Runic alphabet

The runic alphabets are a group of alphabets whose letters, called runes, were used to write the Germanic languages mainly in Scandinavia and the British Isles, although they were also used in Central and Eastern Europe, during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, before and also during the Christianization of the region. There are other types of alphabets very similar to the runic such as the old Turkish alphabet, the old Hungarian alphabet or the paleohispanic scripts.

Scandinavian alphabet variants are also known as futhark or fuþark (AFI province: ['fuθark]), a term derived from the first six runes: to be translited as F, U, ., A, R and K. The Anglo-Saxon variant is known as futhorc, due to the changes produced in the pronunciation of these same six letters in ancient English.

The oldest runic inscriptions found date from around the year 150, and broadly speaking, the alphabet was replaced by the Latin one with Christianization, around the year 700 in central Europe and at the end of the Viking age, around 1100, in Scandinavia. However, the use of runes persisted in Scandinavia well into the XX century, especially in rural Sweden, being used especially in the decoration with runes and in runic calendars. The three best known runic alphabets are:

• The old futhark (c. 150-800)
• The Anglo-Saxon futhorc (400-1100)
• Young futhark or Scandinavian futhark (800-1100)

In turn, there are several versions of the Younger Futhark:

The stone of Rök, a medieval rhonic trail.

• Long branch runes also called Danish
• Short branch runes or Rök runes, also called Swedish-North
• Helsingia runes (without pole or vertical axis)
• Icelandic runes

Over time, the Younger Futhark evolved into:

• Marcoman runes
• Medieval runes (1100-1500)
• The dalecarlian runes (c. 1500-c. 1800)

The origins of runic script are uncertain. Many of the characters in the Old Futhark closely resemble characters in the Latin alphabet. Other candidates for their ancestry are Northern Italian alphabets dating from the 5th to 1st centuries BCE. C. — lepontic, rhetic and venetic — all of them very close and descendants of the Etruscan alphabet. Comparison of the spellings shows similarities in many respects. Futhark is currently a dead language.

Context

Registration made using both encrypted runes, the ancient Futhark and the young futhark, in the Stone of Rök (Sweden).

The name given to the signs of these alphabets is rune, as opposed to Latin and Greek letter, as recorded already on an Alamanic carved staff from the VI century and also, possibly as runo, on the stone from Einang (IV century). This name comes from the root run- (runa in Gothic), which means "secret" or "whisper" (in contrast to Finnish, which took the cognate runo to mean "poem").

Runes began to be used by the Germanic peoples in the I or II. The oldest runic inscription dates from around 160 and is found on a comb found in the Vimose bog, Funen, reading harja (comb). Another disputed candidate for being the oldest is the 1st century inscription of the Meldorf fibula. This period corresponds to the last linguistic stages of the proto-Germanic or common Germanic language, which evolved towards the dialects of its three aspects in the following centuries, still not clearly separated: the North Germanic languages, West Germanic languages and East Germanic languages.

There is no distinction between long and short vowels in surviving runic inscriptions, although such a difference was present phonologically in the spoken languages of the time. Likewise, there are no labiovelar consonant signs in Old Futhark (signs that were introduced into both the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc and Gothic alphabets as variants of the letter p (See worseð).

Mythological

In ancient Scandinavian belief, runes were of divine origin (Old Norse: reginkunnr), the work of the gods, a gift from Odin to men. This is attested as early as around the s. VII d. C. in the inscription of the stone of Noleby, in Sweden (Runo fahi raginakundo toj[e'k]a..., which means "I prepare the appropriate divine rune...") and on the Sparlösa stone from the IX century (Ok rað runa R þaR rægi[n]kundu, meaning "interpret the runes of divine origin"). Most notably, in Hávamál, verse 80, the runes are also described as reginkunnr:

80. ### ##########################
er þú að rúnum spyr
inum reginkunnum,
þeim er gerðu ginnregin
Okay fáði fimbulþulr,
Hefir hann bazt, ef hann þegir.

80. It's proven:
if you run consultations,
those of divine origin,
the high powers
and the supreme tulr ("sacerdote" Odin) stained,
He won't be quiet.

