The Elder Futhark

The Elder Futhark is the oldest runic alphabet. It has 24 runes and takes its name from the first six: f u þ a r k. Speakers of early Germanic languages used it from about the 2nd to the 8th century, in Scandinavia, along the North Sea coast and across central and eastern Europe. The oldest securely dated inscriptions belong to the later 2nd century. The Vimose comb from Funen reads harja (Vimose comb), and the Øvre Stabu spearhead from Norway reads raunijaz (Øvre Stabu). Two finds may be older, and both are disputed. The Meldorf brooch, of about AD 50, has signs that some read as runes and others as Latin letters. The stone fragments from Svingerud (Hole) in Norway, published in 2023, are dated by their grave context to between about 50 BC and AD 275. Most scholars derive the runes from a Mediterranean alphabet, Latin or one of the North Italic scripts, but which one is debated.

The order of the row is known from complete rune-rows. The oldest is on the Kylver stone from Gotland, of about 400. The 6th-century Vadstena and Mariedamm bracteates mark off three groups of eight with dots. Such a group is called an ætt (plural ættir), an Old Norse word. The order was not quite fixed. Kylver has p before ï and d before o, and the bracteates have the reverse in both places.

No rune names survive from this period. The Proto-Germanic names given here are reconstructions, marked with an asterisk. They are worked out by comparing the Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems with the Gothic letter names in a 9th-century Vienna manuscript, Codex Vindobonensis 795. Some are near certain (*fehu, *ansuz). Others are guesses (*perþ-, *algiz).

The corpus is small, usually put at some 350–400 inscriptions depending on what is counted. Most are on portable objects such as brooches, weapons, combs and gold bracteates, with fewer on stones. In Scandinavia the row was replaced by the 16-rune Younger Futhark by about 800. In England and Frisia it grew into the futhorc.

The whole row at a glance