Elder Futhark

The Elder Futhark is the earliest form of the runic script, and the ancestor of every later runic alphabet. It has 24 characters, and it takes its name from the sound values of the first six: f, u, þ, a, r, k. It was in use from roughly the middle of the 2nd century AD until around 700–800, when it was replaced in Scandinavia by the 16-character Younger Futhark and in England by the expanded futhorc.

Rather fewer than four hundred Elder Futhark inscriptions survive. Most are short: a personal name, a maker’s formula, a word or two on a brooch, a spearhead, a bracteate or a stone. That scarcity is the single most important fact about the alphabet: almost everything said about individual runes rests on a small and often ambiguous body of evidence, supplemented by linguistic reconstruction and by rune poems written down centuries later in different languages.

The language written in Elder Futhark is usually called Proto-Norse or, more broadly, Northwest Germanic. It is not Old Norse, and it is certainly not English. This matters for anyone trying to write in runes: the Elder Futhark was designed for a sound system that no longer exists.

A widely repeated modern claim is that these are "the Viking runes". They are not. By the time of the Viking Age raids in the late 8th century, Scandinavians had already moved to the Younger Futhark. The Elder Futhark is several centuries older than the Vikings.