What you see above is a reconstruction of the Germanic futhark, in the order that the runes are usually presented.
I first became interested in runes while reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit in the third grade. Imagine my surprise to find that the "elvish" characters labeling the illustrations were actually a real alphabet, and the inscriptions were in English! While in the military I had the good fortune to serve a five-year tour in England, where my idea of a pleasant weekend was driving around the country looking for stone circles, standing stones, and other ancient monuments.
"Runes" are the generic term used for letters used in several related alphabets that were generally used in Europe between the second and eleventh centuries CE (although they survived in Scandinavia for quite some time after). Notice I said several alphabets. Specifics of runic alphabets (or "futharks") varied greatly with geography and time. Further confusion results from the fact that runes from different regions were sometimes mixed, rotated, or flipped; and sometimes runes were even scattered among Roman letters! So anything you read about them here (or anywhere else) is open to interpretation. The alphabets you'll see on this page, the correct number and order of the letters, and the names and meanings of the symbols are reconstructions.
Runes form alphabets, plain and simple. Anything you've been told about their "mystic properties" is pure hogwash. Runes were considered "mystic" to ignorant people of the dark ages precisely because those people were illiterate and superstitious. Many of them could not read. (Many people of modern times consider runes to be "mystic" in and of themselves. Such people are simply gullible... they do not think.). To quote from R.I. Page(***):
...Most distinguished Scandinavian runologists now take the view that the Germanic peoples used runes as they would have done any other script (had they known any other), for practical, day-to-day purposes. Of course, if they wanted to cut a religious or magical text, if they wished to produce a charm word, they would use runic, the only script they had for it, just as a modern wizard would be likely to write his magic gibberish in Roman characters. But that would not confer upon runes the status of a magical script.
That is not to say that many of the people who used these symbols did not believe runes had mystic properties. They did, but I tend to believe that these properties were assigned after the fact by people that really didn't understand them well. It is true that each rune was assigned a name. It is also true that often a single rune was used to represent the object for which it was named, or even just the syllable (as in using the "M" rune in place of "mon" in the name "Solomon"). Thus runes were used as ideograms, phonetic script, and alphabetic script, sometimes in the same message!
You'll note that runes have very distinctive shapes, having vertical and slanted lines, but no horizontal or curved lines. This form is dictated by their function. Runes are designed for inscription; particularly, for inscription in wood. As such, their form takes the grain of the wood into account. Vertical lines were cut at right angles to the grain. These an the slanted lines showed were easily discernible. Horizontal lines would have disappeared into the grain and curved lines are difficult to carve, so both were avoided.
What you see above is a reconstruction of the Germanic futhark,
in the order that the runes are usually presented.
Of the three major variations of this alphabet family, this futhark is the oldest.
Name notwithstanding, as alphabets go, even the "Elder Futhark" is a Johnny-come-lately. The earliest examples we have are from the 2nd century CE. In comparison, some of the more well-known alphabets of the ancient world (Hebrew, Roman, Greek, and many others) are thousands of years older. As you can tell from the shapes of some letters the futhark borrowed from these outside sources. The F, U, B, T, L, H, I and S share not only their shapes but also their sounds with the Roman alphabet.
Incidentally, the word futhark comes from the pronunciation of the first six runes, just as the English word alphabet is derived from the names of the first two letters of the Greek aphabet (alpha and beta). Obviously there's no "right" way to phonetically order any alphabet!
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}
The English expanded the number of runes to accommodate new
sounds, changing the sound and position of some of them in the
process. As a result they had a "futhork" rather than a
futhark.
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}
Rune-masters in the North went the opposite direction fo the
English when they reduced, rather than expanded, the number of runes.
Even after some study it seems that this was a puzzling move, because
they eliminated many sounds that you might think were necessary. For
example, there was no E, O, P, D, or G! On the other hand, there are
two A's and two R's , subtly differing in pronunciation.
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}, 
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In later years the Scandinavians reduced the futhark to only 16
characters (again, with some mirroring or regional variations... In
particular, the might
have been used as an A, O (or something similar) or even a B). The
letters that were left were not enough to represent the spoken
language, so they took to modifying the sounds of some of the letters
by adding dots to them (thus a K could become a G, or a T become a
D). I have no idea why they just didn't retain the characters from
the elder futhark that represented these sounds.
There are plenty of variations on the runes you've seen above. There's no way I'm going to take time to draw them all, even if I knew them. Just keep in mind that if you see anything at other sources that contradict what I say here, then that source is likely to be also correct. In particular, the various late forms that were used in Scandinavia were so varied and confusing that I don't really want to go into them here, as they are of little interest to folks making casual inquiry on the Web and I don't have the scholarly background to make sense of them for you.
These are ordered by the Roman
alphabetic equivalents. I've put the names of the runes next to them
where I know them... and took a stab at some others (I've marked my
uncertainty with question marks). If you know more than I then
please send me mail so I
can improve this table.
Footnote 1: CE = Common Era. That's the currently accepted terminology for what we in the west used to call "AD".
Footnote 2: Can you tell which of the runes above are scanned images and which ones I drew on the computer? Heck, I can't tell easily, even though I personally did the image manipulation! The amazing tool I used for this is called "the GIMP". It's fabulous, it's wonderful, it's totally and completely FREE, and it only runs on Linux.
Footnote 3: Runes, R.I.Page, p12. This concise and well-written reference to runes is part of the British Museum's excellent Reading the Past series.
Finally , for unknowingly assisting with this web page, I'd like to credit Bjorn Stade, from whose website I "borrowed" the the bulk of the graphics and some of the information you see here. (You'll find some minor variations between the runes he shows on his site and the runes I show. That's not unusual, as there was a great deal of regional variation. My runes are the version reconstructed by R.I. Page). Please visit Bjorn's website, it's very nice, and he presents the names of the runes and their ideographic representations (which I won't reproduce here). Be forewarned, it's in German.
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