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The earliest runic inscriptions date from around A.D. 150. The characters were generally replaced by the alphabet"">Latin alphabet as the cultures that had used runes
underwent Christianization by around A.D. 700 in
central Europe and by around A.D. 1100 in Europe"">Northern Europe. However, the use of runes persisted for
specialized purposes in Northern Europe. Until the early twentieth
century runes were used in rural Sweden for
decoration purposes in Dalarna
and on calendar"">Runic calendars).
The three best-known runic alphabets are the Elder Futhark (around 150 to 800 AD), the English language" class="mw-redirect"">Old English Futhorc (400 to 1100 AD), and the Younger Futhark (800–1100). The Younger
Futhark is further divided into the long-branch runes (also called Danish,
although they were also used in Norway and Sweden), short-branch or Rök runes (also called Swedish-Norwegian,
although they were also used in Denmark), and the stavesyle or Hälsinge
runes (runes"">staveless runes). The Younger Futhark developed further into
the Marcomannic runes, the runes"">Medieval runes (1100 AD to 1500 AD), and the Dalecarlian runes (around 1500 to 1800 AD).
The origins of the runic alphabet are uncertain. Many characters of the Elder Futhark bear a close resemblance to characters from the Latin
alphabet. Other candidates are the 5th to 1st century BC Northern Italic
alphabets: Lepontic, language" class="mw-redirect"">Rhaetic and language"">Venetic, all of which are closely related to each other
and descend from the Italic alphabet"">Old Italic alphabet.
The runes were in use among the Germanic peoples from the 1st or 2nd
This period corresponds to the late Germanic" class="mw-redirect"">Common Germanic stage linguistically,
with a continuum of dialects not yet clearly separated into the three
branches of later centuries; Germanic" class="mw-redirect"">North Germanic, West Germanic, and East Germanic.
No distinction is made in surviving runic inscriptions between long and short vowels, although such a distinction was certainly present
phonologically in the spoken languages of the time. Similarly, there are
no signs for labiovelars in the Elder Futhark (such signs
were introduced in both the Anglo-Saxon futhorc and the alphabet"">Gothic alphabet as variants of p; see peorð.)
The name runes contrasts with Latin or Greek letters. It is attested on a 6th century Alamannic
runestaff as runa, and possibly as runo on the 4th
stone. The name is from a root run- (Gothic runa),
meaning "secret" or "whisper". The root run- can also be found in
the Baltic languages meaning "speech". In Lithuanian, runoti has
two meanings: "to cut (with a knife)" or "to speak".
The runes developed centuries after the Old Italic alphabets from
which they are historically derived. The debate on the development of
the runic script concerns the question which of the Italic alphabets
should be taken as their point of origin, and which, if any, signs
should be considered original innovations added to the letters found in
the Italic scripts. The historical context of the script's origin is the
cultural contact between Germanic people, who often served as mercenaries in the auxiliaries" class="mw-redirect"">Roman army, and the Italic
peninsula during the Roman
imperial period (1st c. BC to 5th c. AD). The formation of the
Elder Futhark was complete by the early 5th century, with the Kylver Stone being the first evidence of the futhark
ordering as well as of the p rune.
Specifically, the Raetic alphabet of Bolzano,
is often advanced as a candidate for the origin of the runes, with only
five Elder Futhark runes ( ᛖ e,
having no counterpart in the Bolzano alphabet (Mees 2000). Scandinavian
scholars tend to favor derivation from the alphabet"">Latin alphabet itself over Raetic candidates.
A "North Etruscan" thesis is supported by the inscription on the Negau helmet dating to the 2nd century BC
This is in a northern Etruscan alphabet, but features a Germanic name, Harigast.
New archaeological evidence came from Monte Calvario (Auronzo di
The angular shapes of the runes are shared with most contemporary alphabets of the period used for carving in wood or stone. A peculiarity
of the runic alphabet is the absence of horizontal strokes,
although this characteristic is also shared by other alphabets, such as
the early form of the alphabet"">Latin alphabet used for the inscription" class="mw-redirect"">Duenos inscription, and it is not
universal especially among early runic inscriptions, which frequently
have variant rune shapes including horizontal strokes.
