Medieval Runes - History and Use - Mutual Influences

Mutual Influences

As the two alphabets were used alongside each other, there was a mutual influence. The Latin alphabet early borrowed the þ rune to represent the /θ/ and /ð/ phonemes, but in Denmark it was rarely used. In the 15th century, Norwegians and Swedes also stopped using the þ letter, but the Icelanders still retain it in their Latin alphabet. Due to the Latin alphabet the m and the l runes changed places so the rune row read fuþorkniastblmy (note that the last rune had come to represent the /y/ phoneme). In addition, Scandinavians began to double spell runes for consonants, influenced by this use in the Latin alphabet.

In the oldest Scandinavian manuscripts that were written with Latin letters, the m rune was used as a conceptual rune meaning "man". This suggests that the medieval Scandinavian scribes had a widespread familiarity with the names and the meanings of the individual runes. In the oldest preserved manuscript of the Poetic Edda from 1270, and which is written with the Latin alphabet, the m is used as a conceptual rune meaning "man" and in Hávamál it appears 43 times.

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