Younger Futhark

The Younger Futhark is the runic alphabet of the Viking Age. Between roughly AD 700 and 800 the 24-character Elder Futhark was cut down to 16 characters, an unusual development, because the Scandinavian languages of the period were gaining sounds, not losing them. The result is a script in which a single rune routinely has to stand for several distinct sounds.

One rune covers both /k/ and /g/; another covers /t/ and /d/; another covers /b/ and /p/. There is no separate rune for /e/, and none for /o/ for most of the period, although the ᚬ óss rune, which began as a nasal vowel, drifted towards /o/ as the nasal quality faded, so late carvers do use it that way. Reading a Younger Futhark inscription therefore depends heavily on context and on knowing Old Norse, which is also why any tool that converts modern English letters into Younger Futhark is making lossy choices on your behalf.

Three graphic traditions are usually distinguished. Long-branch (sometimes called Danish) runes are the fullest forms and dominate on monumental stones. Short-twig (sometimes called Swedish-Norwegian or Rök) runes are simplified and quicker to carve. Staveless or Hälsinge runes reduce the characters further still, to the point of near-illegibility. These are three ways of writing the same sixteen runes, not three different alphabets.

Far more Younger Futhark inscriptions survive than Elder Futhark ones: several thousand, the great majority of them on the runestones of eleventh-century Sweden. Because so many are memorial texts using formulaic language, the Younger Futhark corpus is the best evidence we have for how runic writing was actually used.