.

Their in-world creators are elves, but Tolkien himself was a philologist at Oxford who had studied real Anglo-Saxon runes. The cirth he invents is inspired by the Younger Futhark. That level of demand inaugurates a genre: you no longer invent an alphabet for a story — you build a writing system as if it had been used.

James Gurney does the same in 1992 with Dinotopia: his dinosaurs speak an ancestral language whose claw-print alphabet appears in every frontispiece. Andrzej Sapkowski sprinkles several scripts through the Witcher cycle, including the Illageralt that CD Projekt Red massively expanded in the games.

Volts, Chris Riddell, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson: every contemporary fantasy author slips at least one invented alphabet into their books.

The literary device is always the same: an invented alphabet is an immersion compass. When a reader stumbles upon an illustrated plate carrying runic inscriptions, they know without being told that those inscriptions mean something, that someone took the time to write them for them, and that the world has its own history.

For the amateur cryptographer, these alphabets are a perfect gateway. Most of them are monoalphabetic substitutions (one symbol = one Latin letter), so they read fluently as soon as you have the table — generally published by fans on dedicated wikis. The challenge is not mathematical but cultural.