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Anglo-Saxon runes or Anglo-Frisian runes are runes that were used by the Anglo-Saxons and Medieval Frisians (collectively called Anglo-Frisians) as an alphabet in their native writing system, recording both Old English and Old Frisian (Old English: rūna, ᚱᚢᚾᚪ, "rune").
The Old English rune poem, dated to the 8th or 9th century, has stanzas on 29 Anglo-Saxon runes. It stands alongside younger rune poems from Scandinavia, which record the names of the 16 Younger Futhark runes.
Old English was first written using Anglo-Saxon runes in the 5th century. In 597, the arrival of the Gregorian mission in Kent marked the beginning of the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England, and with it the reintroduction of the Latin alphabet to Britain, where it was used to write English for the first time.
While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph uu , scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn ᚹ for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use during the Middle English period, circa 1300. [2]
Old English was first written in runes, using the futhorc – a rune set derived from the Germanic 24-character elder futhark, extended by five more runes used to represent Anglo-Saxon vowel sounds and sometimes by several more additional characters.
Tolkien's mode of writing Modern English in Anglo-Saxon runes received explicit recognition with the introduction of three extra runes to the Unicode Runic block used by him in Unicode version 7.0 (2014). The three characters represent the English k, oo and sh graphemes, as follows: RUNIC LETTER K (ᛱ, U+16F1), a variant of cen ᚳ [5]
Each Anglo-Saxon runic letter had an acrophonic Old English name, which gave the rune itself the connotations of the name, as described in the Old English rune poem. The inscriptions on the Franks Casket are alliterative verse, and so give particular emphasis to one or more runes on each side.
For example, a tiw rune ᛏ, symbolizing the Anglo-Saxon war god Tiw (Tyr in the earlier quotation from the Sigrdrífumál), is found on two sword-pommels and a spear blade, all from Kent. [28] Thus, although some Anglo-Saxon runic inscriptions on weapons are known, none are as extensive or as prominent as the runic inscription on the Seax of ...