Glossary of runic terms

Acrophonic

The principle that a letter takes its sound value from the first sound of its name. Runic alphabets are acrophonic, which is why the Younger Futhark a-rune changed its sound when its name lost an initial j-.

Ætt (plural ættir)

A group within a runic alphabet. The Elder Futhark has three of eight, and the futhorc keeps that 8 + 8 + 8 across its inherited 24, with the later English and Northumbrian additions falling outside the groups entirely; the Younger Futhark has groups of six, five and five. The division is attested on bracteates of around AD 500 and is the basis of runic ciphers, which is why the group sizes have to be counted rather than assumed.

Armanen futhark

An eighteen-rune system invented by the Austrian occultist Guido von List around 1902. It is not a historical runic alphabet, though it is frequently presented as one, and it is the root of a good deal of later esoteric and far-right rune material. The number eighteen comes from the charms listed at the end of Hávamál, not from any alphabet. See the Armanen runes.

Attested

Directly recorded in a surviving source: an inscription, a manuscript or a rune poem. One of the four evidence labels used throughout this site.

Bind rune

Two or more runes sharing a single vertical stave. Historically attested, usually for practical reasons. See bind runes.

Boustrophedon

Writing that alternates direction line by line, like an ox ploughing a field. Some runic inscriptions use it, which is one reason reading order is not always obvious.

Bracteate

A thin single-sided gold pendant, common in Migration-Period Scandinavia. Around 133 carry Elder Futhark inscriptions (more than a third of everything surviving in that alphabet), including the Vadstena bracteate with its complete futhark. See bracteates.

Codex Runicus

A parchment book of 202 pages written entirely in medieval runes in Scania around 1300, carrying the Scanian Law, a Danish chronicle and the oldest musical notation written in Scandinavia. It is the one runic text of book length, and the standing exception to the claim that runes never carried long texts, though most specialists read it as deliberate archaism rather than ordinary practice. See Codex Runicus.

Dalecarlian runes

A late runic alphabet used in Dalarna in central Sweden, mixing runes with Latin letters. It kept going in rural use long after runes had died out everywhere else: the earliest dated inscription is from 1596, and the latest are 20th-century. Whether that represents an unbroken tradition or a revival learned from printed books is disputed. See Dalecarlian runes.

Dróttkvætt

The main metre of Old Norse skaldic verse, intricately alliterated and internally rhymed. The Karlevi stone carries the only complete dróttkvætt stanza on a runestone.

Elder Futhark

The oldest runic alphabet, 24 characters, in use c. AD 150–800. See the Elder Futhark.

Erilaʀ

A word appearing in several early inscriptions, often in the formula ek erilaʀ, "I, the erilaʀ". Frequently translated "rune-master", though the exact sense is not recorded.

Frisian runes

The runic inscriptions of the coastal Netherlands, mostly 6th–8th century and mostly on small portable objects. Counts range from nine to thirty-one depending on the edition. They share the futhorc with England, which is why the innovations ac, æsc and os are usually called Anglo-Frisian rather than Anglo-Saxon; which side devised them is unsettled. See Frisian runes.

Futhark

A runic alphabet, named after the sound values of its first six runes: f, u, þ, a, r, k. See why it is called a futhark.

Futhorc

The Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet. The name reflects Old English sound changes that turned f-u-þ-a-r-k into f-u-þ-o-r-c. See the futhorc.

Galdrastafir

Icelandic magical staves recorded in grimoires from the 17th century onwards, including the vegvísir and ægishjálmur. They are not runes and they are not Viking-Age.

Gothic

The earliest Germanic language recorded at any length, in a 4th-century Bible translation, which makes Gothic words unusually good evidence for reconstructing rune names. Its alphabet is not runic (Wulfila built it mostly from Greek), and its letter names survive only in one 8th-century Continental manuscript, which makes them a weaker kind of evidence than the ordinary words behind them. See Gothic letters and the runes.

Ideograph

A character used to stand for its own name rather than its sound. The j-rune on the Stentoften stone may be an example, standing for "a good year".

