The use of runes in Old Norse Saga is paralleled in the Anglo-Saxon charms that have come down to us, but in Old English the Latin letters (and often the Latin language) were used for the magical inscriptions. EV Gordon, Introduction to Old Norse, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p183. There is a description in Egils saga of how Egil detected poison with runes: he cut them on the drinking horn, reddened them with his blood, and recited a verse (quoted in the saga). An event might be brought to pass if it were cut in runes which were inlaid with blood while charms were recited.

The most varied and interesting are those cut for magical effect. The Historic Uses of Runes The uses of runes were specialized, and most of the inscriptions fall into clearly-defined conventional types. It is therefore impracticable to provide a definitive list of rune names. In Anglo-Saxon scholarship there is incomplete agreement on the set of names that should go with the Anglo-Saxon futhark, since in poetic use some runes clearly have different names in different contexts. These names varied from language to language, and even from dialect to dialect within a language, and also from one time period to another. The runes seem to have been developed as a means of recording brief texts by scratching them onto stone or wood 3.Įach rune's name was an actual word in the language using a particular futhark. The number of characters depended in part on the number of phonemes (units of sound) in the language being inscribed. The different futharks had different numbers of characters, ranging from 24 characters in the Elder Futhark to more than 30 in that of the Anglo-Saxons. Many of them resemble letters of the Roman or Greek alphabets, from which the runes may have been derived 2. The Anglo-Saxon runes came to England in a wave of migration earlier than that of the great Norse expansions.Ī futhark consists of runes made up principally of straight lines in various combinations. Runes became established wherever the Norse people settled for a substantial length of time, including on the Isle of Man. Southeast to Constantinople, with the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Emperor.

Westward with the Vikings, as far as Greenland.Įastward with the Rus, to Russia and the Ukraine. The use of runes spread from the Scandinavian countries: This is analogous to the derivation of the word 'alphabet' from aleph, bet and alpha, beta. A runic alphabet is called a futhark (also futhorc or futhork), from the first six letters: F - U - Þ - A - R - K 1. Everything / Languages & Linguistics / LanguagesĪ rune is a letter of one of the ancient Germanic alphabets of the countries of Northern Europe, including Iceland and Greenland. Everything / Languages & Linguistics / Alphabets and Writing Systemsģ.

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