Runic Roots: From the Futhorc to the Letter Thorn

If you were to act as a time traveler visiting 8th-century England, glancing over the shoulder of a scribe or looking at a monument in the town square, you might find yourself baffled. While the language spoken would be an early, guttural ancestor of the English we speak today, the writing would look alien. Before the smooth curves of the Latin alphabet dominated the Western world, the Anglo-Saxons had their own angular, distinct writing system: the Futhorc.

Most history classes gloss over the history of the English alphabet, treating it as a static inheritance from the Romans. However, the story of how we write is a tale of collision, adaptation, and survival. It is the story of how a rudimentary 24-character runic row expanded to capture the complex sounds of Old English, and how two specific runic holdovers—Thorn (þ) and Eth (ð)—managed to infiltrate the Latin alphabet to represent the sounds that remain uniquely English.

The Rise of the Futhorc

The writing system used by the early Germanic tribes is known as the Elder Futhark, named after the first six letters of the sequence (F, U, Th, A, R, K). It consisted of 24 characters designed primarily for scratching into wood or carving into stone. The shapes were composed of straight lines to avoid splitting the wood grain, giving them their characteristic angular look.

When the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes migrated across the North Sea to the British Isles starting in the 5th century, they brought this script with them. However, as the English language evolved in its new island home, its sound system became more complex. The original 24 runes were no longer sufficient to map the expanding phonology of the Anglo-Saxons.

The result was the Futhorc (or Anglo-Saxon Runes), an extended alphabet that eventually grew to between 28 and 33 characters. This was not merely a writing system; it was a flexible linguistic tool that adapted to dialectal changes.

The Splitting of Runes: Ac and Ōs

To understand the sophistication of the Futhorc, we must look at how it handled vowel shifts. One of the primary reasons the runic row expanded was to accommodate the splitting of vowel sounds, a linguistic phenomenon known as phonemic split.

In the original Elder Futhark, the Ansuz rune represented the /a/ sound. However, in Old English, the pronunciation of vowels became highly dependent on the sounds surrounding them. The single Ansuz rune split into three distinct descendants in the Futhorc to represent three different sounds:

• Æsc (ᚫ): Representing the /æ/ sound (as in the modern English “cat”), named after the Ash tree.
• Ac (ᚪ): A newly created rune representing the standard /a/ sound (as in “father”), named after the Oak tree.
• Ōs (ᚩ): Representing a nasalized /o/ sound, derived from the word for “god” or “mouth.”

These modifications show that the Anglo-Saxons were keen linguists. The invention of Ac and Ōs demonstrates that they were consciously altering their orthography to maintain a one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol. While the Latin alphabet would later struggle with the complexity of English vowels (leaving us with our current chaotic spelling rules), the runic masters of the 7th century were busy engineering a precise phonetic alphabet.

The Latin Invasion and the Clash of Scripts

The turning point for the English language came not with a sword, but with a cross. Following the mission of St. Augustine in 597 AD, Christianity began to spread through Anglo-Saxon England. With the monks came the Latin alphabet, which carried the prestige of the Church and the Roman Empire.

For centuries, the two scripts coexisted. Runes were used for epigraphy—carving names on personal items, stone crosses like the Ruthwell Cross, and monuments. The Latin script, written with quill and ink on parchment, became the standard for books, legal documents, and religious texts.

However, the Latin alphabet had a major flaw: it was designed for Latin. It had roughly 23 letters, while Old English was rich with fricatives and complex vowels that Latin simply did not possess. The monks faced a dilemma. How do you write the name of a local king or a specific English word when your alphabet lacks the letters for the sounds they are making?

The Survivors: Thorn (þ) and Eth (ð)

The most problematic sounds for the Latin-toting scribes were the dental fricatives—the sounds we make today with the “th” digraph. Old English had two distinct flavors of this sound:

1. The unvoiced dental fricative (as in think or path).
2. The voiced dental fricative (as in this or breathe).

Latin had neither. Early attempts to use the letters th or d were inconsistent. The solution was pragmatic and elegant: the scribes dipped back into the runic tradition and borrowed the letters they needed.

Thorn (þ)

The rune Thorn (ᚦ) was lifted directly from the Futhorc. In its runic form, it looked like a vertical line with a triangle or bubble on the right side. In manuscript handwriting, it evolved to look somewhat like a modern ‘p’ but with the ascender extending above the loop. It represented the hard, unvoiced “th” sound.

Thorn was incredibly resilient. It survived the Norman Conquest and remained in common usage throughout the Middle English period, long after most other runes had been forgotten.

Eth (ð)

Eth (or Eð) has a slightly different origin story. While often grouped with runes, the manuscript version was actually a modification of the Latin letter ‘d’ with a cross-bar through the upstroke. It was meant to represent the voiced “th” sound (the buzzing sound). However, in Old English practice, Thorn and Eth were often used interchangeably by scribes, regardless of whether the sound was voiced or unvoiced.

Eth began to die out earlier than Thorn, largely disappearing by the Middle English period, leaving Thorn to do the heavy lifting for both sounds.

“Ye Olde” and the Death of a Letter

If Thorn was so useful, why don’t we use it today? The death of the letter Thorn is one of the most interesting technological accidents in linguistic history.

By the 15th century, the shape of the handwritten Thorn (þ) had changed, looking increasingly similar to the letter ‘y’. When the printing press arrived in England (thanks to William Caxton), the font sets were imported from Germany and Italy. These continental font sets did not contain the uniquely English character Thorn.

Printers needed a substitute. Because the handwritten Thorn looked so much like a ‘y’, they simply swapped in the letter ‘y’. Therefore, the word the (originally written þe) was printed as ye.

When you see a sign for a generic tourist shop reading “Ye Olde Pub”, you represent a linguistic misunderstanding. It was never pronounced with a ‘y’ sound. It was always pronounced “The.” We are effectively reading a typo that became a cultural trope.

A Linguistic Legacy

Today, our alphabet is standard Latin, but our spelling system remains a ghost of the past. We use the digraph “th” to do the work that Thorn and Eth used to do more efficiently. We struggle with vowel sounds (like the difference between cat, car, and call) that the Futhorc clarifies through distinct runes like Æsc and Ac.

Studying the Futhorc and the transition to Latin letters reminds us that English has always been a scavenger language. It takes what it needs—whether grammatical structures from the Vikings, vocabulary from the French, or letters from the Romans—and adapts them to its own stubborn, shifting phonology. The next time you write the word “the”, spare a thought for the rune Thorn, the lost letter that defined English for a thousand years.