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Anglo-Saxon runes or Anglo-Frisian runes are runes that were used by the Anglo-Saxons and Medieval Frisians (collectively called Anglo-Frisians) as an alphabet in their native writing system, recording both Old English and Old Frisian (Old English: rūna, ᚱᚢᚾᚪ, "rune").
It is also known as the Honorian alphabet or the Runes of Honorius after the legendary magus (though Theban is dissimilar to the Germanic runic alphabet), or the witches' alphabet due to its use in modern Wicca and other forms of witchcraft as one of many substitution ciphers to hide magical writings such as the contents of a Book of Shadows ...
The Finnish word runo, meaning 'poem', is an early borrowing from Proto-Germanic, [12] and the source of the term for rune, riimukirjain, meaning 'scratched letter'. [13] The root may also be found in the Baltic languages, where Lithuanian runoti means both 'to cut (with a knife)' and 'to speak'. [14]
The Elder Futhark (named after the initial phoneme of the first six rune names: F, U, Þ, A, R and K) has 24 runes, often arranged in three groups of eight runes; each group is called an ætt [2] (pl. ættir; meaning 'clan, group', although sometimes thought to mean eight). In the following table, each rune is given with its common transliteration:
Runes were carved into amulets, weapons, and stones, where they were believed to convey protection, power, or other magical properties. The use of runes persisted even after the adoption of the Latin alphabet, particularly in the Scandinavian countries, where they continued to be used in magical practices well into the medieval period. Modern ...
The othala rune is such a case: the o sound in the Anglo-Saxon system is now expressed by ōs ᚩ, a derivation of the old Ansuz rune; the othala rune is known in Old English as ēðel (with umlaut due to the form ōþila-) and is used to express an œ sound, but is attested only rarely in epigraphy (outside of simply appearing in a futhark row).
Their distribution is mostly limited to southern Scandinavia, northern Germany and Frisia (the "North Sea Germanic runic Koine"), with stray finds associated with the Goths from Romania and Ukraine. Linguistically, the 3rd and 4th centuries correspond to the formation of Proto-Norse , just predating the separation of West Germanic into Anglo ...
The name meanings are inferred from the Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems. A hallmark of medieval runes was the optional sting or bar diacritic which was often used to indicate when a rune stands for a secondary sound; ᚡ gave /v/, ᚤ gave /y/ and /ø/, ᚧ gave /ð/, ᚵ gave /g/ and /ɣ/, ᛂ gave /e/ and rarely /j/, ᛑ gave /d/, ᛔ gave ...