How to Write Your Family Name in Viking Runes

A first name in runes is fun. A family name in runes is something else.

I noticed this a while ago. People who come to our rune translator to type in their own name usually play with it for a minute and move on. The ones who type in a surname stay. They try the maiden name, then the grandmother's name, then the name on the old farm. I think it's because a surname isn't really yours. It belongs to everyone who carried it before you, and seeing it in the script their world used is a strange little jolt.

So this is a guide to doing that properly. Not just pasting letters into a chart, but understanding what you're looking at when the runes come back, and why some of them look wrong at first.

Which runes the Vikings actually used

There isn't one rune alphabet. There are three you'll run into, and it matters which one you pick.

The Elder Futhark is the old one, 24 runes, used from roughly the 2nd century up to the 700s. It's the set most people picture when they hear the word rune, and it's the one on most of our designs because it has a character for nearly every sound.

The Younger Futhark is what the Vikings themselves wrote with. Around the start of the Viking Age the Scandinavians cut the alphabet down to just 16 runes. Nearly every runestone standing in Sweden, Norway and Denmark is written in it. If you want your family name the way a Viking would have carved it, this is the one.

The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc went the other way and grew to around 30 runes. It was used in England, so it's the right choice if the family line is English rather than Scandinavian.

My honest advice: try the Younger Futhark first, because it's the real Viking-Age script. Then look at the Elder Futhark and see which one you like the look of. Both are legitimate. Just know which one you've got so you can say so when someone asks.

Why some letters disappear

This is the part that catches everyone. You type Petersen and the runes come back a letter short. Nothing is broken. Runes write sounds, not spelling.

A few things to expect:

• There is no C. The Norse didn't have the letter. A hard C (as in Carlson) becomes the K rune, a soft C (as in Cecilia) becomes S.
• There is no E or O in the Younger Futhark. The Vikings made do with 16 runes, so E was written with the I rune and O with the U rune. Olsen comes out looking like Ulsin. That's correct. That's how a rune carver in the year 1000 would have done it too.
• D and T share a rune. So do B and P, and K and G. Dahl and Tahl look identical. Berg ends in the same rune as Bergk would.
• TH was one rune. The Vikings had a single rune, thorn (ᚦ), for that sound. Our translator keeps things simple and writes T and H separately, so if you're doing it by hand for a tattoo or a carving, swap in the thorn.
• Carvers didn't double letters, and they dropped what they couldn't hear. On real runestones Hansson would lose an S and Thomas would lose its H. Our tool writes every letter you type so you can see what each one became. The carver's version is the one you make yourself afterwards, by crossing out what the ear doesn't need.

If the result bothers you, that's a good sign you've understood it. The runes aren't spelling your name. They're saying it.

A few Scandinavian surnames, done properly

Here are some common names in the Younger Futhark, with the sound the runes are actually making. Notice how often the spelling and the sound part ways.

A couple of these look a little rough to modern eyes. Dahl in particular feels like it's lost something. But that is exactly the point. A runestone carver had 16 characters and a chisel. He wasn't going to carve two different runes for sounds his own tongue didn't bother to separate.

If your family name isn't Scandinavian, the same rules still apply. Irish, German, English, Polish names all go through the same filter: say it out loud, write what you hear, drop what you don't.

Try it with your own name

You can do all of this by hand with a rune chart, and honestly it's a nice way to spend twenty minutes. But if you want to see a few names quickly, our rune translator does the work for you. Type a name, switch between Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark and Anglo-Saxon, and it shows you each rune with its meaning underneath.

A tip from watching how people use it: type the whole thing. First name, surname, the lot. Then try just the surname on its own. Then the name of the furthest-back ancestor you know. It's a bit of a rabbit hole.

The genealogy crowd worked this out long before I did. Randy Seaver, who writes the Genea-Musings blog, once ran a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge where readers wrote their own names in Viking runes and compared results. If you're into family history, that whole series is worth a look. The rune thing is a small part of it, but it's the part that made me smile.

If you want to keep it

Once you've got a version you like, write it down somewhere. Properly, with the Latin spelling beside it, and a note of which rune row you used. In twenty years someone in your family will find it and want to know.

We make a few things for exactly this. A personalised rune shirt with your name printed in runes across the chest, and a wooden Christmas ornament with a name in runes that people seem to buy for new babies and for grandparents in about equal numbers. Both use the Elder Futhark, the fuller 24-rune set, so every letter in the name gets its own rune. The whole personalised range is here if you want to browse. We design everything ourselves here in Halden, and we always show the Latin spelling next to the runes so there's no guessing.

But you don't need to buy anything. A sheet of paper and a pencil will do. The point was never the product. It was seeing a name that's been in your family for two hundred years written the way it might have looked a thousand years before that.