One of the most recognisable ‘gateways’ to Tolkien’s fiction comes in the form of runes on the covers of the HarperCollins editions of his work – Anglo-Saxon runes in the case of The Hobbit, and his invented Cirth on the cover of The Lord of the Rings. Runes also have a more limited role as a script used within his fantasy world and are built into his history of Middle Earth. This paper attempts to contextualise his invented runic alphabets by reference to the historical runic tradition and to the ‘runic politics’ of the mid twentieth-century, arguing that his history of Cirth maps more closely onto the history of the futhark than previously recognised and that his intervention can be understood as both a reaction to and product of runic scholarship in the 1930s. The paper will also look at the extraordinary legacy of Tolkien’s runes, and suggest that the most recent screen adaptations of his Middle Earth give runes a prominence equivalent to the ‘gateway’ runes of his novels, influenced in part by the role they have now come to play in the popular imagination.