Runic scripts

Younger Futhark

The runes of the Viking Age. Sixteen letters, reduced from the Elder Futhark's twenty-four at exactly the moment Old Norse was acquiring more sounds than ever. It is the most-used runic script in history and the most ambiguous, and both facts have the same cause.

16
runes
3,000+
surviving runestones
c. 800–1100
CE in use

The row

Sixteen runes in order, grouped into the three ættir as they survived the reduction. Each card shows the long-branch form first and the short-twig variant beside it where the two differ.

Freyr's ætt

1–6

Cut from eight to six. Gebo and Wunjo were dropped outright, and the group now spells the alphabet's own name: f, u, þ, ą, r, k.

ᚠ
1

Fé

f /f/, /v/

wealth, cattle

Unchanged from Elder Futhark Fehu in shape and sense. Both poems open on kinsmen quarrelling over money rather than on prosperity.

ᚢ
2

Úr

u /u/, /o/, /y/, /ø/

slag; drizzle

The aurochs was extinct in Scandinavia, so the name was re-anchored. Norway, an iron-smelting country, read it as dross; Iceland read it as cold rain.

ᚦ
3

Þurs

þ /θ/, /ð/

giant

Unchanged. Both Scandinavian poems keep the giant and both are hostile about it. The Icelandic gloss maps him onto Saturn.

ᚬ ᚭ
4

Áss / Óss

ą /ɑ̃/, /o/

a god; a river-mouth

The old a-rune, now carrying the nasal vowel. Iceland kept the god and named Óðinn outright; Norway used the homophone óss, an estuary.

ᚱ
5

Reið

r /r/

riding, a journey

Unchanged. Both poems keep one eye on the horse: a speedy journey, and the steed's toil.

ᚴ
6

Kaun

k /k/, /g/, /x/, /ŋ/

ulcer, sore

Elder Futhark Kenaz with a full stave added. It now carries k, g, the velar fricative and ŋ at once, the heaviest phonetic load in the row.

Hagal's ætt

7–11

Cut to five. Eihwaz and Perthro went; Jera was rebuilt as the a-rune; and Algiz was pulled out of the middle and sent to the end of the row.

ᚼ ᚽ
7

Hagall

h /h/

hail

Redrawn with a crossing stroke. The coldest of grain in both poems, and the Norwegian stanza pairs it with a line about Christ creating the world.

ᚾ ᚿ
8

Nauðr

n /n/

need, constraint

Unchanged. Norway grounds it in a naked man in the frost; Iceland in the grief of the bondmaid.

ᛁ
9

Íss

i /i/, /e/

ice

A bare stave, and now the base component every other rune in the row is built from. It absorbed the old e-sound as well.

ᛅ ᛆ
10

Ár

a /a/, /æ/, /e/

a good year, harvest

Elder Futhark Jera, completely redrawn. Old Norse lost the initial j- of *jēraz, leaving ár, so the rune changed both shape and sound value and became the a-rune.

ᛋ ᛌ
11

Sól

s /s/

the sun

Simplified from the Elder Futhark zigzag. Called the destroyer of ice in the Icelandic poem, which is the sharpest thing said about the sun in any stanza.

Týr's ætt

12–16

Cut to five, losing Ehwaz, Ingwaz, Dagaz and Othala. Ýr, the old Algiz, was appended here, making it the only rune in runic history to change its position in the sequence.

ᛏ ᛐ
12

Týr

t /t/, /d/

the god Týr

Unchanged, and now covering d as well as t. Both poems call him one-handed and assume you know why.

ᛒ ᛓ
13

Bjarkan

b /b/, /p/, /ɸ/

birch

Unchanged, and now covering p as well, since Perthro was dropped. The Norwegian stanza pairs the birch with Loki's deceit for the rhyme.

ᛘ ᛙ
14

Maðr

m /m/

a human being

Redrawn: the Elder Futhark double stave collapsed into one stave with raised arms. Man is an augmentation of the dust in both poems.

ᛚ
15

Lǫgr

l /l/

water, sea

Unchanged. Iceland's stanza is unmistakably Icelandic: boiling water, a broad geyser, and the land of the fish.

ᛦ ᛧ
16

Ýr

ʀ /ʀ/

yew

Elder Futhark Algiz turned upside down and renamed, tracking the old final z as it became a distinct r-sound. The only rune whose place in the sequence changed: it moved to the very end.

Where we know it from

Monuments, merchants' tallies and two medieval poems. The Younger Futhark leaves a far richer record than any other runic script.

Jelling stones

Jutland, Denmark c. 965

Harald Bluetooth's stone claims he won all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian. Often called Denmark's birth certificate, and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The larger stone carries a crucifixion scene alongside the runes.

Rök runestone

Östergötland, Sweden c. 800

The longest known runic inscription, roughly 760 characters, and the strangest. It shifts between short-twig runes, older Elder Futhark forms and at least two cipher systems, quoting lost heroic verse as it goes. Nobody has produced an agreed reading of the whole thing.

