Northern Tide

Northern Tide puts a Viking-Age runestone workbench in your pocket. Sweep a raking light across a simulated weathered rubbing — eroded chisel-marks surface only when the beam crosses them at the right angle, just as they do under real oblique light in the field. Tap a mark to lift it off the stone, declare your hand (Long-branch or Short-twig Younger Futhark), assign the stave from an authentic rune-row palette, and commit it home. Watch each letter of the Old Norse gloss firm up beneath your thumb as you read — letter by letter, stave by stave. Six practice stones ramp from a clean two-rune word all the way to a weathered bind-rune line cut in short-twig. The app validates every reading against a full legality model: illegal stave–hand combinations are refused, dotted (stunginn) variants are handled separately, and bind-runes share a trunk exactly as they do on real monuments. A clean pass with no backtracks earns the highest mastery rating. File finished transliterations in the Finds Drawer, attach a photo of the actual stone if you have one, and export a crisp 1080 × 1350 transliteration card straight to your Photos library. Three reference tools deepen your scholarship between reads. The Rune-Row Register catalogues 48 staves across Elder and Younger Futhark — long-branch, short-twig, staveless, and dotted variants — each with sound value, attested date range, scholarly note, and a favourites star. The Carving School guides you through 15 order-gated lessons, from the sixteen-rune alphabet to the Jelling-style title konungr, each closing with a knowledge check before the next unlocks. The Runologist's Lexicon defines 34 method terms — normalization, transliteration, hapax legomenon, bind-rune — the vocabulary a working runologist uses at the stone. Northern Tide is fully offline. No account, no ads, no in-app purchases, no analytics. Three handcrafted visual themes — Aurora Cold-Iron, Bog-Iron Rubbing, and Midnight Vellum — are drawn procedurally so every glyph feels like it belongs on a stave, not a screen.