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The name rune itself, taken to mean "secret, something hidden", seems to indicate that knowledge of the runes was originally considered esoteric, or restricted to an elite. [citation needed] The 6th-century Björketorp Runestone warns in Proto-Norse using the word rune in both senses: Haidzruno runu, falahak haidera, ginnarunaz.
The Elder Futhark (named after the initial phoneme of the first six rune names: F, U, Þ, A, R and K) has 24 runes, often arranged in three groups of eight runes; each group is called an ætt [2] (pl. ættir; meaning 'clan, group', although sometimes thought to mean eight). In the following table, each rune is given with its common transliteration:
The medieval runes, or the futhork, was a Scandinavian runic alphabet that evolved from the Younger Futhark after the introduction of stung (or dotted) runes at the end of the Viking Age. These stung runes were regular runes with the addition of either a dot diacritic or bar diacritic to indicate that the rune stood for one of its secondary ...
The othala rune is such a case: the o sound in the Anglo-Saxon system is now expressed by ōs ᚩ, a derivation of the old Ansuz rune; the othala rune is known in Old English as ēðel (with umlaut due to the form ōþila-) and is used to express an œ sound, but is attested only rarely in epigraphy (outside of simply appearing in a futhark row).
The evolution of the rune in the Elder Futhark during the centuries. The Elder Futhark s rune is attested in main two variants, a "Σ shape" (four strokes), more prevalent in earlier (3rd to 5th century) inscriptions (e.g. Kylver stone), and an "S shape" (three strokes), more prevalent in later (5th to 7th century) inscriptions (e.g. Golden horns of Gallehus, Seeland-II-C).
The tradition of runic literacy continued in Scandinavia into the Viking Age, developing into the Younger Futhark script. Close to 6,000 Younger Futhark inscriptions are known, many of them on runestones. [6]
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 by four runes, losing the e, ŋ, o ...
Modern runestones (as imitations or forgeries of Viking Age runestones) began to be produced in the 19th century Viking Revival. The Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base (Samnordisk runtextdatabas) is a project involving the creation and maintenance of a database of runestones in the Rundata database. [8]