Anglo-Saxon Futhorc
Fuþorc
The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc is the runic alphabet used in Anglo-Saxon England from roughly the 5th to the 11th century. It is an expanded version of the older Germanic Elder Futhark, with extra runes added to write the new vowel sounds Old English developed after the Anglo-Saxons crossed from the continent into Britain. The classical Futhorc has 29 runes; later expansions push the count to 33.
All 29 letters
History
When the Anglo-Saxons brought the Germanic runic tradition to Britain, the Elder Futhark's 24 runes weren't enough — Old English had developed extra front vowels (æ, œ, y) and other sound changes. Anglo-Saxon scribes added new runes (ᚪ ac, ᚫ æsc, ᚣ yr) and modified old ones to fit. The Futhorc was used for inscriptions on weapons, jewelry, stone monuments (most famously the Ruthwell Cross), manuscripts, and even within Old English Latin-script texts as abbreviations — the rune ᚦ thorn made the leap from runes into the Old English Latin alphabet, where it persists in modern Icelandic. The Futhorc fell out of use after the Norman Conquest as Latin writing fully replaced it.
Things you might not know
- The poem "The Rune Poem" — preserved in a single 17th-century transcript of a now-lost manuscript — gives a verse for every Futhorc rune, naming each one and explaining its meaning.
- The rune ᚦ (thorn) jumped from the Futhorc into Latin-alphabet Old English, where it wrote the "th" sound for centuries before being replaced by the "th" digraph (and approximated as "y" by early printers — hence "ye olde").
- The Ruthwell Cross in Scotland is an 18-foot stone cross from around 700 CE inscribed with verses of the Old English poem "The Dream of the Rood" written entirely in Futhorc runes.
- The Futhorc is the most expanded of all the Germanic runic systems — Old English added more new runes than any other Germanic language.