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 decides what stands between words. Pick the single dot ᛫ that real inscriptions use, a double dot, or a plain space. Letters without a rune decides what happens to C, Q, V, X and Y, which have no rune of their own. 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 languages that used runes had no K-W sound to write, 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 just its first six letters read aloud, F U Þ A R K. Every character is built from straight lines, because curves are slow to cut and follow the grain badly.

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 33 in the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.

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 it's the closer cousin than it looks: both alphabets were 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, so the goal is to stop a reader rather than to change the writing system.