Want to Learn the Anglo-Saxon Runes?

Posted by Byron Pendason on June 16, 2023 CE, in Runes, Tech, Updates

Wes hāl!1

The last few days, I have been busy working on a couple projects for this blog, both having to do the the Futhorc (Anglo-Saxons Runes). The most useful in terms of starting out with writing in the Futhorc is a webapp that I created for this blog. Its a flashcard-like program that has 8 levels. The first level starts you off with 8 runes, each which represents a two-letter combination in my system for writing the Futhorc. Then each subsequent level adds 5 more runes, until you get to all 33 in the 6th level. The 7th level adds the three punctuation marks that I use in my runic writing. The eighth (and the final) level will randomly select 20 words out of the 97 most common words2 in modern English to give you practice reading the runes. Be sure to read the notes I included to get some tips for making the learning process easier!

The other resource is Gummere’s translation of Beowulf, rendered in runes. This is a great resource to get practice reading modern English written in Futhorc runes once you’ve learned what each rune represents.

These resources took a lot of time and effort to create these resources, so if you find them useful please consider buying me a coffee or two to compensate me for the work.

Anyways, just a couple updates on what I’ve been up to. Beo gesund!1

  1. Wes hāl and Beo gesund are Old English greetings and farewells that literally mean Be well/whole/healthy. The first seemed to be more common among the Anglian dialects and the second more common among the Saxon dialects. I prefer to use both though, the first as a greeting and the second as a farewell. ↩ ↩2

  2. It was originally a list of the 100 most common words but I removed the single letter words. ↩