The Elder Futhark: the twenty-four runes and their three families

The name itself says a great deal. Just as alphabet comes from the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta, futhark comes from the first six runes of the row: f, u, th, a, r, k. The Elder Futhark, also called the long or Common Germanic futhark, had twenty-four signs and was in use, with few variants, from the second century to around the eighth, across an area stretching from Scandinavia to the European continent.

The order and the three families

The order of the runes is known thanks to a few inscriptions that give the complete row: the Kylver stone on Gotland, around 400, and the gold bracteates of Vadstena and Grumpan in Sweden, from the sixth century. On the Vadstena bracteate the runes are divided into three groups of eight, separated by dots. Medieval Icelandic sources call these groups ættir, a word meaning families or clans, though the term is far later than the Elder Futhark.

The first family includes fehu, uruz, thurisaz, ansuz, raido, kaunan, gebo and wunjo. The second hagalaz, naudiz, isaz, jera, eihwaz, perthro, algiz and sowilo. The third tiwaz, berkanan, ehwaz, mannaz, laguz, ingwaz, dagaz and othala. The last two sometimes appear in reverse order. Later, in Icelandic tradition, the families were named after their first rune, those of Freyr, Hagall and Týr, but this is a medieval usage.

Reconstructed names

No ancient inscription records the names of the runes. The forms found in handbooks, such as fehu or ansuz, are linguists' reconstructions in Common Germanic, obtained by comparing the names preserved in the English, Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems and in a Gothic manuscript. For many runes the meaning is clear: fehu is cattle, wealth; isaz ice; sowilo the sun; mannaz man. For others, such as perthro, the sense remains uncertain.

Each name begins with the sound the rune represents, following a principle called acrophonic. This system helped people memorise the alphabet and, at the same time, tied each sign to a concept: a wealth of associations that later centuries would load with symbolic meanings. The same principle is found in the letter names of other alphabets, such as Hebrew aleph or Greek alpha.

How people wrote

Inscriptions in the Elder Futhark are few, a few hundred in all, and often very short. The direction of writing was not fixed: there are texts running left to right, right to left and in alternating lines, called boustrophedon. Words were not always separated, double consonants were written once, and some runes could be joined into a single sign called a bind-rune. Recurring formulas are ek erilaz, “I, the Erilaz”, perhaps the title of a rune master, and the word alu, whose meaning is debated.

The language of these texts, Proto-Norse, is the oldest documented form of a North Germanic language. For this reason inscriptions in the Elder Futhark are as precious to linguists as to historians: they show words before the changes that would give rise to Old Norse, Old English and German. Some carved words, such as horna, the horn, are almost identical to the reconstructed forms.

Around the eighth century, in Scandinavia, the twenty-four-sign system gave way to a reduced row, while in England and Frisia it was enriched with new runes. The Elder Futhark did not vanish entirely from memory: some carvers still used it in a learned way, as on the Rök stone, and today it remains the starting point for every study of the runes.