[Pervinca Took]

Cryptic sort of means 'hidden.' Cryptic clues often work by giving you the letters that make up the answer in little bits, and/or scrambling parts of them.

Here's an easy example:

SARUMAN: Unarms a confused villain.

'Confused' is often an anagram indicator, as is 'troubled.' The idea being that confusing or disturbing or dislocating something mixes it up.

If you 'confuse' (make an anagram of) UNARMS A, you can get SARUMAN, who is a villain (the 'straight' part of the clue, which indicates the 'actual' answer). The 'straight' part of the clue is usually at the beginning or the end. The fun/difficult part is working out which is the 'straight' part of the clue, and which is the 'cryptic' part.

This one could be seen as slightly harder:

EORL: Troubled knowledge will lead you to him.

because the word you have to trouble/scramble happens to be another word that means knowledge (LORE - a slightly archaic word often used for knowledge/book-learning in Tolkien's books) rather than 'knowledge' itself. If you trouble/scramble LORE, this will lead you to the answer (EORL). 'Him' is the straight part of the clue. It tells you that the answer is a male character.

Also look at Mithalwen's last password, posted just before mine. That was made up of cryptic clues, and contained the standard form of password, where the answer reads down the initial letters. Doing a non-standard one (such as a diagonal password) is what we call 'varying rule 5,' I think (the idea was that once this thread got going, (years ago now!), it would be within the rules to experiment with different arrangements of passwords.

You can also start with a longer word and give instructions to remove bits. For example

DIS: Take apart, remove coat, reveal her.

As Mithalwen rightly pointed out, start with the word DISMANTLE (which means take apart), take away a word meaning coat (MANTLE), and you will reveal HER (straight part of the clue - a female character, in this case the only named female dwarf in Tolkien's books: DIS, the sister of Thorin and mother of Fili and Kili).

Most answers will be names of people or places, but there are other specifically Tolkien things that may be answers too: names of months in the Shire or in elvish, names of flowers, trees or plants, or rivers or seas, words for things in one of Tolkien's invented languages (such as ISEN for iron), and so forth.

...

Also, look out for the word 'direction' in a clue. It could be indicating that you should add the initial letter of one of the directions: these could be N(orth), (W)est, E(ast), S(outh) or sometimes L(eft) or R(ight). You could also have NE, NW, SE, SW for directions. (north-east, north-west, etc).

If it says 'gain direction,' you would add one of the above. For 'lose direction,' you would remove one of those letters from the collection of letters you have in the clue so far (just as Mithalwen removed 'mantle' from 'dismantle' to get DIS).

And one more thing: 'lose a note' or 'gain a note' will usually mean a musical note - and indicate that you should either add or remove A. B, C, D, E, F or G (one of the seven musical notes).

There are others. In crossword clues 'engineer' can indicate add RE for Royal Engineer - and there are others that I don't know or have forgotten, too.