In the first place there was no all over common futhark in the Germanic world, but the runes above show you how the older futhark usually were written in Scandinavia. The older runerow are written in a quit different order than we are used to see the Roman letters. No one has figured out why, but the first six runes represent the letters f u th a r k and that's why the name of the runerows are called; futharks.

When there are only 16 runes in the futharks that were used during the Viking Age Period, several runes became to represent different sounds in the language. As you can se the rune represent so much as five different sounds in the Swedish language of today. The runefour sounds and a couple of other runes also represent several sounds. Today it isn't always that easy to choose the right letter when you read the inscriptions on the stones. It is easy to write the runes because you don't have to analyse the sounds in the words perfectly when several sounds are represented by a single rune. But, try to read it and you will find the reverse of the medal.

Today it is hard to understand that many of the common sounds in the Swedish language of today didn't get a rune of their own. There is no special rune for p, d, g, e or o. In contrast there are two runes for closely similar pronunciations of A and two runes for R. The spelling of a lot of word became fairly odd with this runes but the most of the runestones in Scandinavia is "written" with these runes. This futhark is also known as Danish runes.

The most characteristic with this futhark is that the slanting strokes are not cut on both sides of the vertical stroke. It wasn't necessary to do because you can see what rune it is with a smaller stroke. The common rune (danish) for n look like this and the short-twig (swedo-norwegian) one. Lets compare the common runes with block letters and the short-twigs with scripts. This futhark is also known as Swedo-Norwegian runes.

Obvious there must have been a need for a fast way to write down messages on the Viking Age. Today we use tape recorders or video cameras but the Vikings or at least some of them used these shorthand runes. These runes were common in the landscape of Hälsingland in Sweden but they are found from other areas too. The runerow is based on the swedo-norwegian runerow and the idea behind it is that you don't use any vertical strokes just the slanting ones. It was possible to follow that rule for the most of the runes. There are some runestones with this type of runes but the main material for this kind of rune must have been wood. They were fast to write and you just needed a small piece of wood for a rather long message. But the runes aren't easy to read, are they?

No there's any false spelling. This runerow is called futhork and not futhark. The reason why is that the rune represent the sound of o instead of a. This runerow was used in Frisia and Anglo Saxon England. When the older 24 runerow turned out in the younger Norse runerow with 16 runes in Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon runerow took another direction. The Anglo-Saxon runemasters created new runes for new needs in the language and the runerow turned out into a 31 runerow instead. The pre-Christian inscriptions of Anglo Saxon runes are restricted to a few areas in England; Kent, Isle of Wight/Sussex, East Anglia and the East Midlands. They are all on portable objects and are short and almost always uncertain of meaning.

In late 900 A.D the Roman alphabet was used in some parts of Scandinavia. The order of the futhark was replaced by the order of the Roman alphabet and new runes were created to correspond with Roman letters. Important sounds in the language as ä and ö was giving own runes and in the Middle Age a completely new runerow was created.

Well the story must have an end, doesn't it? This runerow was one of the last one that was created. Now the Roman letters are very common in the runerow and there is really a mess between old runes and Roman letters. Even this runerow had several variants of different letters.

Take notice that the letter j had a rune in the first old norse futhark and in the anglo-saxon futhork. In all the other runerows there is no rune for j. The sound for j was used in the language but it was spelt by using I instead.

The letter ö is the same sound as in the english word earn. The letter ä is the same sound as the english word man. The letter å is the same sound as the english word was..