Jötunvillur

A runic substitution code in which each rune is replaced by the rune for the last sound of its name, so úr, the u-rune, is written with an r. It resisted reading for a century and was decoded by K. Jonas Nordby. See cryptic and cipher runes.

Kenning

An Old Norse poetic circumlocution: "the field of the fish" for water, "the leavings of the wolf" for Týr. The Icelandic Rune Poem gives three for every rune name, which is why it reads so differently from the Old English one.

Long-branch runes

The fullest forms of the Younger Futhark, common on monumental runestones. Sometimes called Danish runes. See long-branch vs short-twig.

Medieval runes

The dotted, Latin-influenced Scandinavian system of c. 1100–1500. The most-used runic system of all, and the least written about. See medieval runes.

Merkstave

A modern term for a reversed rune reading. It looks Old Norse and is not: it appears to be a modern coinage. See reversed runes.

Ogham

A separate early medieval script, found mainly on standing stones in Ireland, Wales and western Britain. It writes Primitive Irish. A smaller group of inscriptions in Scotland is conventionally called Pictish, but that corpus is the one body of insular inscriptions that remains undeciphered (whether its language is even Celtic is argued), so "ogham writes Pictish" states as settled something that is not. It is not runic and is not descended from or related to the futharks: it encodes letters as groups of strokes cut across a stem line. The two get confused because both are angular, both are cut rather than written, and both turn up on stones, but an ogham inscription and a runic one have nothing in common beyond that.

Old Norse

The North Germanic language of Viking-Age and medieval Scandinavia, written in the Younger Futhark and later in the Latin alphabet.

Proto-Germanic

The reconstructed common ancestor of the Germanic languages. Elder Futhark rune names are reconstructed in this language, which is why they carry asterisks.

Proto-Norse

The language of the earliest Scandinavian runic inscriptions, ancestral to Old Norse. Not the same as Old Norse, and not remotely the same as modern Scandinavian languages.

Pseudo-rune

R. I. Page’s term for a character that appears in the manuscript futhorc rows but in no surviving inscription. Cweorð, stan and ior are the three standard examples. The distinction matters because charts routinely list all 33 futhorc runes as equals, and because a row that leaves a pseudo-rune out is complete rather than defective.

Rundata

The Scandinavian Runic-text Database, maintained at Uppsala. The source of the inscription signatures used on this site. See sources.

Rune poem

A medieval mnemonic poem giving a verse for each rune of an alphabet. Three survive (Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic), alongside the Abecedarium Nordmannicum, which lists the runes but gives them almost no meanings and so is usually counted separately. See the rune poems.

Short-twig runes

Simplified Younger Futhark forms, quicker to carve. Sometimes called Swedish-Norwegian or Rök runes. The same sixteen runes as long-branch.

Signature

A catalogue reference for an inscription, e.g. U 29 (Uppland), DR 42 (Denmark), Ög 136 (Östergötland), G 88 (Gotland), N B-series (Norway, Bryggen).

Spiegelrunen

Mirrored runes: a rune drawn together with its own reflection. The term matters mainly because such shapes are easily mistaken for other characters: the forms on the Westeremden yew-stick that look like stan are usually read as Spiegelrunen instead.

Stave

The main vertical stroke of a rune. Most runes are a stave plus attached marks, which is what makes bind runes mechanically easy.

Staveless runes

An extremely reduced Younger Futhark variant, also called Hälsinge runes, in which even the main stave may be omitted.

Transliteration

Rewriting text in a different script, letter for letter. Distinct from translation, which changes the language. See transliteration vs translation.

Younger Futhark

The 16-character alphabet of the Viking Age, c. AD 800–1100, reduced from the Elder Futhark’s 24. Written in long-branch, short-twig and staveless forms. See the Younger Futhark.

ʀ (yr)

A sound descended from Proto-Germanic *z, occurring at word ends, which merged with ordinary r during the Viking Age. Its behaviour is a standard dating criterion. See ýr.

Þ (thorn)

The letter for the "th" sound, borrowed from the runic alphabet into Latin-script Old English and still used in Icelandic. See þorn.

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