Rune Translator (Elder Futhark)
Type English and see it written in the 24 runes of the Elder Futhark, one rune per letter with the English spelling kept. The tool also reads runes back to text. It writes English in runes; it does not translate into Old Norse.
How to use the rune translator
- Type an English word or sentence. The runes appear as you type.
- Keep your normal spelling: th, ng and ei each get one rune, and c, k and q share one.
- To read runes, switch to Runes to text and paste them in.
- Copy the result or use the runic keyboard to type runes directly.
Examples
| Thor | ᚦᛟᚱ |
| Strength and honor | ᛊᛏᚱᛖᛜᚦ ᚨᚾᛞ ᚺᛟᚾᛟᚱ |
| Viking | ᚹᛁᚲᛁᛜ |
About Elder Futhark runes
The Elder Futhark is the oldest runic alphabet, named after its first six letters: f, u, th, a, r, k. Germanic peoples used it from about the second century to the eighth, scratching it into combs, spearheads, brooches and standing stones from Denmark to the Black Sea. It has 24 runes, and the fullest early listing of them, on the Kylver stone from Gotland, dates to around AD 400. Each rune has a name that begins with its sound: fehu, cattle or wealth, for f; uruz, aurochs, for u; thurisaz, giant, for th. The names are reconstructed, since the inscriptions themselves rarely explain anything, but the sound values are secure because the same texts can be read as early Germanic words.
Runes wrote sounds, not letters of the Latin alphabet, and the language they wrote was Proto-Norse and its relatives, not English. By the Viking Age the Norse had cut the row down to the 16-rune Younger Futhark, which is what appears on the runestones of Sweden and Denmark and on nearly every genuine Viking inscription. The Anglo-Saxons went the other way and expanded the row to the 26 or more runes of the futhorc to fit the vowels of Old English. So a historically minded transcription of a Norse name would use the Younger Futhark, and of an Old English one the futhorc. The 24-rune Elder Futhark is the row that modern charts, jewelry and tattoos use, because it is the oldest, the most complete and the easiest to line up with the Latin alphabet, and that is the row this tool uses.
The translator works by substitution. Each English letter becomes the rune with the matching sound, and the spelling you type is kept, silent letters and all: "knight" gets a k rune. Where English has more letters than the row has runes, letters share: c, k and q all become kaunan ᚲ; v and w become wunjo ᚹ; y and j become jera ᛃ; x is written as two runes, ᚲᛊ. Three pairs of letters have a single rune of their own and are always written with it: th becomes thurisaz ᚦ, ng becomes ingwaz ᛜ and ei becomes eihwaz ᛇ. The pairs are matched before single letters, so "th" is one rune even where the two letters happen to meet across a syllable, as in "pothole". Doubled letters stay doubled, as on the name cards, though most real inscriptions wrote a double consonant once. A colon becomes the runic punctuation mark ᛬, which inscriptions used to separate words. Digits and other symbols pass through unchanged.
Because letters share runes, decoding is not an exact reversal. When the tool reads runes back, ᚲ comes out as k, ᚹ as w and ᛃ as y, and the digraph runes come back as th, ng and ei. "Viking" therefore decodes as "wiking" and "Jack" as "yakk". This is not a fault the tool can fix: the runes genuinely do not record which Latin letter was intended, any more than a Roman inscription records whether a V was a v or a u. If you need to check a design before it is carved or inked, the encode direction is the reliable one; the decoder is for reading runes you have found and getting a fair approximation of the letters.
The output is Unicode, from the Runic block at U+16A0, so it is ordinary text that can be copied into a document, a message or a design tool. Any device with a runic font will show it; recent versions of Windows, macOS, iOS and Android all include one, and older devices may show empty boxes. For a tattoo or an engraving, look at the runes in a few fonts before committing, because the shapes of a few runes, notably ingwaz and jera, vary between historical periods and between typefaces.
Frequently asked questions
Does this translate English into Old Norse?
No. It writes the English words you type in runes, letter for letter, keeping the English spelling. That is what rune charts, name cards and most tattoo designs do, and it is what a "rune translator" is usually asked for, but it is not a translation. Translating into Old Norse means changing the words, and that needs a dictionary and a grammar, not an alphabet.
Why does decoding give a different spelling from what I typed?
Several English letters share a rune. c, k and q all become ᚲ, v and w both become ᚹ, and y and j both become ᛃ. Reading back, the tool has to choose one, so ᚲ becomes k, ᚹ becomes w and ᛃ becomes y: "Viking" comes back as "wiking". The rune itself does not record which letter was meant.
Which runic alphabet is this?
The Elder Futhark, the 24-rune row used from roughly AD 150 to 800. It is not the 16-rune Younger Futhark of the Viking Age, and not the Anglo-Saxon futhorc used for Old English. Those rows are historically correct for Norse and English respectively, but the Elder Futhark is what nearly all modern charts and designs use, because it matches the Latin alphabet most closely.
Why do th, ng and ei become a single rune?
The Elder Futhark has runes for those sounds: thurisaz ᚦ for th, ingwaz ᛜ for ng and eihwaz ᛇ for the sound in "ei". The tool matches these pairs before single letters, so they are always written as one rune, even in a word such as "pothole" where t and h belong to different syllables. x has no rune and is written ᚲᛊ.
Can I use this for a tattoo or an engraving?
You can use it to get the runes right for a letter-by-letter design, and the encode direction is exact for the rules described above. Do check the shapes in more than one font, since a few runes vary between typefaces and periods, and be clear that the result is English written in runes rather than a Norse phrase. For a historical Norse text, the Younger Futhark and a specialist are the right tools.
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