Rune Translator

1. 01

   Type English in the text box

   Enter a word, a name or a sentence in the left box. The translator maps letters to runes as you type; there is no Convert button.

2. 02

   Choose a rune row

   Elder Futhark is the default. Switch to the 16-rune Younger Futhark of the Viking Age, or to the expanded Anglo-Saxon Futhorc of Old English.

3. 03

   Pick a word separator

   Use a normal space, a single runic punctuation mark (᛫) or a double punctuation mark (᛬) between words. The choice changes only the spacing, not the runes.

4. 04

   Copy the runes or read them back

   Press Copy, or choose Runes → Text and paste runic characters into either box. The decoder returns the most common reading for the selected row.

Elder Futhark is the oldest row, with 24 runes. It was used from roughly the 2nd to the 8th century in Scandinavia and continental Europe. Its letter values are the closest match to the older Germanic sound system, which is why it is the default.

Younger Futhark is the 16-rune row associated with the Viking Age, roughly the late 8th to the 11th century. The long-branch (Danish) forms shown here were used on stone monuments. Because the row has only 16 signs, several sounds share one rune, and the written form records less information than Elder Futhark.

Anglo-Saxon Futhorc developed in England and Frisia from the 5th century onward. It began with the 24 Elder runes and added new signs for Old English sounds. The table on this page lists the 28-rune core from the Codex Vindobonensis 795 together with four named additions: calc, gar, cweorð and stan.

The name under each rune is a conventional label recorded in rune poems and older Germanic vocabulary, not a translation in a sentence. The Latin column gives the sound used here; th is the sound in “thing” and ng is the sound in “sing”.

These are traditional association labels — fehu is associated with cattle or wealth, for example — not definitions or instructions. This translator does not assign magical meanings to runes.

The tool checks the two-letter combinations th and ng before single letters. In Elder Futhark, th becomes ᚦ and ng becomes ᛜ. In Anglo-Saxon Futhorc they become ᚦ and ᛝ. Younger Futhark has a th rune but no separate ng rune, so ng is written as ᚾᚴ.

English letters without a direct Elder rune follow modern transliteration conventions. C uses ᚲ, q is written ᚲᚹ (kw), x is written ᚲᛊ (ks), v uses ᚹ, and y uses ᛁ. These are practical choices for writing English, not evidence of historical spelling. Read back, ᚲᚹ becomes kw and ᚲᛊ becomes ks, not q or x.

Younger Futhark has fewer distinctions. U, o and v share ᚢ; k and g share ᚴ; i and e share ᛁ; t and d share ᛏ; b and p share ᛒ. The tool uses ᚬ for o and ᚢ for u, v, w and y. Q and x use ᚴᚢ and ᚴᛋ; j uses ᛁ, and z uses ᛋ. Many words cannot be read back exactly after Younger Futhark encoding.

The Anglo-Saxon row has more choices. C uses ᚳ and k uses ᛣ; q uses ᛢ (cweorð); x uses ᛉ (eolhx), the rune used for Latin x; y uses ᚣ (yr); and v uses ᚠ (feoh), because the futhorc had no separate v sign. Z is written with the s rune ᛋ. These mappings are displayed in the alphabet tables and are applied consistently in both the tool and the tests.

This is a letter-by-letter transliteration, not a translation into Old Norse, Old English or any other language. “Odin” becomes runes that map back to O-D-I-N. It does not become the Old Norse name Óðinn, and the tool adds no grammar, case endings or historical spelling.

Runes were used to write languages, not to encode modern English. A real translation needs a dictionary, grammar and context. If you need a message in Old Norse, work with someone who knows the language rather than treating this page as a dictionary.

The same distinction applies to other ancient scripts. The hieroglyphics translator maps English letters to Egyptian signs, but it also does not produce a grammatically correct ancient Egyptian sentence.

For a code that is fully reversible, the Morse code translator is a better comparison: every dot-and-dash pattern maps back to one letter, while runes often do not.

Type the name as you normally spell it, choose a row and copy the result. The tool follows spelling rather than pronunciation, so “Christopher” starts with the c convention rather than a k. For a sound-based spelling, change the English spelling first and then transliterate it.

Names are personal, and there is no single correct modern runic spelling. Two rune rows can give different results for the same name, and Younger Futhark may collapse vowels or consonants. Before using a name in a tattoo, jewellery or a permanent design, ask someone who reads runes to check the row, the spelling and the direction of the inscription. This page does not guarantee that a design is historically accurate.

• Expecting an Old Norse translation

  The output maps English letters to runes. It does not translate the word or reproduce Old Norse grammar, so a runic “Odin” is still an English name written in runes.

• Mixing rune rows

  Elder, Younger and Anglo-Saxon rows use different signs and different sound values. A word encoded in Younger Futhark will not decode correctly if the tool is set to Elder Futhark.

• Assuming every letter has one rune

  Q and x use two runes in Elder Futhark, and several letters share a sign in Younger Futhark. Count the signs instead of expecting one tile per English letter.

• Forgetting that runes have no case

  The output does not preserve capital letters. Decoding returns lowercase Latin letters, which is normal for a transliteration table.