You put a smiley on that, but your comment could very well be the case. Tolkien was a linguist and expert in old northern European literature. He was very familiar with Icelandic sagas, for example.
Oh, definitely! Professor Tolkien was a linguist second to none, IMO--he had an absolutely amazing gift for language, and I have the utmost respect for his scholarship. I'm very sure he studied authentic runes in order to design his runes--in fact, he says in Appendix E of Return of the King that the reason he has two alphabets there is because one was designed for writing with brush/pen whereas the other was "mostly used only for scratched or incised inscriptions. . .The Cirth. . .were long used only for inscribing names and brief memorials upon wood and stone. To that origin they owe their angular shapes, very similar to the runes of our times, though they differed from these in details and were wholly different in arrangement." What I'm curious about is which runic alphabets he drew from--there are some characters in what was posted that I can see he was definitely drawing from, but I suspect he probably drew from more than one alphabet as well as inventing his own characters (all his characters are permutations of a few basic strokes). I'm looking forward to comparing the runes posted with his to see what he's drawing from there.