Anglo-Saxon Runes - Letters

Letters

The Anglo-Saxon rune poem (Cotton Otho B.x.165) has the following runes, listed with their Unicode glyphs, their names, their transliteration and their approximate phonetic value in IPA notation where different from the transliteration:

The first 24 of these directly continue the Elder Futhark letters, extended by five additional runes, representing long vowels and diphthongs (á, æ, ý, ia, ea), comparable to the five forfeda of the Ogham alphabet.

Thorn and Wynn were introduced into the Latin English alphabet to represent and, but then they were replaced with th and w in Middle English.

The letter sequence, and indeed the letter inventory is not fixed. Compared to the letters of the rune poem given above,

f u þ o r c ȝ w h n i j eo p x s t b e m l ŋ œ d a æ y io ea

the Thames scramasax has 28 letters, with a slightly different order, and edhel missing:

f u þ o r c ȝ w h n i io eo p x s t b e ŋ d l m j a æ y ea

The Vienna Codex has also 28 letters; the Ruthwell Cross inscription has 31 letters; Cotton Domitian A.ix (11th century) has another four additional runes:

30. ᛢ cweorð kw, a modification of peorð

31. ᛣ calc "chalice" k (when doubled appearing as ᛤ kk)

32. ᛥ stan "stone" st

33. ᚸ gar "spear" g (as opposed to palatalized ᚷ ȝ)

Of these four additional letters, only the cweorð rune fails to appear epigraphically. The stan shape is found on the Westeremden yew-stick, but likely as a Spiegelrune. The calc rune is found on the Bramham Moor Ring, Kingmoor Ring, the Ruthwell Cross, and Bewcastle Cross inscriptions. The gar rune is found on the Bewcastle Cross inscription, along with the doubled calc rune in select locations.

Cotton Domitian A.ix reaches thus a total of 33 letters, according to the transliteration introduced above arranged in the order

f u þ o r c ȝ w h n i j eo p x s t b e m l ŋ d œ a æ y ea io cw k st g

In the manuscript, the runes are arranged in three rows, glossed with Latin equivalents below (in the third row above) and with their names above (in the third row below). The manuscript has traces of corrections by a 16th century hand, inverting the position of m and d. Eolh is mistakenly labelled as sigel, and in place of sigel, there is a kaun like letter ᚴ, corrected to proper sigel ᛋ above it. Eoh is mis-labelled as eþel. Apart from ing and ear, all rune names are due to the later scribe, identified as Robert Talbot (died 1558).

Another futhorc row is found in Cotton Galba A.ii.

The 9th-century Codex Sangallensis 878 (attributed to Walahfrid Strabo) records an abecedarium anguliscum in three lines. The first two lines list the standard 29 runes, i.e. the 24 derived from Elder Futhark, and the five standard additional ones (á, æ, ý, io, ea). The listing order of the final two of the "elder" 24 runes is dæg, éðel. A peculiarity is the "asterisk" shape of eolh. The third line lists gar and kalc(?) before a doodling repetition of other runes.