Fantasy Stream

12 November 2025

This old post recounts how I constructed the font for what I call in my epic fantasy, Ancient, the original language of my secondary world, the language used for working spells.

17 September 2012

In order for my ‘ancient’ language to have more legitimacy, I realized the need for a unique alphabet that reflected qualities inherent in the language. Also, since I had posited the idea that my epic’s ‘ancient’ language was related to and preceded Indo-European, I wanted the alphabet also to feel familiar, again as if it prefigured the early alphabets which are available. Thus, I first looked at my ancient, figuring out what letters would be necessary. I made the list that follows (hopefully) and then looked at ancient alphabets extant, trying to project back to an alphabet that came before them. In some of the letters, this was easy, for their was an obvious (to me, anyway) antecedent, while in other cases there were multiple possibilities:

I began with the old Roman Numeral system, then posited that at a certain point in ‘history’, these numbers would become so difficult to write, that a clever businessman replaced the original system with the simple digit system we use today.

This then enabled me to fix symbols for the elements, which are visible in the lower half of the picture, based on the root words I had fixed for each element. The numbers and symbols that follow them were the positions I assigned them when I created the computer font to represent the entire alphabet on the computer, which I did after acquiring the appropriate professional software. I called my font “Melbourth Runes” and began using it throughout the epic.

Note: The ‘doggerel’ verse written on the right side of the lower half in red pen was written later on, at the point in Book 4 when Thal remembers to reactivate his tower’s protections, the mnemonic device he memorized in order to open the door deep in the bowels of his tower.