| Dalecarlian runes | |
|---|---|
 Dalecarlian runic inscription from A.D. 1635 | |
| Script type | alphabet |
Time period | 16th century to 1980 |
| Languages | North Germanic languages |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
The Dalecarlian runes, or dalrunes (Swedish : Dalrunor), was a late version of the runic script that was in use in the Swedish province of Dalarna until the 20th century. [1] The province has consequently been called the "last stronghold of the Germanic script". [1]
When Carl Linnaeus visited Älvdalen in Dalarna in 1734, he made the following note in his diary:
The peasants in the community here, apart from using rune staves, still today write their names and ownership marks with runic letters, as is seen on walls, corner stones, bowls, etc. Which one does not know to be still continued anywhere else in Sweden. [2]
The Dalecarlian runes were derived from the medieval runes, but the runic letters were combined with Latin ones, and Latin letters would progressively replace the runes. At the end of the 16th century, the Dalecarlian runic inventory was almost exclusively runic, but during the following centuries more and more individual runes were replaced with Latin characters. In its last stage almost every rune had been replaced with a Latin letter, or with special versions that were influenced by Latin characters. [3]
Although the use of runes in Dalarna is an ancient tradition, the oldest dated inscription is from the last years of the 16th century. It is a bowl from the village of Åsen which says "Anders has made (this) bowl anno 1596". Scholars have registered more than 200 Dalecarlian runic inscriptions, mostly on wood, and they can be seen on furniture, bridal boxes, on the buildings of shielings, kitchen blocks, bowls, measuring sticks, etc. Most inscriptions are brief but there are also longer ones. [2]
The Dalecarlian runes remained in some use up to the 20th century with their last known user dying in 1980. [4] Some discussion remains on whether their use was an unbroken tradition throughout this period or whether people in the 19th and 20th centuries learned runes from books written on the subject. The character inventory was mainly used for transcribing Elfdalian.
The following table, published in the scholarly periodical Fornvännen in 1906, presents the evolution of the Dalecarlian runes from the earliest attested ones in the late 16th century until a version from 1832:
Dalecarlian runes are not explicitly encoded in Unicode. However, due to their similarity to characters used in other runerows and certain other symbols, many can still be typed or at least somewhat well approximated. A few are sufficiently similar in appearance to Latin characters, or to characters typically identified as symbols, that those characters could serve as substitutes for their respective runes.
| Latin | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | X | Y | Z | Å | Ä | Ö |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rune | ᛅ, ᚷ | ᛒ | ᛋ, ᚲ | ᚦ | ᛆ | ᚠ, ᚨ | ᚼ | ᛁ | ᛲ, ᚴ | ᛚ | ᛘ, ᛖ | ᚿ, ᚳ | ᛰ, ⨁ | 𐋐, ᚹ | ᛩ | ᚱ | ᛋ, ᛁ, ᛌ | ᛐ | ᚢ | ᛋᛌ, ᛋ | ᛠ | ᚼ, Å | ᚯ | ᛦ | ||
| Name [6] | ar | birkä/birke | knäsol | dors | er | fir | gir | hagal | is | kan | lagh | madhär | nådh | or | pir | qua | re | sol | tir | ur | äcs | års | halfåars | helårs |
In 2014 an inscription of a Dalrunic alphabet was found on the walls of a very old house in Älvdalen. In this case the Dalrunes were sorted in the order of the sounds of the characters in the Latin alphabet (A B C), rather than in the order of the runic futhark (F U Þ). The Dalrunes were dated to the end of the 16th century, and the house was dendrochronologically dated to 1285. [7]
The alphabetic order of the runes shows that each rune represents the sounds of a Latin character. Consequently, the Dalrunes could instead be represented using glyphs from the Basic Latin Unicode block. However, to do so would be to take an approach similar to Wingdings in that each glyph would only be understood by a computer to be a Latin letter (albeit in a runic shape), not a rune. A Dalrunic alphabet font is available on GitHub. [8] It uses the Basic Latin Unicode block as its base.
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Dalarna, also referred to by the English exonyms Dalecarlia and the Dales, is a landskap in central Sweden.
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A rune is a letter in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write Germanic languages before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised purposes thereafter. In addition to representing a sound value, runes can be used to represent the concepts after which they are named (ideographs). Scholars refer to instances of the latter as Begriffsrunen. The Scandinavian variants are also known as fuþark, or futhark, these names derived from the first six letters of the script, ⟨ᚠ⟩, ⟨ᚢ⟩, ⟨ᚦ⟩, ⟨ᚨ⟩/⟨ᚬ⟩, ⟨ᚱ⟩, and ⟨ᚲ⟩/⟨ᚴ⟩, corresponding to the Latin letters ⟨f⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨þ⟩/⟨th⟩, ⟨a⟩, ⟨r⟩, and ⟨k⟩. The Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc, or fuþorc, due to changes in Old English of the sounds represented by the fourth letter, ⟨ᚨ⟩/⟨ᚩ⟩.
The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a runic alphabet and a reduced form of the Elder Futhark, with only 16 characters, in use from about the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries. The reduction, somewhat paradoxically, happened at the same time as phonetic changes that led to a greater number of different phonemes in the spoken language, when Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse. Also, the writing custom avoided carving the same rune consecutively for the same sound, so the spoken distinction between long and short vowels was lost in writing. Thus, the language included distinct sounds and minimal pairs that were written the same.
The Elder Futhark, also known as the Older Futhark, Old Futhark, or Germanic Futhark, is the oldest form of the runic alphabets. It was a writing system used by Germanic peoples for Northwest Germanic dialects in the Migration Period. Inscriptions are found on artifacts including jewelry, amulets, plateware, tools, and weapons, as well as runestones, from the 1st to the 9th centuries.
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L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el, plural els.
The medieval runes, or the futhork, was a Scandinavian runic alphabet that evolved from the Younger Futhark after the introduction of stung runes at the end of the Viking Age. These stung runes were regular runes with the addition of either a dot diacritic or bar diacritic to indicate that the rune stood for one of its secondary sounds. The medieval futhork was fully formed in the early 13th century. Due to the expansion of its character inventory, it was essentially possible to have each character in an inscription correspond to only one phoneme, something which was virtually impossible in Younger Futhark with its small inventory of 16 runes.
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Runic is a Unicode block containing runic characters. It was introduced in Unicode 3.0 (1999), with eight additional characters introduced in Unicode 7.0 (2014). The original encoding of runes in UCS was based on the recommendations of the "ISO Runes Project" submitted in 1997.
Runic alphabets have seen numerous uses since the 18th-century Viking revival, in Scandinavian Romantic nationalism (Gothicismus) and Germanic occultism in the 19th century, and in the context of the Fantasy genre and of Germanic Neopaganism in the 20th century.