The "West Germanic hypothesis" speculates on an introduction by Germanic tribes"">West Germanic tribes. This hypothesis is based on
claiming that the earliest inscriptions of around 200 AD, found in bogs
and graves around Jutland (the inscriptions"">Vimose inscriptions), exhibit word endings that, being
interpreted by Scandinavian
scholars to be Proto-Norse,
are considered unresolved and having been long the subject of
discussion. Inscriptions like wagnija, niþijo, and harija
are supposed to incarnate tribe names, tentatively proposed to be Vangiones, the Nidensis and the
Harii, tribes located in the Rhineland.
Since names ending in -io reflect Germanic morphology
representing the Latin ending -ius, and the suffix -inius
was reflected by Germanic -inio-,
the question of the problematic ending -ijo in masculine
Proto-Norse would be resolved by assuming Roman (Rhineland) influences,
while "the awkward ending -a of laguþewa (cf. Syrett 1994:44f.) can be
solved by accepting the fact that the name may indeed be West Germanic;"
however, it should be noted that in the early Runic period differences
between Germanic languages are generally assumed to be small. Another
theory assumes a Germanic"">Northwest Germanic unity preceding the emergence of
Proto-Norse proper from roughly the 5th century.
An alternative suggestion explaining the impossibility to classify the
earliest inscriptions as either North or West Germanic is forwarded by
È. A. Makaev, who assumes a "special runic koine", an early "literary Germanic" employed by
the entire Late Common Germanic linguistic community after the
separation of Gothic (2nd to 5th centuries), while the spoken dialects
may already have been more diverse.
Runic inscriptions from the 400 year period of c. 150 to 550 AD are referred to as "Period I" inscriptions. These inscriptions are generally
in Elder Futhark, but the set of letter shapes
and bindrunes employed is far from
standardized. Notably the j, s and ŋ runes undergo considerable modifications,
while others, such as p and ï, remain unattested altogether prior the
first full futhark row on the Kylver
Stone (ca. 400 AD).
Theories of the existence of separate Gothic runes have been advanced, even identifying them as
the original alphabet from which the Futhark were derived, but these
have little support in actual findings (mainly the of Kovel" class="mw-redirect"">spearhead of Kovel, with its
right-to-left inscription, its T-shaped tiwaz
and its rectangular dagaz). If
there ever were genuinely Gothic runes, they were soon replaced by the Gothic alphabet. The letters of the Gothic
alphabet, however, as given by the Alcuin
manuscript (9th century), are obviously related to the names of the
Futhark. The names are clearly Gothic, but it is impossible to say
whether they are as old as, or even older than, the letters themselves. A
handful of Elder Futhark inscriptions were found in Gothic territory,
such as the 3rd to 5th century Pietroassa"">Ring of Pietroassa.
In stanza 157 of Hávamál, the runes are attributed with the power to bring that which is dead to life. In this stanza, Odin recounts a spell:
The earliest runic inscriptions found on artifacts give the name of either the craftsman or the proprietor, or, sometimes, remain a
linguistic mystery. Due to this, it is possible that the early runes
were not so much used as a simple writing system, but rather as (paranormal)"">magical signs to be used for charms. Although some say
the runes were used for divination,
there is no direct evidence to suggest they were ever used in this way.
The name rune itself, taken to mean "secret, something hidden",
seems to indicate that knowledge of the runes was originally considered
esoteric, or restricted to an elite. The 6th century Björketorp Runestone warns in Proto-Norse using
the word rune in both senses:
Haidzruno runu, falahak haidera, ginnarunaz. Arageu haeramalausz uti az. Weladaude, sa'z þat barutz. Uþarba spa.
I, master of the runes(?) conceal here runes of power. Incessantly (plagued by) maleficence, (doomed to) insidious death (is) he who breaks this (monument). I prophesy destruction / prophecy of destruction.
The same curse and use of the word rune is also found on the Stentoften Runestone. There are also some inscriptions suggesting a medieval belief in the magical
significance of runes, such as the Franks
Casket (700 AD) panel.
Charm words, such as auja, laþu, laukaR and most commonly, alu,
appear on a number of period"">Migration period Elder Futhark inscriptions as well as
variants and abbreviations of them. Much speculation and study has been
produced on the potential meaning of these inscriptions. Rhyming groups
appear on some early bracteates that may also be magic in purpose, such
as salusalu and luwatuwa. Further, an inscription on the Gummarp Runestone (500 to 700 AD) gives a
cryptic inscription describing the use of three runic letters followed
by the Elder Futhark f-rune written three times in succession.
