Medieval runes

From Metapedia

Medieval runes are letters of the alphabets used by German people. They were written down soon after the birth of Christ. The northern part of Europe, called Scandinavia, is Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. These people wrote in runes. A rune alphabet is called a futhark. The Elder Futhark, or older set of runes, was written on objects in Denmark about 160 A.D. The Elder Futhark had 24 letters in a special order. Runes were written on weapons, jewelry, and stones.

Letters used from 550 to 700 A.D. are called Transitional Runes. The people of Friesland and England both developed futharks. The Futhark of Friesland had 26 runes. The Futhark of England had 28. To help with memory, a song was created called the rune-poem.

The Younger Futhark was created around 700 AD. It had 16 runes. In Ostergottland, Sweden, a document over 950 runes long was written in Younger Runes. Two jewelled royal gravestones were built by King Harold Gormsson in Jelling, Denmark. Similar stones followed, about 220 of them over the next 400 years. Twenty five hundred Viking gravestones have runes on them.

Swedish folk continued to use and create runes from 1100 to 1500 A.D. Norway did at least 2700 writings in this time. Church buildings, gravestones, and church inventories were runic. Daily writings such as price tags, art signatures, personal messages, love poetry and nonsense were written on whittled sticks and bones.