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The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a
runic alphabet Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...
and a reduced form of the
Elder Futhark The Elder Futhark (or Fuþark), also known as the Older Futhark, Old Futhark, or Germanic Futhark, is the oldest form of the runic alphabets. It was a writing system used by Germanic peoples for Northwest Germanic dialects in the Migration Pe ...
, with only 16 characters, in use from about the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries. The reduction, somewhat paradoxically, happened at the same time as phonetic changes that led to a greater number of different phonemes in the spoken language, when Proto-Norse evolved into
Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...
. Also, the writing custom avoided carving the same rune consecutively for the same sound, so the spoken distinction between long and short vowels was lost in writing. Thus, the language included distinct sounds and
minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate ...
s that were written the same. The Younger Futhark is divided into long-branch (Danish) and short-twig (Swedish and Norwegian) runes; in the 10th century, it was further expanded by the "Hälsinge Runes" or staveless runes. The lifetime of the Younger Futhark corresponds roughly to the
Viking Age The Viking Age () was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. It followed the Migration Period The ...
. Their use declined after the
Christianization of Scandinavia The Christianization of Scandinavia, as well as other Nordic countries and the Baltic countries, took place between the 8th and the 12th centuries. The realms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden established their own Archdioceses, responsible direc ...
; most writing in Scandinavia from the 12th century was in the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
, but the runic scripts survived in marginal use in the form of the medieval runes (in use ca. 1100–1500) and the Latinised Dalecarlian runes (ca. 1500–1910).


History

Usage of the Younger Futhark is found in Scandinavia and
Viking Age The Viking Age () was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. It followed the Migration Period The ...
settlements abroad, probably in use from the 9th century onward. During the Migration Period
Elder Futhark The Elder Futhark (or Fuþark), also known as the Older Futhark, Old Futhark, or Germanic Futhark, is the oldest form of the runic alphabets. It was a writing system used by Germanic peoples for Northwest Germanic dialects in the Migration Pe ...
had been an actual "secret" known to only a literate elite, with only some 350 surviving inscriptions. Literacy in the Younger Futhark became widespread in Scandinavia, as witnessed by the great number of
Runestone A runestone is typically a raised stone with a runic inscription, but the term can also be applied to inscriptions on boulders and on bedrock. The tradition began in the 4th century and lasted into the 12th century, but most of the runestones da ...
s (some 3,000), sometimes inscribed with almost casual notes. During a phase from about 650 to 800, some inscriptions mixed the use of Elder and Younger Futhark runes. Examples of inscriptions considered to be from this period include DR 248 from Snoldelev, DR 357 from Stentoften, DR 358 from Gummarp, DR 359 from Istaby, and DR 360 from Björketorp, and objects such as the
Setre Comb The Setre Comb is a bone comb found in 1932 at Setre in Bømlo, Norway, which has been dated to between 560 and 700 AD. It has a runic inscription whose interpretation has been extensively discussed. The comb, listed as N KJ40 in the Rund ...
(N KJ40). p. 451. Ög 136 in Rök, which uses Elder Futhark runes to encrypt part of the text, and Ög 43 in Ingelstad, which uses a single Elder Futhark rune as an ideogram, are also sometimes included as transitional inscriptions. By the late 8th century, the reduction from 24 to 16 runes was complete. The main change was that the difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants was no longer expressed in writing. Other changes are the consequence of sound changes that separate
Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...
from Proto-Norse and
Common Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic bra ...
(mostly changes to the vowel system). *The first ''ætt'' was reduced to its first six letters, ''fuþąrk'', losing the ''g'' and ''w'' runes (the old ''a'' rune is transliterated as ''ą'' for Old Norse as the phoneme it expressed had become more closed). *The second ''ætt'' lost the ''æ'' and ''p'' runes. 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 to four runes, losing the ''e'', ''ŋ'', ''o'' and ''d'' runes. In tabular form: The Younger Futhark became known in Europe as the "alphabet of the Norsemen", and was studied in the interest of trade and diplomatic contacts, referred to as in Frankish Fulda (possibly by Walahfrid Strabo) and " Ogham of the Scandinavians" in the Book of Ballymote.


