The Runic Rows: Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc

There is no single runic alphabet. Over roughly a thousand years the Germanic peoples used several related rows of runes, each shaped by the language it had to write and the people who wrote it. Three matter most to anyone who reads runes today: the Elder Futhark, the oldest row; the Younger Futhark of the Viking age; and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc of England and Frisia. Knowing how they relate is the first step to understanding what a rune is, where its name comes from, and why the old rune poems sometimes seem to describe a different rune from the one in front of you.

Where the runes came from

The poems give the runes a divine origin. In the Hávamál, Odin hangs for nine nights on the windy tree and takes up the runes; the same poem names other carvers as well, Dáin for the elves, Dvalin for the dwarfs and Ásvid for the giants. The archaeology tells a quieter story.

The oldest runic inscriptions come from the second century AD, from Denmark, northern Germany and Norway. Among the earliest is a comb from the Vimose bog on the Danish island of Funen, carrying a single name. Others are on spearheads and brooches. Most scholars think the letters were adapted from an alphabet of the Mediterranean world, most likely one of the Old Italic scripts used in the Alps, by Germanic people who had contact with Rome. Several runes resemble Latin or North Italic letters closely: compare the shapes of Raidho and R, or of Sowilo and S. Others are harder to trace.

The earliest inscriptions are short. They give a name, an owner, a maker, or a single word such as alu, which appears again and again on objects and amulets and whose meaning is still debated. The runes were made for cutting rather than writing with ink. They are built from straight strokes and avoid horizontal lines, which would disappear along the grain of a piece of wood.

The two stories do not have to compete. One is how a people explained the gift of writing to themselves; the other is how the gift actually arrived. What both agree on is that runes were never just letters. To carve them was to fix something in wood, bone or stone, and the poems treat that act with a seriousness that ordinary writing never had.

The Elder Futhark

The Elder Futhark is the oldest runic row, used by Germanic peoples from about the second to the eighth century AD. Its name is simply its first six letters: F, U, Th, A, R, K, for Fehu, Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raidho and Kenaz, in the same way that “alphabet” comes from alpha and beta.

It has twenty-four runes, and the order is old. The Kylver stone from Gotland, carved around AD 400, carries one of the earliest complete rows, and the gold bracteates (thin stamped medallions) of Vadstena and Grumpan show the same sequence, with a few runes changing places here and there, most often the last two. The common modern order, followed here, ends with Dagaz and Othala.

The three ættir

On the Vadstena bracteate the row is divided into three groups of eight. Later Icelandic tradition calls such groups ættir, “families”, and names them after the rune that opens each:

• Freyr’s ætt, from Fehu to Wunjo: Fehu, Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raidho, Kenaz, Gebo, Wunjo.
• Hagal’s ætt, from Hagalaz to Sowilo: Hagalaz, Nauthiz, Isa, Jera, Eihwaz, Perthro, Algiz, Sowilo.
• Tyr’s ætt, from Tiwaz to Othala: Tiwaz, Berkano, Ehwaz, Mannaz, Laguz, Ingwaz, Dagaz, Othala.

The names of the families come from much later sources than the stones, but the division into three is as old as the row itself.

Names reconstructed, not recorded

Each rune stood for a sound and carried a name that was a real word: cattle, aurochs, giant, god, ride, torch. The names of the Elder runes, however, are not written down anywhere in their own time. They are reconstructed from the names the runes kept in the later English and Norse rows, and from the rune poems, which were composed for those later rows. Forms such as fehu or ansuz are scholarly reconstructions of what the names would have sounded like in Proto-Germanic. When an Elder rune is given an old poem, it borrows the stanza of its English or Norse descendant, and an honest reading says so.

From 24 to 16: the Younger Futhark

Around the eighth century something strange happened in Scandinavia. The spoken language was gaining sounds, as early Old Norse moved away from the older Germanic, and yet the runic row lost them. The twenty-four runes of the Elder Futhark became the sixteen of the Younger Futhark, the row of the Viking age.

The result is a script in which one rune does several jobs. The rune Úr stands for u, o, ø, y and w. Íss serves for i and e. Kaun is both k and g, Týr both t and d, Bjarkan both b and p. A reader of a runestone has to know the language to know which sound is meant, much as a reader of Hebrew or Arabic supplies the vowels. Why the row was cut down is still argued over. The most common explanation is practical: fewer and simpler shapes, and a spelling that followed how the names of the runes now sounded.

Long-branch, short-twig and staveless runes

There are several forms of the Younger row. The long-branch runes, often called Danish, are the fuller shapes seen on the great runestones. The short-twig runes, used in Sweden and Norway, are quicker to cut, and the Rök stone mixes the two. The Hälsinge runes of northern Sweden go further still and leave out the vertical staves altogether, keeping only the branches.

The row of the runestones

This is the row of the runestones. Most of the several thousand stones in Scandinavia, the majority of them in Sweden, were raised in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and nearly all use Younger runes. They remember a father, a son, a partner who died in the east, a bridge built for someone’s soul. Long after the Latin alphabet arrived with the Church, the Younger runes stayed in use for everyday messages carved on sticks, and some Swedish districts kept them into the modern age.

The sixteen Younger runes are also the runes of the Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems, which is why those poems have sixteen stanzas and not twenty-four.

The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc

When Germanic settlers came to Britain in the fifth century they brought the runes with them, and in England and Frisia the row changed in its own way. The sounds of Old English were shifting too, but here new runes were added instead of old ones being dropped. The result is the Futhorc, named, like the Futhark, after its first letters; the fourth rune, Ōs, now stood for o.

The Old English Rune Poem gives twenty-nine runes. Beyond the twenty-four of the old row it adds Āc, the oak; Æsc, the ash; Ȳr, a bow or a piece of gear; Īor, a creature of river and land that may be an eel or a beaver; and Ēar, the grave. In Northumbria the row grew further, to more than thirty runes.

Runes on England’s finest objects

The Futhorc was used on some of the finest objects of early England. The Franks Casket, a whalebone box of the early eighth century, is carved with scenes from Germanic legend, Rome and the Bible, framed in runic verse. The Ruthwell Cross in Scotland carries lines of the poem The Dream of the Rood in runes. The Seax of Beagnoth, a knife found in the Thames, has the whole row inlaid on its blade.

The runes also survived on parchment. The poet Cynewulf signed four of his poems by weaving the runes of his name into the verse, so that the reader had to know the rune names to find him. In England, unlike in pagan Scandinavia, the runes lived for centuries side by side with Christian learning, and the Old English Rune Poem itself is a Christian poem.

Why the differences matter to a reader

The three rows are one family, not three systems. A rune such as Fehu keeps its shape and its sense of “wealth” across all of them; Hagalaz keeps its hail; Isa keeps its ice. But some runes change shape, some change meaning, and some disappear. Jera, the year, becomes the Younger Ár; Ansuz, the god, becomes the English Ōs, a “mouth” in the Christian poem. A reader who knows which row a meaning or a stanza comes from will read more clearly, and will not mistake a medieval English verse for the voice of a second-century carver.

Sources: Runic inscriptions, 2nd to 11th centuries; the Kylver stone and Vadstena bracteate; Viking-age runestones; M. P. Barnes and runic scholarship in general; the Old English Rune Poem, tr. Bruce Dickins (1915).