Rune translator

Type English on the left. Runes appear on the right as you type, and the picker above the boxes switches between Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc. The arrows between the boxes read runes back into English.

Word separator puts the single dot ᛫ of real inscriptions between words, or a double dot, or a plain space. Some letters have no rune of their own. In Elder Futhark they are C, Q, V, X and Y. The Anglo-Saxon set lacks only K, V and Z. Younger Futhark has just 16 runes, so it also borrows for D, E, G, J, O, P, W and Z. Letters without a rune says what to do with them. Spell them with the nearest sound, keep the Latin letter, or drop them.

Each letter is matched to the rune with the same sound. That makes this a transliteration. The alphabet changes and the language doesn't. Writing "hello" in runes doesn't make it Old Norse any more than writing it in Greek letters makes it Greek.

The letters with no rune are a real gap rather than an oversight. The Elder Futhark has no rune for Q, so a Q has to borrow. Anything the converter can't place is listed under the output instead of vanishing.

The Elder Futhark is the oldest runic alphabet, used by Germanic peoples from roughly the 2nd to the 8th century. Its name is its first six letters read aloud, F U Þ A R K. Every character is built from straight lines with no horizontal strokes, because a cut along the grain is hard to read and can split the wood.

Then Scandinavian runes did something odd. Old Norse gained sounds while the alphabet lost characters, dropping to the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark, so a single rune had to cover several sounds and readers leaned on context. English went the other way, expanding to as many as 34 in the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, which has its own Q rune, ᛢ.

You're probably carrying a rune. The Bluetooth symbol is two of them laid on top of each other: ᚼ and ᛒ, the initials of Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, the 10th-century Danish king. The engineers named their protocol after a man who united warring tribes, then signed it in his own alphabet.

Ogham does the same job for early Irish, and like the futhark it was designed to be cut rather than written. Morse swaps shapes for durations but keeps the same promise that your words come back out the other end.

Ciphers are a different business. ROT13 and Atbash keep the Latin alphabet and move the letters around to stop a reader.

Ages 8 and up, about 25 minutes. Students write their names in Elder Futhark runes and compare: which runes do they share, and which letters had no rune of their own? It shows that runes were an alphabet for a different language, not a code for English.

Take it further: carve or draw runes on clay or card name plates, or switch the translator to Younger Futhark, which has only 16 runes, and ask how people managed with fewer letters.