Can you tell the difference between these three runes? Can you tell which is genuinely ancient, which was carved in stone and wood by Vikings, and which is a product of 19th/20th-century Nazi mysticism? A thread, tw for nazi shit.

How about now? This is why modern people with an interest in runes should base their understanding in actual material culture and not abstract prototypical idealizations that are not only susceptible to nazi influence but kind of is a nazi idea itself.

I'm gonna skip some steps here for brevity so if you need me to elaborate on something just let me know.

The rune commonly called *algiz or *elhaz 'moose' based on Old English eolh 'elk' was originally used to write a phoneme of uncertain sound that was either /z/ or had developed from something that was /z/ in earlier times. It's often written "ʀ" because through observation

of written language over hundreds of years, we see this sound slowly come to merge with /r/. This is the -r stuck on the ends of lots of Norse words, for example the runic name *nauðiz > *nauðiʀ > nauðʀ > nauðr. It's sorta like the Norse version of -os and -us in Greek and Latin.

When this sound was lost the rune was recycled. In Old Norse the functional and graphical equivalent is ýr 'yew (wood; bow)' and came to indicate the sound "y" or "ý"; its name however is cognate with the Old English ᛇ rune eoh rather than the ᛉ rune.

In the Elder Futhark period the "branches" could face up or down arbitrarily as seen in the picture. "branches up" ᛉ predominates early but gives way to "branches down" ᛦ over time. This has nothing to do with a so-called "death rune" which is a modern Armanen invention.

In Norse inscriptions the short-twig version ᛧ, just a short vertical line at the baseline of the writing space, is extremely common. The ᛨ variant that looks like two arrows facing up and down is an Icelandic innovation.

In the Elder Futhark period the m-rune ᛗ is built on two staves; this form is still used in the very earliest Younger Futhark inscriptions but the new single-stave variants quickly took over. With ᛦ permanently facing downward, ᛘ was available for reuse as the m-rune.

Its name is cognate in all futharks, OE mann, ON maðr, meaning 'person; human being; man.' Let's table the discussion of "male person" being the unmarked category of "man" for now. There is no specification for gender

I want to point something out. It's a common belief that runes "have straight lines." While that's common in Elder Futhark I actually struggled to find good pictures of straight-lined younger futhark ýr and maðr. Curved lines is the clear preference generally.

In the early 20th c. Guido List began to describe the Armanen runes, part of a völkisch mystical system in the Western Esoteric tradition drawing especially on Theosophy but using Germanic material culture as fodder for its totalizing universalist narrative of Aryan supremacy.

The runes were loosely based on the 16-rune Younger Futhark but altered to correspond better to the Armanist cosmology, with 18 runes. In this system the runes stood for 18 irreducible universal properties of reality, the building blocks of the universe.

If this sounds like a cheap ripoff of Kabbalah, it's because it was. Already in the 17th century Johan Bure was accusing the Jews of stealing Kabbalah from God's true chosen people, the Goths. Völkish Austrian and German mystics went even further, using farfetched interpretation

to read Armanist wisdom into symbols found anywhere in the world to support their claim that in ancient times Aryans had spread all over the globe enlightening the inferior races. They thought runes were like tens of thousands of years old.

The runes are supposed to be derived from the hexagonal crystal shape best exemplified by the hagal rune, which is something of a first principle to the mystical system's sort of sacred geometric cosmology. That's part of the weird hangup about straight, geometric lines.

The so-called "life rune" and "death rune" come out of this. The "life rune" is Man, derived from younger futhark maðr (not from *algiz/elhaz); the "death rune" derives from younger futhark ýr, which *is* the (functional but not linguistic) reflex of *algiz/elhaz.

The so-called death rune is, linguistically and in meaning, a reflex of the ᛇ rune conventionally called *īwaz/īhaz (unless ᛉ was already the "yew" rune in the Elder Futhark, in which case we don't know what ᛇ was called).

From what I can tell the "life" and "death" meanings are secondary or at least later; in List the Man-Rune represents "humanity" and the Yr-rune represents "irrationality, error, femininity"; it's sometimes called the "Wieb-Rune" ('woman/wife-rune') e.g. by Gorsleben

because the entire religion ultimately boils down to "we (white men) need to control white women and non-white people so white women can be made to procreate with us and only us."

Anyway I have no satisfying ending or conclusion here. I just really need ostensible anti-racists who are trying to "reclaim" völkisch bullshit like the "life rune" to start seriously interrogating their own assumptions and internalizations.

At this point we have to reckon with the fact that this nazi bullshit is more characteristic of the general modern experience of runes than actual runes are. We can't do this without reconnecting to sources that can be seen and touched with our hands.

Let's revisit this image. How many of these are even recognizable to most people as runes? I'd guess a few Futhark ones, and then all of the ones in the right column.

I urge people who genuinely care about this material to consider the ways our expectations have been shaped through modern reinterpretation and how much of what you're trying to reclaim is the co-optation itself.