The Elder Futhark was a script used to write short texts on portable objects, and that is where the evidence for every one of its characters comes from.
Last in the row
Othala stands twenty-fourth and last in the Elder Futhark. Its position is stable in the ordered listings of the row that survive, of which there are only a handful, cut as complete alphabets on objects rather than written out in any manuscript of the period.
Why complete futhark inscriptions matter
The order of the row is known because a small number of objects carry the whole sequence. Without those, the order would have to be reconstructed from fragments, and the numbering used throughout this atlas would be an inference rather than a reading. Those complete inscriptions also show that the order was fixed and taught, which is one of the reasons a modern row that rearranges it cannot be a transmission of it.
What survives
The rest of the corpus is short inscriptions on brooches, weapon fittings, combs, bracteates and stones, many of them personal names.
The name
Othala is a reconstructed form projected back from the medieval rune poems, which name the characters of later rows. The word behind it means inherited land or an ancestral holding.
Later use
This character has a documented twentieth-century political history and remains in current political use. That history is recorded separately in this atlas and is not a property of the inscriptional character described here.