The Younger Futhark

The Younger Futhark is the sixteen-rune row of the Viking Age. It replaced the twenty-four-rune Elder Futhark in Scandinavia during the 7th and 8th centuries. The change was gradual. The Blekinge stones of Stentoften (DR 357) and Björketorp (DR 360) and the Eggja stone in western Norway (N KJ101) use an older row with some new shapes and new sound values, so they are called transitional inscriptions. The Ribe skull fragment (DR EM85;151B), dated to about 725, is one of the earliest texts written essentially in the new row, although it still keeps the older forms of h and m.

The reduction is a puzzle because the language moving into Old Norse had more distinct sounds, not fewer. The new row dropped separate runes for voiced and voiceless consonants, so t also wrote d, k wrote g, and b wrote p. It kept only four vowel runes, u, i, a and o. One rune therefore stood for several sounds, and readers had to work out the word from context. The rune stone at Gørlev on Zealand (DR 239) carves the whole row in its standard order: fuþorkhniastbmlR.

The row came in two main varieties. Long-branch runes, often called "Danish", are the forms on the great Jelling stones (DR 41, DR 42). Short-twig runes, sometimes called "Swedish-Norwegian" or "Rök runes" after the Rök stone (Ög 136), reduce several runes to short strokes. The names describe where each kind is common, not national scripts. Both varieties were used across Scandinavia and were often mixed. Scholars have long debated whether the difference was functional, with long-branch runes for monuments and short-twig runes for everyday writing on wood, or regional, or both. A third, extreme simplification, the staveless or Hälsinge runes, drops the main staves altogether and appears on a small group of 10th–12th-century stones such as Malsta (Hs 14).

The whole row at a glance