Runic scripts

Elder Futhark

The oldest runic alphabet, cut into weapons, brooches and stones across Germanic Europe from roughly the second century to the eighth. Twenty-four letters, arranged in three groups of eight, named after the first six: f, u, þ, a, r, k.

24
runes
3
ættir
c. 150–800
CE in use

The row

Twenty-four runes in their traditional order, grouped into the three ættir. Click any rune for its name, sound, poem stanza and reading.

Freyr's ætt

1–8

The first eight, named for the god who opens the row. Wealth, force, speech and the road: the material terms a life is negotiated in.

ᚠ
1

Fehu

f /f/

cattle, movable wealth

Livestock on the hoof: wealth you can count, drive away or lose. The first rune of the row and the first lesson in it.

ᚢ
2

Uruz

u /uː/

the aurochs

The wild ox of the northern forests, hunted to extinction by 1627. Raw, untamed vitality that answers to nobody.

ᚦ
3

Thurisaz

þ /θ/

giant, thorn

A thorn or a giant, depending on which poem you read. Force that cuts both ways and is never safe to handle carelessly.

ᚨ
4

Ansuz

a /a/

a god, the mouth

The Æsir, and speech itself. The rune of the word spoken aloud, breath carrying meaning.

ᚱ
5

Raidho

r /r/

riding, the ride

A journey on horseback, and by extension the wagon, the road and the rhythm of travel.

ᚲ
6

Kenaz

k /k/

torch, ulcer

The Norwegian and Icelandic poems read it as a sore; the reconstructed Germanic name gives a torch. Both are things that burn.

ᚷ
7

Gebo

g /ɣ/ no reversal

gift

A gift, and the obligation that comes attached. Symmetrical: it cannot be reversed, because giving and receiving are the same act.

ᚹ
8

Wunjo

w /w/

joy

Joy, but of a specific kind: the contentment of a household with enough, not ecstasy.

Hagal's ætt

9–16

The middle eight, and by far the harshest. Hail, need, ice and the yew — the things that happen to you rather than the things you do.

ᚺ
9

Hagalaz

h /h/ no reversal

hail

Hail: the grain of the sky that ruins a harvest and then melts into water. Damage that turns out to be temporary.

ᚾ
10

Naudhiz

n /n/ no reversal

need, constraint

Need in the hard sense: want, compulsion, the fire-drill worked against resistance until it lights.

ᛁ
11

Isa

i /iː/ no reversal

ice

A single vertical stroke. Ice: a bridge and a trap, everything held exactly where it stands.

ᛃ
12

Jera

j /j/ no reversal

year, good harvest

The turning year and the crop it brings in. Reward that cannot be hurried, only waited out.

ᛇ
13

Eihwaz

ï /æː/ no reversal

yew tree

The yew: evergreen, poisonous, the wood of bows and of graveyards. Death and endurance in one tree.

ᛈ
14

Perthro

p /p/

uncertain — a dice cup?

The most disputed rune in the row. The Old English poem puts it among play and laughter in the hall; the name has no secure etymology.

ᛉ
15

Algiz

z /z/

elk, protection

Elk-sedge in the Old English poem, a plant that wounds the hand that grasps it. Defence that hurts the attacker.

ᛊ
16

Sowilo

s /s/ no reversal

the sun

The sun as the sailors' rune — in the Old English poem it is the hope of men at sea.

Týr's ætt

17–24

The last eight. Law, kin, land and the daylight: what a person builds and hands on once the weather has done its worst.

ᛏ
17

Tiwaz

t /t/

the god Týr

Named for the god who put his hand in the wolf's mouth to bind him. Justice paid for with a real loss.

ᛒ
18

Berkano

b /b/

birch

The birch: first tree back on cleared ground, and in the poems a bearer of leaves without seed.

ᛖ
19

Ehwaz

e /e/

horse

The horse, but specifically the partnership — the Old English poem praises it as the comfort of restless men.

ᛗ
20

Mannaz

m /m/

human being

Mankind, and each person in the mesh of kin who will outlive and bury them.