The Poetic Edda Rúnatal explains that its creator was the god Odin, and lines 138 and 139 describe how Odin received the runes through his own sacrifice. The text is as follows:

Old Nordic

Veit ec at ec hecc vindga meiði
netr allar nío,
geiri vndaþr oc gefinn Oðni,
sialfr sialfom mer,
a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn.

Við hleifi mic seldo ne viþ hornigi,
nysta ec niþr,
nam ec vp rvnar,
opandi nam,
fell ec aptr þaðan.

Castellano

I know I hung up on a tree deserved by the wind
nine long nights
wounded with a spear and delivered to Odin,
myself offered to myself,
in that tree no one knows the origin of its roots.

They didn't give me bread or drink from the horn,
I looked down,
I took the runes.
I took them between screams,
Then I plunged into the earth.

There are two accounts of how the runes became known to mortals. The Rígsþula tells how Ríg, identified as Heimdall in the introduction, had three sons by women: Thrall (slave), Karl (free man) and Jarl (noble). These sons became the ancestors of the three classes of men indicated by their names. When Jarl reached the age to wield weapons and show other signs of nobility, Rig returned and, having recognized Jarl as his son, taught him the runes. In 1555, the exiled Swedish Archbishop Olaus Magnus recorded a tradition about a man named Kettil Runske who had stolen three rune staffs from Odin and thus learned the runes and their magic.

Historicals

Codex Runicus, a scroll of c. 1300 containing one of the oldest and best preserved texts of Scania Provincial Laws, written entirely in runes.

The runes were developed late, centuries after the Mediterranean alphabets of which they descend, their similarities with the alphabets of Phoenician origin (Latin, Greek, Etruscan) cannot be attributed to mere coincidence. One of the ancient italic alphabets, the rhetic alphabet of Bolzano, is often cited as a candidate to be the origin of the runes, with only five runes of the old futhark ( e, ï, j, Русский, p) that do not have their correspondence in the alphabet of Bolzano. This hypothesis is often denied by Scandinavian scholars, who frequently favor the Latin origin of most of the rhone letters.

The thesis of an Old Italic or North Etruscan origin is supported by the inscription on the Negau helmet dating from the II century.

The angular forms of the runes are shared with most of the contemporary alphabets of the time used in engravings on stone or wood. A peculiarity of the runic alphabet, compared to the Old Italic family, is the absence of horizontal strokes. Runes were usually written on the edges of small pieces of wood. The engraved primary grooves ran vertically through the piece, in the opposite direction of the wood grain: curves are difficult to draw, and horizontal lines are lost among the natural grain of the wood. This characteristic is also shared with other alphabets, such as the first forms of the Latin alphabet used in the Duenos inscription.

The West Germanic origin hypothesis speculates that the runic alphabet was introduced by West Germanic tribes. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the oldest inscriptions (c. 200 AD), found in swamps and tombs in the Jutland area (the Vimose inscriptions), show word endings that, being interpreted by Scandinavian philologists as protonordic, have not yet been resolved and are the subject of disputes among linguists. Inscriptions such as wagnija, niþijo and harija supposedly represent the names of tribes. As a hypothesis, the names of the Vangiones, the Nidensis and the Harii, tribes located in the Rhineland area, have been proposed. Since the names ending in -io are an adaptation of the Germanic morphology of the Latin ending -ius, and the suffix -inius becomes Germanic -inio-, the problematic ending in -ijo in the masculine declension of Proto-Norse could be resolved by assuming Roman influence in the Rhineland area, while the strange -a ending of laguþewa (cf. Syrett 1994:44f.) may be resolved accepting that the name may be West German.

However, it should be noted that in the early period of runic writing the differences between the Germanic languages are assumed to be minimal. Another theory assumes a West North Germanic unit that predates the emergence of Proto-Norse, proper to the V century. explains the impossibility of classifying the first inscriptions as both northern and western is the one proposed by È. A. Makaev, who assumes a "special runic koine", an early literary Germanic employed by the entire Common-Germanic community after the split from Gothic (2nd to 5th centuries), while the spoken dialects would have become increasingly more and more diverse.

