The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc

The futhorc is the runic alphabet of the Anglo-Saxons and the early Frisians. It grew out of the 24-rune Elder Futhark and kept that row's order, but it added runes as the sounds of the North Sea languages moved away from those of early Germanic. Its modern name comes from its first six runes, f u þ o r c. The fourth rune now stood for o and the sixth was written c, as in Old English spelling.

The first changes affected the old a rune, *ansuz. In the Anglo-Frisian dialects, a before a nasal became a rounded vowel and later o, and in most other positions a was fronted to æ. The old shape stayed with the fronted sound and was renamed æsc "ash". A new rune, os, took the rounded vowel, and a third, ac "oak", took back a. The Undley bracteate from Suffolk, of the 5th century, already distinguishes o from æ. Two vowel runes followed, yr for y and ear for the diphthong ea.

In Old English, c and g split into palatal sounds (as in cild "child") and velar ones (as in cuþ). Northumbrian carvers added calc and gar for the velar sounds, and both appear on the Ruthwell Cross. Cweorð and stan are known only from manuscripts, and R. I. Page treated them as "pseudo-runes", invented by scholars and never used for writing.

The surviving corpus is small. Fewer than 200 English and Frisian inscriptions are known, on brooches, coins, combs, weapons, caskets and standing crosses. The best known are the Franks Casket, the Ruthwell Cross and the Seax of Beagnoth, which carries the only complete rune-row cut on an object. Runes also lived on in books. Þorn and wynn became letters of the Old English alphabet. Scribes used single runes as abbreviations for their names, as with eþel in the Beowulf manuscript. The poet Cynewulf signed four poems by working the runes of his name into the verse. The Old English rune poem and lists such as Codex Vindobonensis 795 preserve the rune names.

The whole row at a glance