Bryggen inscriptions

Bergen, Norway 12th–14th century

Some 670 wooden sticks and fragments recovered after a fire exposed the medieval wharf in 1955. Trade tallies, ownership tags, name practice, a Latin lesson, prayers, insults and love notes. The single best evidence that runic literacy was ordinary rather than priestly.

Norwegian Rune Poem

Norway 13th century

Sixteen two-line stanzas in strict skaldic metre, surviving only through a seventeenth-century copy of a manuscript that has since been destroyed. Its second lines are frequently proverbs chosen for rhyme rather than sense.

Icelandic Rune Poem

Iceland 15th century onward

Sixteen stanzas, each giving three kennings and then a Latin gloss naming a classical equivalent or a princely title. The most literary and the most systematic of the rune poems.

Abecedarium Nordmannicum

St Gallen, Switzerland 9th century

A short verse listing the sixteen Norse runes, copied into a Frankish manuscript alongside Hebrew and Greek alphabets. The oldest surviving catalogue of the Younger Futhark, and badly damaged by a nineteenth-century attempt to bring up the ink with reagent.

Maeshowe

Orkney, Scotland 12th century

Norse visitors broke into a neolithic chambered tomb and covered the walls in graffiti: boasts about treasure, a claim that these runes were carved by the best rune-carver in the western ocean, and a good deal that is simply crude. About thirty inscriptions, the largest such collection outside Scandinavia.

Hagia Sophia graffiti

Constantinople 9th–11th century

A partly legible name, usually read as Halfdan, scratched into a marble parapet in the gallery by a member of the Varangian Guard. Runic writing at the far end of the Norse world.

Piraeus Lion

Athens, now Venice 11th century

A classical marble lion carried off to Venice in 1687, carrying long bands of Swedish runes across its shoulders and flanks, carved by Varangians. Weathering has made most of the text unreadable.

Kingittorsuaq runestone

Greenland c. 1300

Three men record building cairns on an island north of Upernavik, roughly 73 degrees north. The westernmost and most northerly runic inscription known.

Staveless runes

Hälsingland, Sweden 10th century

An extreme shorthand that removes the vertical stave from almost every letter, leaving only branches and their positions. Confined to a small area, and only usable by people already fluent enough not to need the redundancy.

Dotted runes

Scandinavia 11th–12th century

Rune-carvers began adding a small dot to split overloaded letters: dotted k gave g, dotted t gave d, dotted b gave p, dotted i gave e. These stungnar rúnir broke the sixteen-rune constraint and turned the script into the Medieval Futhark.

The alphabet that shrank

Between roughly 700 and 800 CE the Scandinavians did something no other people using an alphabet has done on this scale: they threw away a third of their letters.

The Elder Futhark had twenty-four runes and had served Proto-Norse adequately for five hundred years. Then the language changed underneath it. Unstressed vowels in word endings collapsed, a process called syncope, and the collapse triggered a chain of further changes — umlaut, breaking, fronting — in which a vanishing ending pulled the vowel before it into a new position. An a became e; u became y; au became ey. Old Norse came out of it with nine distinct vowel qualities where Proto-Norse had five, each of which could be short, long or nasal.

More sounds should mean more letters. Instead the row was cut to sixteen.

Why anyone would do that

There is no document explaining the decision, and runologists have argued about it for over a century. The most persuasive account is that this was a deliberate reform, and that its object was not precision but teachability.

A sixteen-character row is easier to learn, easier to remember and faster to cut. What it costs is certainty, and it only costs that for a reader who does not already speak the language fluently. A Norse speaker looking at ᚴᚢᚾᛅᚱ does not need the script to tell them whether the k is a k or a g, or whether there is one n or two. They know the name is Gunnar, because there is no other word it could be.

The evidence that this worked is the sheer volume of what survives. The Elder Futhark left about 350 inscriptions in five centuries. The Younger Futhark left over 3,000 runestones alone, plus thousands of everyday scraps on wood and bone. The script got worse at representing sounds and much better at being used.

What each rune had to carry

The conflations are severe and systematic. Voiced and unvoiced consonants were not distinguished at all.

  • ᚴ covers k, g, the velar fricative x, and ŋ
  • ᛏ covers t and d
  • ᛒ covers b, p and the bilabial fricative
  • ᚦ covers both the th of thin and the th of this

Four vowel runes carry the entire Old Norse vowel system between them: ᚢ for the rounded vowels, ᛁ for unrounded front vowels, ᛅ for low and mid unrounded vowels, and ᚬ mainly for the nasal.

On top of that, carvers routinely dropped nasals before a stop of the same articulation, so sank was written sak and dumb was written dub, and they almost never doubled a consonant. Spelling was not standardised, because there was nothing to standardise against.

Long-branch, short-twig, staveless

The script exists in three graphic registers, and the difference is largely about what you are cutting into.

Long-branch runes, sometimes called Danish, have full staves and prominent branches. They are the monumental hand: deep, legible from a distance, and correct for granite. Most raised runestones use them.

