Nytt om runer 17 (2002, publ. 2004), 45–46

The ISO Runes Project

With the assistance of grants from the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Cultural Fund, a standardization of runes in ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) has been carried out by the "ISO Runes Project". The centres for runic research in Denmark (Marie Stoklund), Norway (James E. Knirk) and Sweden (Helmer Gustavson) as well as Klaus Düwel (Göttingen) and R. I.. Page (Cambridge) were participants in the project. Svante Lagman (runologist and computer typesetter) and Olle Järnefors (of The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm) participated as consultants. The project was formally connected to the National Heritage Board of Sweden.

The goal of the project was to produce a proposal for a standardized repertoire of runic chararcters for inclusion of the runic script into the standard for computer encoding of characters ISO 10646 (also known as Unicode). The primary users for this script are scholars in the fields of runology, the history of Germanic languages and the general history of the Germanic peoples. They will be well served since these characters can be freely used intermixed with other scripts in word processing, text databases, publishing, and text communication such as electronic mail. Within the ISO system an international standard for sorting is under preparation which will cover all characters within ISO 10646 (Unicode).

At the Third International Symposium on Runes and Runic Inscriptions in Valdres, Norway, in August 1990, the need to represent runes by real graphic symbols in text production of various kinds was discussed. Project meetings were held in Oslo in March 1993 and in Stockholm in November 1994 and March 1995. The proposal from the "ISO Runes Project" (cf. Digitala runor, TemaNord 1997:623, København 1997) was accepted with some minor adjustments in 2001, and Unicode now includes runic characters in accordance with the proposal.

Acceptance of the proposal by ISO means that there is already now a firm foundation for practical applications. You may, for example, code independent of choice of fonts, you will have an unlimited character set available, and you are assured that software for keyboarding of texts, sorting and searching can be used for all fonts with standard coding.

The runic part of the coded character set standard in ISO 10646 (Unicode) is as per the table below. Note that, for example, the rune Þ has the character code 16A6, and the rune K the character code 16D5.

Helmer Gustavson
National Heritage Board of Sweden

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