Medieval runes

Runes did not stop at the end of the Viking Age. From about 1100 the Younger Futhark was systematically extended with dots and additional characters so that each sound had its own rune again: a dotted ᛁ gives /e/, a dotted ᚴ gives /g/, a dotted ᛒ gives /p/, and so on. Characters were added for the sounds Latin writing had made familiar, and the alphabet was often reordered to match the Latin one.

This medieval system was in everyday use for centuries. The Bryggen finds from Bergen alone produced hundreds of runic messages on wood: business notes, name tags, love letters, obscenities, Latin tags, prayers. It is the largest body of runic material there is, and the least likely to appear in popular writing about runes.

It also produced the one runic text of book length. The Codex Runicus, written in Scania around 1300, is 202 parchment pages carrying the Scanian Law, a Danish chronicle and the oldest musical notation written in Scandinavia, all of it in runes. That was possible here and nowhere earlier, because the dotted alphabet could finally spell the language unambiguously. Most specialists still read the manuscript as deliberate archaism rather than as ordinary practice; keep that in mind before using it to argue that runes were a normal book script.

This site covers medieval runes as a reference chart rather than as individual entries. The evidence for the individual characters is thinner and more variable than for the earlier alphabets, and dozens of near-identical pages would add page count without adding much a reader could use.