There have even been found historical items, such as amulets and jewelry, with runic alphabets engraved on them. Runes were typically engraved into pieces of wood or stone, making them very practical as they were easy to carry around and provide readings to passers-by. The Scandinavians themselves believed that the runes had powerful energy and great mystical power. These ancient runes are associated with Scandinavian religion and magic, as well as skaldic poetry. The oldest alphabet we can trace comes from the Elder Futhark runes, and it consists of 24 lettered runes, each one with its own symbolic meaning and purpose. However, they began as a Scandinavian runic alphabet, with each rune having its own name and symbolic meaning. dags OE dæg ON dagr OHG tag.Runes have been used as a method of divination for centuries.

The sound value is as modern English /ng/ in thing. The sound value is between /e/ and /i/, as it developed out of IE /ei/. The sound value is as modern English /y/ in year. The sound value is as modern English /th/ in thing. The names and meanings of the runes are as follows: Reconstructed forms are usually marked with the *asterisk sign. The reconstructed ending *-az corresponds to Greek -os and Archaic Latin -os, where IE *o is represented by the Common Germanic *a and IE *s is represented by Common Germanic *z. Finnish kuningas ‘king’ and OS kuning) lead to a supposed Common Germanic form *stainaz, which is nowhere attested: Gothic and Finnish borrowings exclude -R, Gothic -s represents the ancient *-z. The runic form stainaR and comparison with early Germanic borrowings in Finnish (cf. stains, ON steinn, OE stān, OS sten, OHG stein. The reconstruction in comparative linguistics works more or less like that: ancient Germanic variants for the word ‘stone’ were Goth.

There are English, Gothic and Scandinavian manuscripts that list them, which makes possible the reconstruction of the Common Germanic forms. The translation is given in ‘single’ quotation marks. Phonetic transcription is given in italics. The transliteration of runes is usually given in bold Roman lower-case letters (even personal names begin with small letters the upper-case R is not a capital variant of r, but a separate rune designtaing a separate sound that corresponds to Common Germanic *z). Sometimes even individual runes are written in a mirror image as compared to the main direction of an inscription.

Some inscriptions combine the two methods. Runic writing may go from left to right or from right to left. The order above represents the Vadstena version. The reason of this division is disputed, but it seems to have been meaningful and important for Germanic peoples who used the elder Futhark. The Vadstena listing has an important feature: the sequence of runes is divided into three equal groups (ON ǽttir, ‘families’, orginally meaning ‘groups of eight’). In the latter listing the ï and p as well as o and d-runes go in inverted order as compared to the Kylver inscription. The second-oldest sequential listing is on a bracteate (thin single-sided gold coin) from Vadstena (Östergötland, Sweden) dated to the 6th century. The earliest known instance of sequential listing of all the runes is found on the so called Kylver Stone (after the name of a farm on Gotland, Stånga parish, Sweden), which was discovered in the surroundings of a 5th century grave. The elder Futhark remained in use until the ninth century, when it was superseded by other runic systems due to the phonological changes in Germanic languages, which made it less suited to render the current speech sounds. As it seems, the oldest datable runic inscription is on the comb from Vimose (ca 160 AD). As for the runes themselves, there is no agreement on their origin: some researchers are inclined to think that runes were greatly influenced by the Roman alphabet, others point to Etruscan writing from Northern Italy. The order of the runes has nothing to do with the ABC and clearly developed independently. See below which signs represented which sounds: The word futhark is formed after the first six runes in it, the same way as the Greek word alphabet is formed after the first two Greek letters, Alpha and Beta. The elder Futhark is the most ancient Germanic runic alphabet.

Norse runes elder futhark