The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc: the runes of England and Frisia

In England the runes did not shrink; they multiplied. The Angles, Saxons and Frisians, who in the fifth century brought their language from the continent, brought the runic alphabet as well, and adapted it to the sounds of Old English. The result was the futhorc, so called because the fourth rune, whose name was os, had taken on the sound o. Over the centuries the row grew from twenty-four signs to twenty-eight, and in Northumbria up to thirty-three.

New signs for new sounds

Old English had vowels that Common Germanic did not distinguish. To render them, the old ansuz rune split: os stood for o, while two new signs, æsc and ac, the ash and the oak, served for æ and a. Then came yr and ear, and in the north of England runes such as calc, gar and stan for particular consonant sounds. Many names of the English runes are known to us thanks to the Old English Rune Poem, which describes twenty-nine of them.

The oldest example of a complete futhorc carved on an object is the Thames scramasax, an iron knife of the ninth or tenth century found in the river in London and now in the British Museum. Twenty-eight runes are inlaid in order on the blade, followed by the name Beagnoth, perhaps the smith or the owner.

Runes on Christian objects

Unlike Scandinavia, in England runes soon lived alongside Christianity and the Latin alphabet of the monasteries. The Franks Casket, a whalebone box carved in Northumbria in the early eighth century, mixes scenes from the Germanic legend of Weland the Smith, the Adoration of the Magi, the founding of Rome and the capture of Jerusalem. The inscriptions are mostly in runes, partly in Latin. The casket is in the British Museum, except for one side panel kept in the Museo del Bargello in Florence.

The Ruthwell Cross, in south-west Scotland, is a tall eighth-century stone cross. Along its margins it carries, in runes, some Old English lines that match a passage of the poem known as The Dream of the Rood, preserved in full in a tenth-century manuscript at Vercelli. It is one of the rare cases in which a poetic text survives both in a codex and on stone.

Runes in manuscripts

Anglo-Saxon scribes also used runes on parchment. Two of them, thorn and wynn, entered the Latin alphabet of Old English to render the sounds th and w. The poet Cynewulf, probably active between the eighth and ninth centuries, signed four poems by inserting the runes of his name in the closing lines, so that the reader had to unpack the rune names to complete the sense.

In the Exeter Book, a tenth-century poetic collection, some verse riddles contain runes to be deciphered. Other manuscripts include tables of runic alphabets compiled by scholars, sometimes with fanciful shapes: a sign that, even then, runes had also become an object of antiquarian curiosity. One of them, known as the Isruna tract, even describes systems of cipher runes similar to the Scandinavian ones.

After the Norman Conquest of 1066 the futhorc fell out of use, and only the letter thorn survived for long in writing. The Anglo-Saxon runes would draw attention again many centuries later, when J. R. R. Tolkien used a version of them on the map and title page of The Hobbit, published in 1937.