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The Dalecarlian runes, or dalrunes, was a late version of the runic script that was in use in the Swedish province of Dalarna until the 20th century.[1] The province has consequently been called the "last stronghold of the Germanic script".[1]

Dalecarlian runes
Dalecarlian runic inscription from A.D. 1635
Script type	alphabet
Time period	16th to 20th centuries
Languages	North Germanic languages
Related scripts
Parent systems	Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Old Italic alphabets Elder Futhark Younger Futhark Medieval runes Dalecarlian runes
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

History and usage

When Carl Linnaeus visited Älvdalen in Dalarna in 1734, he made the following note in his diary:

The peasants in the community here, apart from using rune staves, still today write their names and ownership marks with runic letters, as is seen on walls, corner stones, bowls, etc. Which one does not know to be still continued anywhere else in Sweden.[2]

The Dalecarlian runes were derived from the medieval runes, but the runic letters were combined with Latin ones, and Latin letters would progressively replace the runes. At the end of the 16th century, the Dalecarlian runic inventory was almost exclusively runic, but during the following centuries more and more individual runes were replaced with Latin characters. In its last stage almost every rune had been replaced with a Latin letter, or with special versions that were influenced by Latin characters.[3]

Although the use of runes in Dalarna is an ancient tradition, the oldest dated inscription is from the last years of the 16th century. It is a bowl from the village of Åsen which says "Anders has made (this) bowl anno 1596". Scholars have registered more than 200 Dalecarlian runic inscriptions, mostly on wood, and they can be seen on furniture, bridal boxes, on the buildings of shielings, kitchen blocks, bowls, measuring sticks, etc. Most inscriptions are brief but there are also longer ones.[2]

The Dalecarlian runes remained in some use up to the 20th century. Some discussion remains on whether their use was an unbroken tradition throughout this period or whether people in the 19th and 20th centuries learned runes from books written on the subject. The character inventory was mainly used for transcribing Elfdalian.

Table

The following table, published in the scholarly periodical Fornvännen in 1906, presents the evolution of the Dalecarlian runes from the earliest attested ones in the late 16th century until a version from 1832:

Representation in Unicode

While not explicitly encoded in Unicode, Dalrunes, due to the similarities to runes used in other alphabets can be said to have certain of their runes encoded due to their presence in other runic alphabets, and many more can at least somewhat be well approximated.

Dalrunes in Unicode[4]

Latin	A	B	C	D	E	F	H	I	K	L	M	N	P	R	S	T	U	Y	Å	Ä	Ö
Rune	ᛅ, ᚷ	ᛒ	ᚲ	ᚦ	ᛆ	ᚠ, ᚨ	ᚼ	ᛁ	ᛲ, ᚴ	ᛚ	ᛖ, ᛘ	ᚿ, ᚳ	ᚹ, ᛘ	ᚱ	ᛋ, ᛁ, ᛌ	ᛏ	ᚢ	ᛠ	ᛡ	ᚯ	ᛦ
Name	ar	birkä	knäsol	dors	er	fir	hagal	is	kan	lagh	madhär	nådh	pir	re	sol	tir	ur

In year 2014 an inscription of a Dalrunic alphabet was found on the walls of a very old house in Älvdalen. In this case the Dalrunes were sorted in the order of the sounds of the characters in the latin alphabet (A B C), not in the order of the runic futhark (F U Þ). The Dalrunes were dated to the end of the 16th century, and the house was dendrochronologically dated to year 1285.[5] The alphabetic order of the runes means that the Dalrunes represents the sounds of the Latin characters in the alphabet. The dalrunes can hence also be located to the Basic Latin Unicode block, and could as well also be represented by the ASCII character range as letters of the latin alphabet, albeit with runic shapes.

A Dalrunic alphabet font is available on GitHub.[6]

See also

• List of runestones

References

Bibliography

• Enoksen, Lars Magnar (1998), Runor: historia, tydning, tolkning, Falun: Historiska Media, ISBN 91-88930-32-7.
• Jansson, Sven BF (1997) [1987], Runes in Sweden, Stockholm: Gidlund, ISBN 91-7844-067-X.

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