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Background

The distinction made by Unicode between character and glyph variant is somewhat problematic in the case of the runes; the reason is the high degree of variation of letter shapes in historical inscriptions, with many "characters" appearing in highly variant shapes, and many specific shapes taking the role of a number of different characters over the period of runic use (roughly the 3rd to 14th centuries AD). The division between Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark and Anglo-Saxon runes are well-established and useful categories, but they are connected by a continuum of gradual development, inscriptions using a mixture of older and newer forms of runes, etc. For this reason, the runic Unicode block is of very limited usefulness in representing of historical inscriptions and is better suited for contemporary runic writing than for palaeographic purposes.

The original publication of the Unicode standard is explicitly aware of these problems, and of the compromises necessary regarding the "character / glyph" dichotomy. The charts published show only "idealized reference glyphs", and explicitly delegates the task of creating useful implementations of the standard to font designers, ideally necessitating a separate font for each historical period.⁴ Glyph shape was taken into consideration explicitly for "unification" of an older rune with one of its descendant characters.⁵ On the other hand, the Younger Futhark era script variants of long-branch, and short-twig, in principle a historical instance of "glyph variants", have been encoded separately, while the further variant form of staveless runes has not.⁶

The ISO Runes Project treated the runes as essentially glyph variants of the Latin script. Everson argued that the native futhark ordering is well established, and that it is unusual for UCS to order letters not in Latin alphabetical order rather than according to native tradition, and a corresponding sorting order of the runic letter Unicode characters was adopted for ISO/IEC 14651 in 2001.⁷

Characters

The original 81 characters adopted for Unicode 3.0 included 75 letters, three punctuation marks and three "runic symbols".

The names given to the runic letter characters are "a bit clumsy" in a deliberate compromise between scholarly and amateur requirements. They list simplified (ASCII) representations of the three names of a "unified" rune in the Elder Futhark, the Anglo-Saxon and the Younger Futhark traditions, followed by the letter transliterating the rune (if applicable).⁸ The ordering follows the basic futhark sequence, but with (non-unified) variants inserted after the standard Elder Futhark form of each letter, as follows:

The three "punctuation marks" are three variant forms of separators found in runic inscriptions, one a single dot, one a double dot and one cross-shaped.

The three "runic symbols" are the Arlaug, Tvimadur and Belgthor symbols used exclusively for enumerating years in runic calendars of the early modern period.

The eight additional characters introduced in Unicode 7.0 concern the Anglo-Saxon runes. Three are variant letters used by J. R. R. Tolkien to write Modern English in Anglo-Saxon runes, representing the English k, oo and sh graphemes.¹⁶

The five others are letter variants used in one of the Franks Casket inscriptions, "cryptogrammic" replacements for the standard Anglo-Saxon o, i, e, a and æ vowel runes.

Fonts

Numerous Unicode fonts support the Runic block, although most of them are strictly limited to displaying a single glyph per character, often closely modeled on the shape shown in the Unicode block chart.

Free Unicode fonts that support the runic block include: Junicode, GNU FreeFont (in its monospace, bitmap face), Caslon, the serif font Quivira, and Babelstone Runic in its many different formats. Commercial fonts supporting the block include Alphabetum, Code2000, Everson Mono, Aboriginal Serif, Aboriginal Sans, Segoe UI Symbol, and TITUS Cyberbit Basic.

Microsoft Windows did not support the Runic block in any of its included fonts during 2000—2008, but with the release of Windows 7 in 2009, the system has been delivered with a font supporting the block, Segoe UI Symbol. In Windows 10 the Runic block was moved into the font Segoe UI Historic.¹⁷

Chart

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Runic block:

Footnotes

References

1. Everson, Michael; West, Andrew (10 May 2011). "Proposal to encode additional Runic characters in the UCS" (PDF). ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4013R. http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4013.pdf ↩

2. "At the Third International Symposium on Runes and Runic Inscriptions in Valdres, Norway, in August 1990, the need to represent runes by real graphic symbols in text production of various kinds was discussed. Project meetings were held in Oslo in March 1993 and in Stockholm in November 1994 and March 1995. The proposal from the "ISO Runes Project" (cf. Digitala runor, TemaNord 1997:623, København 1997) was accepted with some minor adjustments in 2001, and Unicode now includes runic characters in accordance with the proposal."[4][5] ↩

3. This is not to be confused with Tolkien's own Cirth script which is "runic" in appearance but has no direct relation to the historical runes. This alphabet has no official Unicode encoding (although there is a proposed ConScript Unicode Registry encoding).[6] /wiki/Cirth ↩

4. "The known inscriptions can include considerable variations of shape for a given rune, sometimes to the point where the nonspecialist will mistake the shape for a different rune. There is no dominant main form for some runes, particularly for many runes added in the Anglo-Friesian and medieval Nordic systems. When transcribing a Runic inscription into its Unicode-encoded form, one cannot rely on the idealized reference glyph shape in the character charts alone. One must take into account to which of the four Runic systems an inscription belongs, and be knowledgeable about the permittedform variations within each system. The reference glyphs were chosen to provide an image that distinguishes each rune visually from all other runes in the same system. For actual use, it might be advisable to use a separate font for each Runic system."[citation needed] /wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed ↩