ᛚ
21

Laguz

l /l/

water, lake

Water, and the sea in particular — the poems dwell on how it terrifies people who are not used to it.

ᛜ
22

Ingwaz

ŋ /ŋ/ no reversal

the god Ing

Ing, ancestor-god of the Ingvaeones, who departed eastwards over the waves. Potential sealed up and stored.

ᛞ
23

Dagaz

d /d/ no reversal

day

Daylight, and the moment it arrives — the hinge between one state and the next.

ᛟ
24

Othala

o /o/

inherited land

The ancestral holding: property that is not bought or sold but received and passed on.

Where we know it from

Every name in the left-hand column is reconstructed. These are the objects and texts the reconstruction rests on.

Kylver stone

Gotland, Sweden c. 400 CE

A slab from a grave that carries the complete 24-rune row in order. The oldest full futhark we have, and the reason the standard sequence is not guesswork.

Vadstena bracteate

Östergötland, Sweden c. 500 CE

A gold pendant with the full row divided by dots into three groups of eight. The direct evidence for the ættir. Stolen from the Swedish History Museum in 1938 and never recovered.

Grumpan bracteate

Västergötland, Sweden c. 500 CE

A second bracteate with the row in three groups, damaged but confirming Vadstena's arrangement.

Abecedarium Nordmannicum

St Gallen, Switzerland 9th century

A short rune-list in a Frankish manuscript, giving names for the Younger Futhark. Chemically damaged by a 19th-century attempt to read it better.

Old English Rune Poem

England copied 10th c.; text older

Twenty-nine stanzas, one per Futhorc rune, each a riddle-like verse on the rune's name. Our fullest source for what the names meant. Survives only through Humfrey Wanley's 1705 transcription, published by George Hickes — the manuscript burned in the Cotton fire of 1731.

Norwegian Rune Poem

Norway 13th century

Sixteen two-line stanzas for the Younger Futhark, in a terse style that pairs an image with an unrelated proverb.

Icelandic Rune Poem

Iceland 15th century

Sixteen stanzas, each giving three kennings for the rune plus a Latin gloss. The most compressed and the most literary of the three poems.

Vimose finds

Funen, Denmark c. 150–300 CE

A weapon deposit in a bog holding some of the earliest datable runic objects, including the Vimose comb reading harja — arguably the oldest runic inscription known.

Gallehus horns

South Jutland, Denmark c. 400 CE

Two gold horns, one carrying a full alliterative line in runes. Melted down by a thief in 1802; only 18th-century drawings survive.

Tune stone

Østfold, Norway c. 400 CE

A memorial stone whose inscription runs boustrophedon and preserves grammar close to Proto-Norse, useful for dating the language behind the names.

What the Elder Futhark is

The Elder Futhark is the earliest runic alphabet, in use across Germanic-speaking Europe from around the second century CE until roughly the eighth. About 350 inscriptions survive in it, most of them very short: a name, a maker's mark, a word or two on a brooch, a spearhead, a comb. It takes its name from the sound values of its first six letters, the same way alphabet comes from alpha and beta.

It was designed to be cut. Every rune is built from straight strokes, and almost none use horizontal lines, because a horizontal cut in wood runs along the grain and disappears. That constraint, not aesthetics, is why the letters look the way they do.

The names are reconstructions

This matters more than most rune books admit. No source from the Elder Futhark period tells us what the runes were called. The names in the left-hand column above — fehu, uruz, þurisaz — are Proto-Germanic forms reconstructed backwards from three much later poems, none of which describes the Elder Futhark itself: an Old English poem about the 29-rune Futhorc, and two medieval Scandinavian poems about the 16-rune Younger Futhark.

Some reconstructions are secure. Fehu is confirmed by Old English feoh, Old Norse fé and Gothic faihu, all meaning cattle or wealth, and the sound value fits. Others are not. Perthro has no agreed etymology in any Germanic language; the Old English poem places it in a hall among laughter and play, which has been read as dice, a chess piece, a pear tree and a hearth. Anyone who tells you flatly what perthro means is filling in a blank.

