I think it's very clear they had magical meanings to them, as you can see from for example the Kragehul spear shaft or Lindholm amulet that they feature sequences of runes that make no sense. Now it's some-what debated if the runes were only used to write a language or for magical purpose as well. The runes did have magical purposes even in the old days The rune poems we know are from Icelandic, Old Norwegian and English backgrounds and you can find them on the interenet, I believe wikipedia has them all listed out as well. We know these from old poems that were used to remember the runes - similar to some of the childrens songs you see today where they sing something along the lines of "a is for apple, b is for bee, c is for cat and d is for dog". The Anglo-Saxon futhark was used in England by the inhabitants of that land to write Old English.Īt least the Anglo-Saxon and Younger Futhark ones do. The Younger Futhark was used to write Old Norse and was the one in common use during the Viking age. With the futharks depicted on here the oldest is the Elder Futhark and that was used to write the proto-norse language. There's also a gothic futhark and numerous others as well. There are actually more futharks in the world with one of the oldest being a Portugese one, if you're interested in that look up on youtube Arith Härger as he has done an amazing job exploring that.
Runes were used to write different languagesĪs you can see here - there are three different futharks, they each symbolize a different language. The main speculated reasons are that it's an alternate greek alphabet that was written this way or that the futhark sequence we know nowadays is some magical/cryptic sequence instead of the regular ABC sequence and that for unknown reasons it became the widely used version. There is no agreed reason or evidence why it's so different from all the other writing systems where always an alphabet is used. It's the same for runes, the first six letters are F U Th A R K. Our current collection of letters is called an alphabet because alpha-beta are the two first letters. The translator on here I've used the most common and agreed upon way of transfering runes to the English sounding alphabet. So this is something to keep in mind when using runes, they transfer better when using phonetically. Similar differences occur even nowadays between different languages, for example the English letter A and Estonian letter A - even though they are written the same way they express a different sound. For example the rune ᚦ makes a noise that is similar to the english written "th" and you can see we need two letter to express that sound. Meaning that each rune symbolizes a certain noise that you can make with your mouth - instead of having a one to one conversion between a latin letter and rune letter. Good to know about the runes They are phonetic
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