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A rune in Old English could be called a rūnstæf (perhaps meaning something along the lines of "mystery letter" or "whisper letter"), or simply rūn. Futhorc inscriptions hold diverse styles and contents. Ochre has been detected on at least one English runestone, implying its runes were once painted.
The ansuz rune is always transliterated as o from the Younger Futhark, and consequently, the transliteration mon represents Old Norse man in a runestone from Bällsta, and hon represents Old Norse han in the Frösö Runestone, while forþom represents Old Norse forðom in an inscription from Replösa. [2]
There are about 3,000 runestones in Scandinavia (out of a total of about 6,000 runic inscriptions). [1] The runestones are unevenly distributed in Scandinavia: The majority are found in Sweden, estimated at between 1,700 [2] and 2,500 (depending on definition). Denmark has 250 runestones, and Norway has 50. [2]
The Elder Futhark (named after the initial phoneme of the first six rune names: F, U, Þ, A, R and K) has 24 runes, often arranged in three groups of eight runes; each group is called an ætt [2] (pl. ættir; meaning 'clan, group', although sometimes thought to mean eight). In the following table, each rune is given with its common transliteration:
The distinction made by Unicode between character and glyph variant is somewhat problematic in the case of the runes; the reason is the high degree of variation of letter shapes in historical inscriptions, with many "characters" appearing in highly variant shapes, and many specific shapes taking the role of a number of different characters over the period of runic use (roughly the 3rd to 14th ...
This rune may have been invented because stinging a consonant rune usually marks it as voiced, and the stung b rune violated this norm by being unvoiced. [7] When the medieval runic alphabet was fully developed in the early 13th century, it mixed short-twig and long-branch runes in a novel manner.
The j rune was rendered superfluous due to Old Norse sound changes, but was kept with the new sound value of a. The old z rune was kept (transliterated in the context of Old Norse as ʀ) but moved to the end of the rune row in the only change of letter ordering in Younger Futhark. The third ætt was reduced by four runes, losing the e, ŋ, o ...
Its date is very early (3rd century) and it shows a mixture of runic and Latin letters, reading TᛁᛚᚨᚱᛁDᛊ or TIᛚᚨRIDS (the i, r and s letters being identical in the Elder Futhark and Latin scripts), and may thus reflect a stage of development before the runes became fixed as a separate script in its own right.