Runes (ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ) on the Web

Based on an older version from 24-Feb-2006

What are Runes?

View the Rune Unicode Chart

Runes (or ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ "Futhark") are a set of alphabets developed by the Germanic tribes. The origins are a little murky (and much debated), but the letters appear to borrow from both the Roman alphabet and the Greek alphabet.

The letters all have names like thorn (þ) for "th" /θ/ and isaz (ᛁ) 'ice' for /i/. Ancient Germanic did use them for "magical" purposes but they also used it for everyday writing. For English, it's actually a little more efficient because it has single letters like thorn (þ) for sounds that need to be written with two letters in the modern Roman alphabet.

Links

• Ancient Scripts
• Omniglot

Rune Test

If you see a question mark or a bunch of squares below, then you need to install a rune font.

ᛖᛚᛁᛊᚢᛒᛖᚦ ᚹᚱᚨᛖᛏ ᚱᚢᚾᚨ "ELISABEÞ WRAET RUNA"

ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ "FUÞARK" (the first six runic letters)

Getting Them on the Web

Step 1: Make sure you have a Runic font

Runes are important for linguists studying ancient Germanic and Old English texts and Unicode Runes will allow them to create and share standardized archives. So there are actually a lot of good fonts available.

• Junicode
• TITUS Cyberbit
• Chrysanthi (Chrʃsanþi)
• Other Fonts

Step 2: Tell Visitors Where to Get a Font

Just like the list above.

Step 3: Input the Runes

Most people rarely have long runic texts, so you can either

• Input the Unicode numeric entity codes (See below)
• Cut and paste them from Character Map (Windows) or the Character Palette (Mac) - this is what I did on this site.
• Install a third-party Unicode Runic keyboard utility (look on Google).

Step 4: Make sure the utf-8 encoding tag is included

Your file should be ready to post. But expect a little bit of debugging to occur.

Example Code

Here are two ways to include ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ in a Unicode Web page.

As Is

I was able to quickly insert these letters into Dreamweaver via the Mac Character Palette.

With Numeric Codes

You can also translates the characters as numeric entity codes, but unless your system is automated, you will need to look up each character number.

Unicode Runic Codes

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