Long-branch vs short-twig runes

One of the most common confusions in this subject is treating long-branch and short-twig as separate alphabets. They are not. Both write exactly the same sixteen runes with the same sound values and the same names. What differs is how much of each character actually gets cut.

Long-branch runes (sometimes called Danish runes) use the fullest forms, with branches extending the whole height of the stave. They dominate on monumental runestones, where legibility mattered and there was time to carve properly.

Short-twig runes (sometimes called Swedish-Norwegian or Rök runes) reduce those branches to short strokes. They are quicker to cut, and they turn up more often on everyday objects than on monuments. Staveless or Hälsinge runes push the reduction further still, sometimes removing the main stave, to the point where reading them depends heavily on knowing what the text is likely to say.

One practical consequence shows up in the table below. Unicode encodes the long-branch and short-twig forms as separate characters (it names them that way, ᚼ against ᚽ) but it encodes no staveless ones at all. The third column therefore cannot be shown as text on this page, or on any other; that is a gap in the character set, not in the evidence.

The regional names are conventional rather than strict. Both forms appear across Scandinavia, and carvers mixed them: the Rök stone uses both, along with several cipher systems, in a single monument.