5. "When a rune in an earlier writing system evolved into several different runes in a later system, the unification of the earlier rune with one of the later runes was based on similarity in graphic form rather than similarity in sound value."[citation needed] /wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed ↩

6. "Two sharply different graphic forms, the long-branch and the short-twig form, were used for nine of the 16 Viking Age Nordic runes. Although only one form is used in a given inscription, there are runologically important exceptions. In some cases, the two forms were used to convey different meanings in later use in the medieval system. Therefore the two forms have been separated in the Unicode Standard. ... Staveless runes are a third form of the Viking Age Nordic runes, a kind of runic shorthand. The number of known inscriptions is small and the graphic forms of many of the runes show great variability between inscriptions. For this reason, staveless runes have been unified with the corresponding Viking Age Nordic runes."[7] ↩

7. "On 2000-12-24 Olle Järnefors published on behalf of the ISORUNES Project in Sweden aproposal for ordering the Runes in the Common Tailorable Template (CTT) of ISO/IEC14651. In my view this ordering is unsuitable for the CTT for a number of reasons."[8][9]"Due to the summer holidays, one of our experts was unable to reportback to us by the due date of 2001-09-01. While we voted positivelyon 2001-08-30, Ireland would like to change our vote to DISAPPROVAL,with the following technical comment:In the tailorable template, the Runic script is ordered according toLatin transliteration order. This produces ordering which does notfully satisfy any user community. The Runes should be reordered tothe Futhark order in the tailorable template.Note that the SC22/WG20 minutes are ambiguous as to what should havebeen sent out for ballot:'Runes were added after 14651 cut-off. Order of the Runes in N833 areaccording to the preference of the ISO Runes project (Sweden). Otherpeople, such as Everson and Ken, disagree with the ISO project andprefer the current usage on the web. Reason: academic work is done intransliterations and the order is for the transliterated characters.Everson's proposal is very close to the binary order in 10646(Futhark) for all extensions in various countries. Transliteratedorder would have to be a tailoring. Current draft table shows theISO Runes order.... Discussion about the merits of either ordering.Decision that the order stays as in the table which is the Futharkorder.' [...]We believe that ambiguities in transliteration ordering will meanthat researchers in the Nordic countries and Britain and Ireland willhave to tailor ANYWAY to get a correct transliteration ordering.Therefore the not-quite-perfect transliteration order in thetailorable template serves little purpose. On the other hand, themany non-researcher users of the Runes (who far outnumber theresearchers), universally prefer the Futhark order, and require notailoring for it. Since MOST users will not need to tailor, it seemsonly logical that the Futhark order should be the order used in thetemplate."[9] ↩

8. "The names given to the Runes in the UCS may be a bit clumsy, but they are intended to serve the needs of scholars and amateurs alike; not everyone is familiar with Runic transliteration practices, and not everyone is conversant with the traditional names in Germanic, English, and Scandinavian usage. So the names concatenate those three together with the scholarly transliteration letter."[10] ↩

9. Modern innovation, intended as representing the Latin letter W in the context of medieval runic inscriptions.[clarification needed] /wiki/W ↩

10. The Anglo-Saxon æsc rune with the same shape is encoded separately, as 16AB. ↩

11. nasal o, translitterated with ǫ ↩

12. The 1997 ISORUNES proposed name for this was "RUNIC LETTER YOUNGER K WITH DOT", intended as representing the /ŋ/ phoneme in medieval runic inscriptions (Elder Futhark already had a separate ng-rune, sometimes shown in ligature with the i-rune (the so-called "lantern rune"[11]) /wiki/%C5%8A ↩

13. ᚷ is an alternative stylistic representation of ᛅ in Dalecarlian use. ↩

14. The 1997 ISORUNES proposed name for this was "RUNIC LETTER YOUNGER N WITH DOT", transliterated as N.[clarification needed] /wiki/Wikipedia:Please_clarify ↩

15. The 1997 ISO Runes proposed name for this was "RUNIC LETTER YOUNGER L WITH DOT", transliterated as L.[clarification needed] /wiki/Wikipedia:Please_clarify ↩

16. The k rune was published with The Hobbit (1937), e.g. for writing Tolkien's own name, as ᛁ ᚱ ᚱ ᛏᚩᛚᛱᛁᛖᚾ. His oo and sh runes are known from a postcard written to Katherine Farrer (sic, the name is mistakenly given as Ferrer by Everson and West) on 30 November 1947, published as no. 112 in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981) ("A postcard, apparently written on 30 November 1947, using the system of runes employed in The Hobbit [...] Mrs Farrer, a writer of detective stories, was married to the theologian Austin Farrer, then Chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford.").[12] /wiki/The_Hobbit ↩

17. "Script and Font Support in Windows". Microsoft. Archived from the original on 13 September 2015. Retrieved 4 September 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150913222146/https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb688099.aspx ↩

18. Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names ↩