Short-twig runes, sometimes called Swedish-Norwegian or Rök runes, shorten the branches and in places truncate the staves. Wood grain swallows shallow diagonal cuts and splits along them, so a hand with less branching survives better on a wooden stick. This is the everyday register, and the Bryggen finds in Bergen are full of it.

Staveless or Hälsinge runes go further and delete the stave altogether from nearly every letter, leaving branches and their relative positions to do all the work. They are confined to a small part of Sweden and they are only legible to someone who is already fluent. This is shorthand, and shorthand implies a population of practised readers.

Rune divination and this script

Nothing here supports it. There is no attested Viking Age practice of drawing runes from a bag to answer a question, and the Younger Futhark's own record is overwhelmingly memorial, legal, commercial and personal.

The runes did carry ideographic weight alongside their sound values — the Stentoften stone uses a single rune to mean "a good harvest", and the rune poems exist precisely to fix a concept to each letter. That is real. It is not the same as an oracle.

Modern rune casting was assembled in the twentieth century, largely after Ralph Blum's The Book of Runes in 1982, which modelled its method on the I Ching and on tarot spreads and added a blank rune that appears in no historical source. Most modern practice also uses the Elder Futhark's twenty-four rather than these sixteen. Where a reader does work with the Younger Futhark, the meanings are generally imported from the Elder row and adjusted, not derived from the two Norse poems.

Where it went

The ambiguity that made the script easy became a liability once Scandinavia Christianised and began producing legal and ecclesiastical documents that had to be exact.

The fix was elegant. From the eleventh century carvers began adding a dot to overloaded letters: a dotted ᚴ became g, a dotted ᛏ became d, a dotted ᛒ became p, a dotted ᛁ became e. These stungnar rúnir broke the sixteen-rune limit from the inside and produced the Medieval Futhark, which could map one-to-one onto the Latin alphabet.

That line runs a long way. Dalecarlian runes, the last descendants, were still being used in rural Dalarna for calendars and inscriptions into the twentieth century.

Frequently asked questions

Sixteen. It replaced the twenty-four-rune Elder Futhark across Scandinavia around 800 CE and remained the standard script through the Viking Age, into the twelfth century. It divides into three ættir of six, five and five.

Nobody recorded the reason, but the reduction happened exactly when Old Norse was gaining sounds rather than losing them, so it was not driven by phonology. The most persuasive account is that it was a deliberate reform aimed at teachability: sixteen characters are easier to learn, remember and carve than twenty-four. It cost precision, and precision was cheap for fluent speakers who could work out the intended word from context.

Mostly the material they were cut into. Long-branch runes have full staves and prominent branches, are legible at a distance, and suit stone; they dominate the raised runestones. Short-twig runes shorten the branches and sometimes the staves, which survives better in wood because grain swallows and splits along shallow diagonal cuts. Short-twig is the everyday hand, and the Bryggen finds in Bergen are full of it.

Yes. Viking Age Scandinavian inscriptions use this sixteen-rune row, not the Elder Futhark, which had gone out of use in Scandinavia around 800, roughly when the Viking Age begins. A tattoo or inscription meant to be Viking should use these letters.

Eight: Gebo, Wunjo, Eihwaz, Perthro, Ehwaz, Ingwaz, Dagaz and Othala. Their sounds were folded into surviving letters, so g went into ᚴ kaun, d into ᛏ týr, p into ᛒ bjarkan, e into ᛁ íss and o into ᚢ úr. Jera was rebuilt into the a-rune ᛅ after Old Norse lost the initial j- of its name.

Because its sound moved. Elder Futhark Algiz represented a z that only occurred at the ends of words; in Proto-Norse that sound shifted to a distinct r-like phoneme written ʀ. The rune was turned upside down, renamed ýr, and moved from position fifteen to position sixteen. It is the only rune in runic history to change its place in the sequence.

By already speaking the language. ᚴᚢᚾᛅᚱ can only be Gunnar, even though the script does not distinguish k from g or mark the doubled n. Carvers wrote the phonemic skeleton and left the reader to supply the grammar, which also means they often wrote the un-mutated base vowel and expected the reader to apply the umlaut themselves.

An eleventh-century fix for the ambiguity. Carvers added a small dot to split overloaded letters: dotted ᚴ gave g, dotted ᛏ gave d, dotted ᛒ gave p, dotted ᛁ gave e. These stungnar rúnir broke the sixteen-rune limit and turned the script into the Medieval Futhark, which could correspond one-to-one with the Latin alphabet.

People do, but the meanings are usually imported from the Elder Futhark and adjusted rather than derived from the Norwegian and Icelandic poems. There is no attested Viking Age practice of drawing runes to answer a question, and the surviving Younger Futhark corpus is memorial, legal, commercial and personal. Modern rune casting dates from the twentieth century.

The Rök stone in Östergötland, Sweden, carved around 800 CE and carrying roughly 760 characters. It switches between short-twig runes, older Elder Futhark forms and at least two cipher systems, and quotes heroic verse that survives nowhere else. There is still no agreed reading of the whole text.

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