ANCR-301 Lessons

Introduction
Welcome back to the Room of Runes. Today our topic is the Younger Futhark, its history, and general information on the runes that make it up. More specifically today we will take a look at the names and meanings of these later runes. Next week, we will go more in detail to discuss the changes to the symbols and sound values of the Elder Futhark as it developed into the Younger Futhark. Before we begin, however, I would like to point you in the direction of two Muggle resources on the runes of the Germanic futharks.

The first one is The Rune Primer: A Down to Earth Guide to the Runes by Sweyn Plowright. This little volume, also available as an electronic book (a form of which Muggles are fond), is a good guide to the various interpretations of the runes by Muggles and can be useful for distinguishing between the scholarly, academic discussion of the runes and their more basic interpretations as practiced by Muggles.

The other book is of a more scholastic bent, and gives a great overview of the academic scholarship on runes that has evolved over the last few centuries. It is published in the series “Reading the Past” by the British Museum Press, and the volume is simply called Runes. It is written by R. I. Page, one of the great Muggle experts on the runes in modern times, and is particularly good for those interested in reading about the linguistic background of the runes as well as the historical and archaeological discoveries made by Muggles. Sadly, R. I. Page never showed any sign of magical talent, or he would have been a great asset to magical runologists and linguists worldwide. We will discuss some of the inscriptions he describes later in this course.

The Younger Futhark
The term “Younger Futhark” is used to describe the runes that developed in the Scandinavian countries from the 8th century C.E. onwards. From around 700 C.E. and on, the Vikings reduced the number of runes to only sixteen symbols. This meant that some of the remaining runes acquired additional phonetic meanings (sound values), while other runes changed their sound value entirely. In addition, some of the runes also changed their shape until they looked nothing like the original rune counterparts in the Elder Futhark.

From the turn of the first millennium onwards (around 1,000 C.E.), Roman letters began to gain influence as
Christianity began to spread in Scandinavia, and with it, the Latin language. Although new runes were devised to represent the sounds of Latin, the modern language of a changing world, the runes still lost their role in most forms of communication from this period onwards, although they continued to be used in some ornamental and decorative functions right up to the 19th century.

The Names and Meanings of the Younger Futhark
Below, you will find a handout of the Younger Futhark with the rune names in Old Norse and their meanings in English. Many of the meanings of the Younger Futhark are the same as in the Elder Futhark, but a few -- notably, but not limited to: Ur, Ass, and Naudh -- have changed or developed more specific meanings.

Also in the table below is a comparison of the runes of the Elder Futhark with the runes of the Younger Futhark. In the first column, you will see the Younger Futhark rune symbols, the second column displays variant forms that were also used, often interchangeably. Some of the runes in this third column look very different from the original forms.¹ In the fourth column, you will find the name of each rune from the original Elder Futhark. Then, in the fifth column, the new names of each rune in Old Norse. In contrast to the Elder Futhark, where we could only conjecture and reconstruct the original names via later sources, the names of the Younger Futhark runes are well documented.² In particular, they are derived from two poems: the Old Icelandic and the Old Norse Rune Poems.

Finally, the sixth column includes the meanings of the runes of the Younger Futhark in both Old Norse and Old Icelandic if necessary. These two separate, though related, languages were both used alongside this one script, and while most of the time they mutually agreed on the same meaning, there were instances where the accepted meanings differed. You may notice, as you go through, that very little reference to Schreiber's corrections remains. These meanings have much more in common with the mundane (though still ideographic) meanings of the Elder Futhark. This is another instance of the prevailing opinion that these runes are purely non-magical. However, again, those who oppose this position insist that no one has looked hard enough for magical meanings, some suggesting that the magical meanings of the runes may have been completely different from Schreiber’s corrections of the original futhark and therefore harder to research.

As you can see, most of the runes have different spellings of their names, but are still recognisable as related to the Elder Futhark runes. Some of the runes that have made more noticeable changes are Jera (now called “Ar”), and Eihwaz (now known as “Yr”), which resulted from changes to their sound values, which we will discuss next week.

The following runes were all lost in the change from Elder to Younger Futhark:

By the 10th century C.E., some of these losses, particularly of vowels, had been compensated through sound changes (Ass, formerly Ansuz, was now being pronounced as “Oss” and so began to stand for the sound /o/ as well as /a/). Additionally, some of the lost consonants had been reinstated through alterations to some of the runes (the runes in the above handout with sound values denoted with an asterisk (*)). These variants were created by adding dots to runes that represented similar sounds, as the following table shows:

Notes on Transcribing the Younger Futhark
One of the main challenges of deciphering inscriptions written in the Younger Futhark is deciding on the sound value of each individual rune. To do this, a good knowledge of the languages that used the Younger Futhark is essential. For the purpose of this course, we will limit our practice to modern English words written using the Younger Futhark (one of your assignments this week will include such transcription exercises), as this is only an introduction to these runes. Should you decide to go into the field of runology, you will, however, have to spend some time learning the languages of your chosen area of expertise.

The Younger Futhark is also well known for using ligatures. You will remember that we mentioned ligatures briefly last year. They are combinations of runes written in such a way that they are combined into a single symbol with no gaps between individual runes. There are two main options for doing this: ligatures can be based around a single main “staff”, a vertical line with the various characteristics of the different runes added to it, or simply interconnected runes written next to each other, similar to a cursive script written by hand. We will see more examples and get more practice with this in coming lessons this year.

Your assignments will concentrate on the runes of the Younger Futhark as they first appeared. Your homework consists of a quiz and a transcription exercise. You will want your handout of the Younger Futhark for the exercise. You will be transcribing the runes phonetically, so make sure to use your common sense to choose the letters that actually make sensible words. All words in the exercise will be either studied last year when we discussed Nordic culture or written in English.

Vocabulary
Old Norse: a language spoken from roughly the 9th century C.E. to the 13th century C.E. Used in Scandinavian countries alongside the script known as the Younger Futhark.
Variants: slightly different forms of runes that, while they bear the same ideographic meanings and phonetic values as the original, have alternate shapes due to such factors as time, geographic region, and personal preference just to name a few.
Younger Futhark: a runic script used in Scandinavian countries from the 8th to 12th centuries. It consisted of sixteen symbols.

Footnotes:
1. This is because they can be part of an alternative Younger Futhark, which has been suggested was mainly used for everyday communication rather than official inscriptions on stones and monuments. This variant form of the Younger Futhark is sometimes called its cursive form, derived from the term used for other handwritten scripts in the Latin alphabet.
2 . While we know less about the magical uses of the Younger (and Anglo-Saxon) scripts, their names were much better documented because of their comparative youth.

Original lesson written by Professor Mathilda Stevens
Image credits to Mathilda Stevens and here