Younger Futhark Translator

Version 1.0 — Last updated: 7 September 2026

Younger Futhark is the 16-rune alphabet used during the Viking Age (roughly 800–1200 AD), replacing the older 24-rune Elder Futhark even though the Old Norse language it recorded had more sounds than Younger Futhark had runes. That means Younger Futhark is inherently a lossy fit for the Latin alphabet — several English letters below share a single rune, and that’s a real feature of the historical writing system, not a limitation of this tool.

English to Younger Futhark converter

The 16 long-branch runes used here

This tool uses the long-branch variant of Younger Futhark (the form more common in Denmark; Norway and Sweden also used a simplified short-twig variant with different shapes for the same sounds — we cover that comparison on our Elder vs Younger Futhark page). Where a rune covered multiple sounds historically, this converter picks one common assignment for consistency, shown here:

Rune	Represents
ᚠ	f
ᚢ	u / v / w / o / y
ᚦ	th (þ/ð)
ᚬ	a / o / æ (long)
ᚱ	r
ᚴ	k / g / c / q
ᚼ	h
ᚾ	n
ᛁ	i / e / j
ᛅ	a (short)
ᛋ	s / z
ᛏ	t / d
ᛒ	b / p
ᛘ	m
ᛚ	l
ᛦ	r (final, “yr”)

How this differs from our Elder Futhark tool

Our main Rune Translator uses Elder Futhark, the older 24-rune alphabet used before roughly 700 AD. If you’re translating something meant to represent the Viking Age specifically (800–1200 AD) rather than the earlier Migration Period, Younger Futhark is the historically correct choice — this is the same distinction we corrected on our Old Norse Translator page after finding it conflated the two.

Limitations

Like our other rune tools, this is a letter-for-letter conversion, not a spelling-reconstruction engine — real Younger Futhark inscriptions often used context-dependent spelling conventions (omitting nasals before consonants, using single runes for double consonants) that this tool does not attempt to reproduce. Don’t rely on this for tattoos, inscriptions, or academic work without independent verification; see our Methodology and Sources & Corpora pages for how our rune data is put together and reviewed.