Sarati is an artificial script, one of several scripts created by J. R. R. Tolkien. According to Tolkien's mythology, the Sarati alphabet was invented by the Elf Rúmil of Tirion. External history As Tolkien strove to create a world that would feel authentic, he realized that for that to be possible, he must invent accompanying scripts for his languages. And, being a perfectionist, he acknowledged that a fully-fledged writing system could not have just appeared out of nowhere. Therefore, he set out to create a series of scripts for the elves as well as for the humans and dwarves that would indicate a certain degree of evolution and development. The first script for the elves was the Sarati which eventually developed into Tengwar by Fëanor. Known as the first writing system of Arda, Sarati was invented by the Ñoldorin chronicler Rúmil of Valinor in the Valian Year of 1179. It was he "who first achieved fitting signs for the recording of speech and song" The writing system is officially called Sarati as each letter of the script represents a "sarat". However, Tolkien sometimes called the writing system "The Tengwar of Rúmil", where the word tengwar means "letters" in Quenya. "Sarati" is the Quenya name for Rúmil's script. Upon marrying and getting a job as an assistant on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Tolkien began to keep a diary that was written exclusively using the "alphabet of Rúmil". It has been described as a script that looks like a "mixture of Hebrew, Greek, and Pitman's shorthand." Description Each full character represents a consonant, while vowels are represented with diacritics (called tehtar in the terminology associated with the Tengwar). In Sarati, vowel signs are written to the left if the vowel comes before or to the right if after the consonants in vertical writing, above and below in the same principle in horizontal writing. According to Tolkien, consonants were considered more salient than vowels, and vowels were considered merely modifiers. When writing Quenya, the sign for "a" is usually omitted, as it is the most common vowel in Quenya. This makes Sarati an abugida with an inherent vowel of "a". Consonants In accordance with the leading theory at the time, the consonants were created as the main characters of Sarati, while the role of vowels was secondary and were used to accentuate the consonants. It is important to note that the consonants,