The discipline of reading medieval handwriting is called paleography (also spelled palaeography). Thus the Unicode table includes multiple variants for each letter.Letter Forms | Abbreviations | Punctuation There were actually several varieties of Runic alphabets (including Common Germanic, Old English and Old Norse/Scandinavian), each with their own forms and pronunciation.

Note that Unicode numbers are assigned in Runic alphabetic order (F,U,Þ.), but this table is sorted roughtly in Roman alphabet order (A,B.C.). I was able to quickly insert these letters into Dreamweaver via the Mac Character Palette. Here are two ways to include ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ in a Unicode Web page. But expect a little bit of debugging to occur. Step 4: Make sure the utf-8 encoding tag is included Install a third-party Unicode Runic keyboard utility (look on Google).Cut and paste them from Character Map (Windows) or the Character Palette (Mac) - this is what I did on this site.Input the Unicode numeric entity codes (See below).Most people rarely have long runic texts, so you can either Step 2: Tell Visitors Where to Get a Font So there are actually a lot of good fonts available. Runes are important for linguists studying ancient Germanic and Old English texts and Unicode Runes will allow them to create and share standardized archives. ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ 'FUÞARK' (the first six runic letters) Getting Them on the Web Step 1: Make sure you have a Runic font If you see a question mark or a bunch of squares below, then you need to install a rune font. For English, it's actually a little more efficient because it has single letters like thorn (þ) for sounds that need to be written with two letters in the modern Roman alphabet. Ancient Germanic did use them for 'magical' purposes but they also used it for everyday writing.

The letters all have names like thorn ( þ) for 'th' / θ/ and isaz ( ᛁ) 'ice' for /i/. The origins are a little murky (and much debated), but the letters appear to borrow from both the Roman alphabet and the Greek alphabet. Runes (or ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ 'Futhark') are a set of alphabets developed by the Germanic tribes.

Based on an older version from 2 What are Runes?

Letter thorn old english font