The genesis of the Elder Futhark was completed by the early V century, with the Kylver stone becoming the first evidence of the order of the futhark, as well as the rune peorth.

Varieties of alphabets

Details of the registration in the old futhark of the centuryV in one of Gallehus' golden horns.

Elder Futhark

The Old Futhark alphabet, used for writing Proto-Norse, consists of 24 runes that were typically grouped into three groups of eight, each called an ætt. The first known sequenced list of the complete group of 24 runes is dated around the year 400 and was found in the Kylver stone in Gotland (Sweden).

Each rune had a name, chosen to represent the sound of itself, but the names have not been recorded directly in the Old Futhark. However, these names have been linguistically reconstructed in Proto-Norse from the names of the runes of later alphabets, which have been recorded, for example in runic poems, and the names of the letters of the Gothic alphabet that have usually been found. been named similarly to the equivalent runes.

The 24 runes of the Elder Futhark are:

Runa
Name	Fehu	Uruz	Thurisaz	Ansuz	Raido	Kaunan	Gebo	Wunjo	Haglaz	Naudiz	Isaz	Jeran
Transliteration	f	u	!	a	r	k	g	w	h	n	i	j
Sound AFI	/f/	/u(towards)/	/θ/, /ð/	/a(towards)/	/r/	/k/	/g/	/w/	/h/	/n/	/i(development)/	/j, y/
Unicode	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///
Runa
Name	Ihaz	Pertho	Algiz	Sowilo	Tiwaz	Berkanan	Ehwaz	Mannaz	Laguz	Ingwaz	Othalan	Dagaz
Transliteration	(or æ)	p	z	s	t	b	e	m	l	Русский	or	d
Sound AFI	/æ development/(?)	/p/	/z/	/s/	/t/	/b/	/e(s)/	/m/	/l/	/EUR/	/o(œ)/	/d/
Unicode	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///

Anglo-Saxon Futhorc

The Frisian and Anglo-Saxon alphabet is an extended version of the Futhark, which consisted of 29 runes, and later even 33 characters. It was probably used from the V century. There are two theories about the origin of the Anglo-Saxon fuþorc. One of them proposes that it developed in Friesland and later spread to England. The other maintains that the runes were introduced by the Scandinavians in England where they were modified until they formed the fuþorc and later they would be exported to Friesland. The scant archaeological records cannot confirm either theory, since approximately the same number of inscriptions have appeared in both regions and of similar antiquities. Futhorc inscriptions are found, for example, on the Thames Knife, the Anglo-Saxon Code of Vienna, the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem of the Otho B.x from the Cotton Library, and the Ruthwell Cross.

The following characters and names appear in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem:

Runa
Name	Feoh	Ur	Thorn	You	Rad	Cen	Gyfu	Wynn	Haegl	Nyth	Is	Ger	Eoh	Peordh	Eolh
Transliteration	f	u	!	or	r	k	g	w	h	n	i	j	eo	p	z
Sound AFI	/f/	/u(towards)/	/θ/, /ð/	/o(towards)/	/r/	/k/	/g/	/w/	/h/	/n/	/i(development)/	/j/	/e development/	/p/	/z/
Unicode	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///
Runa
Name	Sigel	Tir	Beorc	Hey.	Man	Lagu	Ing	Ethel		Daeg	Ac	Aesc	Yr	Ior	Ear
Transliteration	s	t	b	e	m	l	Русский	What?		d	a	æ	and	io	ea
Sound AFI	/s/	/t/	/b/	/e(s)/	/m/	/l/	/EUR/	/e development/, /ø(development)/		/d/	/a(towards)/	/æ(towards)/	/y(development)/	/jo/	/ea/
Unicode	///	///	///	///	///	///	///	///		///	///	///	///	///	///

The extended version of the 33-rune alphabet (counting the two calc versions as one rune), which only appears in manuscripts, also contains the following:

Runa
Name	Cweorth	Calc and Calc double	Gar	Stan.
Transliteration	kw	kk	g	st
Sound AFI	/kw/	/k/, /k/	/g/, / reading/	/st/
Unicode	///	///	///	///

Thorn and wynn (ƿ) remained, entering the Latin alphabet to represent the sounds [θ] and [w], respectively. And Gyfu evolved into the letter yogh (ȝ), temporarily entering the Latin alphabet of Middle English to represent the sound [g].

