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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]
Each rune most probably had a name, chosen to represent the sound of the rune itself according to the principle of acrophony. The Old English names of all 24 runes of the Elder Futhark, along with five names of runes unique to the Anglo-Saxon runes, are preserved in the Old English rune poem, compiled in the 7th century
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 ...
The Elder Futhark, used for writing Proto-Norse, consists of 24 runes that often are arranged in three groups of eight; each group is referred to as an ætt (Old Norse, meaning 'clan, group'). The earliest known sequential listing of the full set of 24 runes dates to approximately AD 400 and is found on the Kylver Stone in Gotland, Sweden.
The first appearance of an ancestral stage of Old Norse in a written runic form dates back to c. AD 200–300 [1] (with the Øvre Stabu spearhead traditionally dated to the late 2nd century), at this time still showing an archaic language form (similar to reconstructed Proto-Germanic) termed Proto-Norse.
The medieval runes, or the futhork, was a Scandinavian runic alphabet that evolved from the Younger Futhark after the introduction of stung (or dotted) runes at the end of the Viking Age. These stung runes were regular runes with the addition of either a dot diacritic or bar diacritic to indicate that the rune stood for one of its secondary ...
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 ...