Fewer Signs for More Sounds

The change makes no sense as a technical improvement and that is what makes it interesting. As the older row was cut from twenty four characters to sixteen, the language it wrote was gaining distinctions rather than losing them, so the new row had to make one sign carry several sounds. A single character serves for more than one vowel quality, another covers a voiced and an unvoiced consonant, and a reader has to supply the difference from context and from knowing the language. Nobody has a settled explanation for why literate people would do this deliberately. Proposals include a drive toward a smaller memorised set, the influence of a particular scribal centre, and a shift in what runes were mainly used for.

The reduction happened across Scandinavia within a relatively short period, which suggests a change that spread rather than a gradual decay. Three forms of the row were in use. One has full length staves and is found on most monumental stones; another uses shortened side strokes and appears more often in everyday and Norwegian contexts; a third reduces the characters almost to shorthand and is difficult to read without knowing what it should say. They overlap in time and place, so the difference is one of register rather than of period.