Young Futhark

The Younger Fuþark, also called the Scandinavian Fuþark, is a more modern and reduced version of the Elder Futhark, consisting of only 16 runes, grouped into three ætts. This reduction in signs paradoxically parallels the phonetic increase that occurred as Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse. It is found in Scandinavia and Viking Age settlements abroad and began to be used in the IX century.

The runes as they appear in the Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems are:

Runa

Name

Fe

Use

CHEERS

Ós

Ræið

Kaun

Hagall

Nauðr

YES

Ar

Sole

Týr

Bjarkan

Maðr

Lögr

Ír

Transliteration

f,v

u,o

##

ą, o

r

k,g

h

n

i

a

s

d

p,b

m

l

Sound AFI

/f/,/v/

/u(development)/ /y(development)/ /)(towards)/, /w/

/θ/, /ð/

/ bookmark/, /o(turning)/

/r/

/k/,/g/

/h/

/n/

/i(development)/

/a(towards)/

/s/

/t/,/d/

/p/,/b/

/m/

/l/

/r/

Unicode

Comparison of long branch runes (top) and short branch (low).

There are two main versions of the alphabet: the long-branched, or Danish, runes, and the short-branched, or Swedish-Norwegian runes, although both were used in both Denmark as in Sweden and Norway. The difference between the two versions has been the subject of controversy. The general opinion is that the difference was functional, the long-branched runes were used for solemn texts on stone, while the short-branched ones would be used in everyday writing or official messages on wood.

Helsingian Runes

Runes Hälsinge or runes without post.

The Helsingian runes, or runes without a post, owe their name to the Hälsingland region of Sweden, where they were first found, although inscriptions of the same type have since been found in other parts of Sweden. They were used between the 10th and 12th centuries.

Fundamentally they are a simplification of the Swedish-Norwegian runes in which the vertical lines have been eliminated as much as possible, to which it owes the denomination of "without post", and also part of the horizontal lines and transversals are replaced by dots. Of this variant, only 15 runes have appeared in the inscriptions, the one corresponding to the ã is missing, to have 16 characters like the other versions of the young furthark. But since all these runes have a symmetry, it has been postulated that the missing one is the mirror symmetry of the n. These runes are not assigned Unicode signs (at least up to Unicode 4.0).

Icelandic Runes

Icelandic runes.
The runes that were modified in order to compare them are shown in the lower row.

Icelandic runes are another simplification of Younger Futhark, in which some cross-strokes are shortened or replaced by dots. This alphabet was used in Iceland between the 11th and 14th centuries. In this version there are only 15 runes, because the last rune, yr, disappeared as it became redundant because the sound it represented, /ɻ/, had become a true r in the Old Norse Icelandic dialect of the time.

Marcomaniac Runes

Maroon runes.

The treatise entitled De Inventione Litterarum attributed to Hrabanus Maurus assigns the origin of these runes to the Marcomanni: "Marcomanni, quos nos Nordmannos vocamus", although there is no real relationship with them, and since then they have been known by this name. Wilhelm Grimm discussed the origin of these runes in 1821.

The Marcomania runic alphabet consists of a curious mixture of Old Futhark and Anglo-Saxon Futhorc runes in an attempt by Carolingian scholars to represent all letters of the Latin alphabet with runic equivalents. They were used in 8th and 9th century manuscripts mainly from the southern German-speaking Carolingian Empire.

Medieval Runes

Example of medieval runes.

The Younger Futhark had spread throughout Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, but its small number of runes did not have written symbols for every Old Norse phoneme. To remedy this deficiency, punctuated variants of the characters representing voiceless consonants were introduced to represent their voiced equivalents, and vice versa, and several runes were added to cover all vowel sounds. No single pattern was followed, and Scandinavian runic inscriptions from the Middle Ages show variant rune types, often equivalent to the letters s, c, and z are used interchangeably.

