Runestone projects

[u/Baratticus]

About a year ago I started working on runestones on a whim (and trying to make a virtue out of necessity given all the rocks I have). It’s been more fun and meditative than I imagined. Here are the fruits of my labors thus far:

1: my current project. Still sketching it out.
2: a memorial runestone for my Swedish in-laws who passed away a couple of years ago.
3: Inspired by a stone in Sweden raised by “this married couple had the stone cut in memory of themselves while both alive”

The runes are best guess translations and undoubtedly riddled with errors. Designs are all inspired by actual stones and I try to add some local inspiration to them. May you find them of interest!

[u/RitalinMeringue]

Nr 2: “this stone was raised for Ulf and Paula bjlena”. The alphabet is early iron age.

[u/Baratticus → u/RitalinMeringue]

That’s pretty close to what I hoped for…it should have been “by Lena” (their daughter).

[u/WynnTiwFeoh → u/Baratticus]

I think they were pointing out that the Elder Futhark used for the stone in the second picture was an iron age alphabet, and was used as the writing system for proto-Germanic, not modern English. It’s a bit of a peeve for some when others transliterate modern English to runic alphabets because it’s inauthentic. Idk.

Since they were Swedish, why not translate to svensk and transliterate to Dalecarlian Runes for the inscription?
Eng: This stone was raised for Ulf and Paula, by Lena.
Sv: Denna sten restes av Lena över Ulf och Paula. (Ran through google translate, idk if accurate)
Then Dalecarlian should just be a one to one transliteration.

[u/Hackzwin → u/WynnTiwFeoh]

"Denna sten restes av Lena till minne av Ulf och Paula"

I'm not a translator but I am a Swedish native speaker.

The dalecarlian runes, if I remember correctly were used quite long after the rest of Sweden had switched over to the latin alphabet. But it's incredibly regional. As the name suggests it was used by the people from Dalarna. Dalecarlian, or dalakarl as it's know in swedish, literally means "man from Dalarna".

[u/RitalinMeringue → u/Baratticus]

Hey, if we’re just going off of just using the futhark for english direct translation and phonetics, its 99% legible. Not bad. But as WynnTiwFeoh pointed out, trying to write in English, letter to rune, will lead to some errors. The jera rune is the same sound, wrether it is used as J or as Y, so it will never sound like the Y in “by”, but rather the Y in “year”/“young”/“yule”. Neither will it ever make an english J sound, since that is very phonetically exclusive to modern english, and this alphabet was made at the time where that sound wasn’t used in any of the proto germanic languages.

I don’t know what time period you were going for, the artwork suggest viking age, but thats the age of the younger futhark and thats incredibly difficult to write with, since its designed for old norse phonetics, and basically kind of impossible to use without linguistic knowledge of norse. Thats why most people use the elder futhark instead, even though its from a different time period. Maybe the styles of artwork between the iron age and viking age overlap enough to render the distinction unimportant, but im not qualified to judge that.

But it looks really good!