Rune names

The names of the 16 runes of the Younger futhark are recorded in the Icelandic and Norwegian rune poems. The names are: * fé ("wealth") * úr ("iron"/"rain") * Thurs ("thurs", a type of entity, see jötunn) * As/Oss ("(a) god") * reið ("ride") * kaun ("ulcer") * hagall ("hail") * nauðr ("need") * ísa/íss ("ice") * ár ("plenty") * sól ("Sun", personified as a deity—see
Sól (Germanic mythology) Sól (Old Norse: , "Sun")Orchard (1997:152). or Sunna (Old High German, and existing as an Old Norse and Icelandic synonym: see Wiktionary sunna, "Sun") is the Sun personified in Germanic mythology. One of the two Old High German Merseburg Inc ...
) * Týr ("Týr, a deity") * björk/bjarkan/bjarken ("birch") * maðr ("man, human") * lögr ("sea") * yr ("yew") From comparison with Anglo-Saxon and Gothic letter names, most of these names directly continue the names of the Elder Futhark runes. The exceptions to this are: * yr which continues the name of the unrelated Eihwaz rune; * '' thurs'' and '' kaun'', in which cases the Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Gothic traditions diverge.


Variants

The Younger Futhark is divided into long-branch (Danish) and short-twig (Swedish and Norwegian) runes. The difference between the two versions has been a matter of controversy. A general opinion is that the difference was functional, i.e. the long-branch runes were used for documentation on stone, whereas the short-twig runes were in everyday use for private or official messages on wood.


Long-branch runes

The long-branch runes are the following rune signs: :


Short-twig runes

In the short-twig runes (or Rök runes), nine runes appear as simplified variants of the long-branch runes, while the remaining seven have identical shapes: :


Hälsinge runes (staveless runes)

Hälsinge runes are so named because in modern times they were first noticed in the Hälsingland region of Sweden. Later, other runic inscriptions with the same runes were found in other parts of Sweden. They were used between the 10th and 12th centuries. The runes seem to be a simplification of the Swedish-Norwegian runes and lack certain strokes, hence the name "staveless". They cover the same set of
stave Stave may refer to: Places * Stave (Krupanj), a village in Serbia * Stave Hill, in London * Stave Lake, in British Columbia, Canada * Stave River, in British Columbia, Canada * Stave Run, a river in Virginia, United States Other uses * Stave ...
s as the other Younger Futhark alphabets. This variant has no assigned Unicode range (as of Unicode 12.1).


Descendant scripts


Medieval

In the Middle Ages, the Younger Futhark in Scandinavia was expanded, so that it once more contained one sign for each phoneme of the old Norse language. Dotted variants of
voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...
signs were introduced to denote the corresponding voiced consonants, or vice versa, voiceless variants of voiced consonants, and several new runes also appeared for vowel sounds. Inscriptions in medieval Scandinavian runes show a large number of variant rune-forms, and some letters, such as ''s,'' ''c'' and ''z,'' were often used interchangeably. Medieval runes were in use until the 15th century. Of the total number of Norwegian runic inscriptions preserved today, most are medieval runes. Notably, more than 600 inscriptions using these runes have been discovered in Bergen since the 1950s, mostly on wooden sticks (the so-called Bryggen inscriptions). This indicates that runes were in common use side by side with the Latin alphabet for several centuries. Indeed, some of the medieval runic inscriptions are actually in the Latin language. After the 15th century interest in rune history and their use in magical processes grew in Iceland, with various studies beginning with Third Grammatical Icelandic Treatise - Málfræðinnar grundvǫllr. Publications written in Latin and Danish in the 1600s included works by Arngrímur Jónsson, Runólfur Jónsson and Dr. Olaus Wormius. Content from these along with Icelandic and Norwegian Rune Poems appeared frequently in subsequent manuscripts written in Iceland.


Early modern

According to Carl-Gustav Werner, "in the isolated province of Dalarna in Sweden a mix of runes and Latin letters developed" (Werner 2004, p. 7). The Dalecarlian runes came into use in the early 16th century and remained in some use up to the 20th century. Some discussion remains on whether their use was an unbroken tradition throughout this period or whether people in the 19th and 20th centuries learned runes from books written on the subject. The character inventory is suitable for transcribing modern
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
and the local Dalecarlian language.


See also

* Codex Sangallensis 878 * Cipher runes


References


External links


Runes found in the Eastern VikingAn English Dictionary of Runic Inscriptions in the Younger Futhark
(Nottingham University) *Allrunes LaTeX fon

{{list of writing systems Younger Futhark,