Medieval runes were in use until the 15th century. Most of the surviving Scandinavian runic inscriptions date from the Middle Ages, although there are also some Latin inscriptions, indicating that runes were in common use in the Middle Ages and coexisted with the Latin alphabet for several centuries.

Dalecarlian Runes

Dalecarlian runes.

The isolation of the Swedish province of Dalecarlia led to the development of its own runic type, a mixture of runes and Latin letters. Dalecarlian runes came into use at the turn of the century XVI and were preserved in some uses until the XX century. There is debate whether their use was part of an unbroken tradition or whether people of the 19th century and XX reintroduced them by learning the runes from treatises on the subject. They were mainly used for transcription of the local language, Elfdalian.

Magic Use

Insignia de las SS (Schutzstaffel) de 1933 con dos runas sigel. The Nazis were keenly interested in Runic occultism.

It is very likely that the earliest runic inscriptions, such as those found on artifacts with the name of the craftsman or owner, were used for magical purposes other than as simple alphabets. A divinatory use of runes in the Viking Age has also been suggested, although there is no direct scientific evidence to support this claim.

Recently, certain esoteric and neopagan groups have developed modern reinterpretations of the magical and ritual use of runes. The Nazis, under the influence of romanticism and völkisch nationalism, felt so fascinated by them that they incorporated some into their political and military symbology.

Bluetooth Runes

The Bluetooth logo is the combination of two Younger Futhark runes, hagall and berkana, equivalent to the letters "H" and "B", which are the initials of Harald Blåtand's name (bluetooth in English), who was a king of Denmark in the Viking Age.

Runes of the Wise or Wise Runes

The runes of the wise is a compilation of symbols, whose influence is alchemist and Wiccan symbology. Being 2 women the creators of this mancia; the 13 witch runes were brought to light by the seer and Wiccan priestess Patricia Crowther and the 14 alchemical runes by the Russian psychic Irina Antamonova. This symbology vibrates with Latin, but more properly with the Spanish alphabet. It has 27 runes, its symbology is modern and practical, it is a triple system, which means that each rune has a different symbol, number and letter. It is a very powerful and easy to use esoteric divination system for its practitioners. The 13 Witch Runes: According to the description in Patricia Crowther's book, they are:

• The Eye
• The harvest (the spike)
• The Sword (man’s fire)
• The waves (snake)
• The rings
• The Ways (Women's Day)
• The scar (black).
• The shield or cross spears
• The star
• The moon
• The sun
• Birds (alas)
• Tricket (magic, help)

It should be noted that they are also known in Spain and Latin America as gypsy runes, a completely wrong name, since a Spanish distributor mistook the name of Wiccan for gypsy and proceeded to mark the packaging where they were commercially presented in 1987.

Pichação

Runes have influenced pichação, a style of graffiti from the city of São Paulo, (Brazil) influenced by the logos of Anglo-Saxon rock bands from the 80s such as Manowar, who used to use typography similar to that of runes runes.

Unicode

The runic alphabets were added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0.

The Unicode block for runic alphabets is U+16A0 – U+16FF. It is intended to encode the Old Futhark letters, Anglo-Frisian runes, and the Long-branch and Short-branch Younger Futhark variants (but not the unstick ones), in cases where the cognate letters have the same form, recourse has been made to the "unification".

The Unicode 3.0 block contained 81 symbols: 75 runic letters (U+16A0 – U+16EA), 3 punctuation marks (Runic single punctuation U+16EB ᛫, Runic multiple punctuation U+16EC ᛬ and Runic cross punctuation U +16ED ᛭) and three runic symbols used on the staves of the early modern runic calendar ("Gold Numerical Runes", Arlaug runic symbol U+16EE ᛮ, Tvimadur runic symbol U+16EF ᛯ, runic Belgthor symbol U+16F0 ᛰ). As of Unicode 7.0 (2014), eight characters were added, three attributed to J. R. R. Tolkien's Modern English script in Anglo-Saxon runes, and five for the "cryptographic" used in an inscription on the Auzon Chest.