Indo-European, North Germanic · Younger Futhark runes
Old Norse
ᚱᚢᚾᛅᛦ runaR, “runes”
- Spoken
- c. AD 700–1350
- Where
- Scandinavia, Iceland and the Viking settlements
Old Norse was the language of the Viking Age, spoken from Greenland to Kyiv by traders, raiders and farmers. Its speakers called it dǫnsk tunga, the Danish tongue, wherever they came from. They carved it in runes on standing stones to honour the dead, and two centuries later Icelanders wrote it in Latin letters, producing the sagas and the Eddas. English still carries hundreds of its words: sky, egg, knife, window, and even the pronoun they.
Where and when
Old Norse grew out of the Proto-Norse of earlier rune stones and was spoken across Denmark, Norway and Sweden from about AD 700. Viking expeditions carried it to Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, the British Isles, Normandy and along the rivers of Russia. In Normandy, place names and a few sea words still show where Norse speakers settled.
Rune stones like the Jelling stones in Denmark, raised by King Harald Bluetooth around 965, are the earliest long texts. From the twelfth century Icelandic scribes wrote down law codes, poetry and sagas on parchment, which is why we know the language so well. Iceland, settled from about 870, became the great library of the language.
How it fell silent
Old Norse did not die without heirs. It split. By around 1350 the eastern dialects had become Old Swedish and Old Danish, and the western ones Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic. Trade with the German Hanseatic League, the Black Death of 1349, which hit Norway's literate class hard, and new royal chanceries writing in local forms all sped the divergence.
Overseas, Norse lost to its neighbours. In England and Normandy it gave way to English and French within a few generations. In Orkney and Shetland it became Norn, which lasted until the eighteenth century. In Greenland the Norse colony itself died out in the fifteenth century. Icelandic changed least, which is why Icelanders today can read the sagas with modest effort.
How it may have sounded
-
ᚼᛅᚱᛅᛚᛏᚱ ᚴᚢᚾᚢᚴᛦ
haraltr kunukR
Say it roughly HAH-rahld-r KOH-noong-r
“King Harald”
From the larger Jelling stone; runes did not mark n before k or the difference between o and u, so the reading konungr comes from later manuscripts, and the final R was a distinct r-like sound.
-
Deyr fé, deyja frændr
Say it roughly DAYR FYEH, DAY-yah FRAYND-r/deyr feː ˈdeyja ˈfrɛːndr/
“Cattle die, kinsmen die”
From Hávamál stanza 77, preserved in a thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript in Latin letters; the reconstructed pronunciation is a scholarly model of about 1200, not modern Icelandic.
Your name, set in stone
The Younger Futhark has only 16 runes, so many sounds share one: a single rune serves for k and g, another for t and d, another for u, o and w. Your name keeps its outline but loses many distinctions.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- English 'they', 'egg', 'sky' and 'window' (vindauga, 'wind-eye') all came from Old Norse.
- As the language gained sounds, the rune row shrank from 24 runes to 16, so one rune often stood for several sounds.
- The Bluetooth logo combines the runes for H and B, the initials of King Harald Bluetooth.