ᛥ stan

Line of descent

History

Stan "stone" is a single rune for the two-consonant group st. It stands at the foot of Hickes's printing of the rune poem with cweorð, calc and gar, and has no stanza. Its name is an ordinary Old English word, the ancestor of modern stone, and it begins with the sounds the rune writes, the same principle by which the other runes were named. Its shape is usually explained as a combination of s and t, though the drawn forms in the manuscripts vary.

Unlike calc and gar, stan is not known from any inscription. R. I. Page grouped it with cweorð as a "pseudo-rune": a sign that exists in learned lists but was never part of carvers' practice.

Stan and cweorð show how the futhorc was extended on parchment after runic carving had declined. Scholars of the 10th and 11th centuries collected, rearranged and supplemented runes alongside cryptic alphabets and foreign scripts. Some of what they recorded was part of a living tradition, and some was invented by the compilers.

Where it is found

• Hickes (1705), printing of Cotton Otho B.x: rune at the foot of the poem, name stan
• Manuscript rune lists; no inscription known

Sources

• Dickins (1915), p. 22, note to v. 91.
• Wikipedia, 'Anglo-Saxon runes' (citing Page 1999, pp. 41–42), checked 2026-10.