The three ættir

The row divides into three groups of eight, each called an ætt. This is not a modern invention: the Vadstena and Grumpan bracteates both separate the groups with dots. What the division was for is less clear. It works as a memory aid, and the medieval Icelandic cipher-runes exploit it — a coded rune is written as two marks meaning "third group, fifth letter", which only works if everyone agrees on the grouping.

The names Freyr's ætt, Hagal's ætt and Týr's ætt are modern conveniences, taken from the first rune of each group. No medieval source names them.

Divination is a modern layer

There is no evidence that anyone in the Elder Futhark period drew runes from a bag to answer a question. Tacitus, writing in 98 CE, describes Germanic diviners cutting marks into strips of fruitwood and drawing three while looking upward — but he wrote before the futhark is attested, calls the marks notae, and does not say they were letters.

Rune divination as practised today was assembled in the twentieth century, mostly after Ralph Blum's The Book of Runes in 1982, which also introduced the blank rune and an order of his own. That does not make it worthless — tarot's psychological reading is a twentieth-century layer too, and it works. It does mean the historical section and the divinatory section of every rune page here are kept separate, and labelled.

Upright, reversed and the nine that cannot turn

Modern rune reading often assigns a merkstave or reversed meaning when a rune falls upside down. Nine of the twenty-four are symmetrical and cannot be reversed at all: Gebo, Hagalaz, Naudhiz, Isa, Jera, Eihwaz, Sowilo, Ingwaz and Dagaz. Each of those pages says so rather than inventing a reversal for it.

Frequently asked questions

Twenty-four, in a fixed order confirmed by the Kylver stone from Gotland (c. 400 CE), which carries the complete row. They divide into three groups of eight called ættir.

For the same reason alphabet comes from alpha and beta: the word is built from the sound values of the first six runes, f-u-þ-a-r-k. The runic order is entirely different from the Latin one, which is one of the arguments that it was not simply copied from a Mediterranean script.

Not directly. No source from the period records the names. The forms used everywhere today are Proto-Germanic reconstructions worked backwards from the Old English Rune Poem and the two Scandinavian rune poems, all of which describe later, different rune rows. Most reconstructions are well supported; a few, notably Perthro, are genuinely unresolved.

The three groups of eight the row divides into. The division is attested — the Vadstena bracteate marks it with dots — and medieval Icelandic cipher-runes depend on it, encoding a letter as its group number and position. The names Freyr's, Hagal's and Týr's ætt are modern labels taken from each group's first rune.

No. By the Viking Age the Elder Futhark had been reduced to the 16-rune Younger Futhark, which is what Viking-Age Scandinavian inscriptions use. The Elder Futhark had gone out of use in Scandinavia around 800, roughly when the Viking Age begins.

Nine of the twenty-four are symmetrical top to bottom and look identical inverted: Gebo, Hagalaz, Naudhiz, Isa, Jera, Eihwaz, Sowilo, Ingwaz and Dagaz. Readers who use reversals treat these as non-reversible and read them by position or by the runes around them instead.

Not for the Elder Futhark period specifically. Tacitus describes a Germanic divination practice with marked wooden strips in 98 CE, but that is before the futhark appears in the record and he does not identify the marks as letters. The modern system of upright and reversed rune meanings dates from the twentieth century, largely after 1982.

The last two runes swap between sources. The Kylver stone ends dagaz then othala; the Vadstena bracteate has othala then dagaz. Both orders are attested and neither is an error. This site follows Kylver.

The Futhorc is a descendant. As Old English sound changes made the original 24 letters insufficient, extra runes were added — up to 29, and 33 in Northumbrian manuscripts — and several existing runes changed sound value. Ansuz splits into three separate runes, which is why the row is a futhorc rather than a futhark: the fourth letter is now o.

You can transliterate it, and people do, but the fit is poor. The futhark has no letters for several English sounds and has letters for sounds English lost. A transliteration is a modern cipher using runic shapes, not a historical text — worth knowing before it goes on a tattoo.

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