Younger Futhark

The change makes no sense as a technical improvement and that is what makes it interesting. As the older row was cut from twenty four characters to sixteen, the language it wrote was gaining distinctions rather than losing them, so the new row had to make one sign carry several sounds. A single character serves for more than one vowel quality, another covers a voiced and an unvoiced consonant, and a reader has to supply the difference from context and from knowing the language. Nobody has a settled explanation for why literate people would do this deliberately. Proposals include a drive toward a smaller memorised set, the influence of a particular scribal centre, and a shift in what runes were mainly used for.

The reduction happened across Scandinavia within a relatively short period, which suggests a change that spread rather than a gradual decay. Three forms of the row were in use. One has full length staves and is found on most monumental stones; another uses shortened side strokes and appears more often in everyday and Norwegian contexts; a third reduces the characters almost to shorthand and is difficult to read without knowing what it should say. They overlap in time and place, so the difference is one of register rather than of period.

The great memorial runestones are not a pagan monument type. The overwhelming majority were raised in the eleventh century, after conversion, and they carry crosses, prayers for the soul of the person commemorated, and formulas asking God and the mother of God to help. The standard text names who raised the stone, who it commemorates and how they were related, and often adds where the person died. That makes the corpus a source for social history above all: inheritance, kinship, the position of women who raised stones in their own name, the range of travel recorded in the memorials of men who died in the east or in England, and the conversion itself in progress.

A stone naming a Christian death in a landscape of older burial practice records the change more directly than any chronicle. The script continued to develop after the Viking Age rather than stopping with it. Additional marks were introduced to distinguish the sounds the reduced row had merged, restoring something close to a one to one relationship between sign and sound, and runes remained in use in Scandinavia for inscriptions, ownership marks, business notes and everyday messages well into the medieval period. They were used alongside the Latin alphabet for centuries rather than being replaced by it at a stroke, and the wooden message sticks recovered from medieval Norwegian towns show the script doing ordinary work long after the stones stopped being raised.