Early forms of literature
Literature in this period is a mix of the everyday life events and a “vision of the mysterious and the fantastic, the dangerous and the horrible, to which elements of the newly imposed Christian faith were added” (Golban, 2007). Before Christianization, the Anglo-Saxons had mostly oral literature, and had no actual form of literature, so what they used for writing were symbols or “runes” (which means mystery or secrecy), inscribed in stone or wood.
The characters together are known as futhorc (or fuþorc), from the sound of the Old English first six runes, and actually they were used from the fifth century to approximately the eleventh century.