Nevertheless, it has proven difficult to find unambiguous traces of runic "oracles": Although language" class="mw-redirect"">Norse literature is full of references
to runes, it nowhere contains specific instructions on divination.
There are at least three sources on divination with rather vague
descriptions that may or may not refer to runes: Tacitus's
1st century (book)"">Germania, Snorri Sturluson's 13th century Ynglinga saga and Rimbert's
9th century Vita
The first source, Tacitus's Germania, describes "signs" chosen in groups of three and cut from "a nut-bearing tree," although the
runes do not seem to have been in use at the time of Tacitus' writings. A
second source is the Ynglinga saga, where Granmar,
the king of Södermanland, goes to Uppsala
for the blót.
There, the "chips" fell in a way that said that he would not live long (Féll
honum þá svo spánn sem hann mundi eigi lengi lifa). These "chips,"
however, are easily explainable as a blótspánn (sacrificial
chip), which was "marked, possibly with sacrificial blood, shaken and
thrown down like dice, and their positive or negative significance then
The third source is Rimbert's Vita Ansgari, where there are three accounts of what some believe to be the use of runes for
divination, but Rimbert calls it "drawing lots". One of these accounts
is the description of how a renegade Swedish king Anund
Uppsale first brings a Danish fleet to Birka, but
then changes his mind and asks the Danes to "draw lots". According to
the story, this "drawing of lots" was quite informative, telling them
that attacking Birka would bring bad luck and that they should attack a
Slavic town instead. The tool in the "drawing of lots," however, is
easily explainable as a hlautlein (lot-twig), which according to
Foote and Wilson
would be used in the same manner as a blótspánn.
The lack of extensive knowledge on historical usage of the runes has not stopped modern authors from extrapolating entire systems of
divination from what few specifics exist, usually loosely based on the
runes' reconstructed names and additional outside influence.
A recent study of runic magic suggests that runes were used to create magical objects such as amulets (MacLeod and Mees 2006), but not in a
way that would indicate that runic writing was any more inherently
magical than were other writing systems such as Latin or Greek.
As Proto-Germanic evolved into its later language groups, the words assigned to the runes and the sounds represented by the runes themselves
began to diverge somewhat, and each culture would either create new
runes, rename or rearrange its rune names slightly, or even stop using
obsolete runes completely, to accommodate these changes. Thus, the
Anglo-Saxon futhorc has several runes peculiar to itself to represent diphthongs unique to (or at least prevalent in)
the Anglo-Saxon dialect.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Younger Futhark has 16 runes, while the Elder Futhark has 24, is not fully explained by the some 600 years
of sound changes that had occurred in the Germanic" class="mw-redirect"">North Germanic language group. The
development here might seem rather astonishing, since the younger form
of the alphabet came to use fewer different rune signs at the same time
as the development of the language led to a greater number of different
phonemes than had been present at the time of the older futhark. For
example, voiced and unvoiced consonants merged in script, and so did
many vowels, while the number of vowels in the spoken language
increased. From about 1100, this disadvantage was eliminated in the
medieval runes, which again increased the number of different signs to
correspond with the number of phonemes in the language.
Some later runic finds are on monuments (runestones), which often contain solemn inscriptions about people who died or
performed great deeds. For a long time it was assumed that this kind of
grand inscription was the primary use of runes, and that their use was
associated with a certain societal class of rune carvers.
In the mid-1950s, however, about 600 inscriptions known as the Bryggen inscriptions were found in Bergen. These inscriptions were made on wood and bone, often in the shape of sticks of
various sizes, and contained inscriptions of an everyday nature—ranging
from name tags, prayers (often in Latin),
personal messages, business letters and expressions of affection to
bawdy phrases of a profane and sometimes even vulgar nature. Following
this find, it is nowadays commonly assumed that at least in late use,
Runic was a widespread and common writing system.
In the later Middle Ages, runes were also used in the Clog almanacs (sometimes called Runic staff, Prim or Scandinavian calendar) of Sweden and
Estonia. The authenticity of some monuments bearing Runic inscriptions
found in Northern America is disputed, but most of them date from modern