Runic text (Elder Futhark)
Convert text to runic script and back, in three historical alphabets.
Runic text (Elder Futhark)
Paste any text and this tool rewrites it in runic script, or reads runes back into Latin letters. Three historical alphabets are supported: Elder Futhark, the 24-rune system used across Scandinavia from roughly the 2nd to 8th century; Younger Futhark, the 16-rune Viking-age alphabet that merged several sounds onto shared staves; and Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the extended alphabet used in early medieval England. It's a popular way to draft tattoo lettering, name a runestone in a game, or see how a word would have looked carved in wood or stone.
Direction switches between converting to runes and decoding runes back to Latin, and the swap button flips both the option and the text. Letters without a direct rune — an accented vowel, or a sound Younger Futhark's smaller set dropped — can map to the nearest rune, be omitted, or stay unchanged. The word separator sets how spaces appear: a space, a period or a colon, matching different inscription styles. Toggle whether punctuation and numbers pass through, whether accented letters (é, ř, ö…) fold to their plain sound first, and whether a plain-text line is added under each converted line for reference.
Digraphs like "th", "ng" and "ea" map to a single rune rather than two, matching how each alphabet represents those sounds. Younger Futhark has fewer runes than English has sounds, so letters like b/p, d/t and u/o/v/w share a stave — historical, not a mapping error. Windows and Unix line endings are treated the same, and the tally below the output reports how many letters matched a rune out of the total.
Everything runs locally in your browser — nothing you type is uploaded. Copy the result, download it as a .txt file, or send the output back into the input to try another alphabet on the same text.