Twenty-four Germanic rune staves used for divination and inscription.
The Runes of the Elder Futhark are letters that are also names and forces: ᚠ fehu is the F-sound and "cattle/wealth," ᚦ thurisaz a sound and a "giant/thorn." Carved for inscriptions and cast or drawn for divination, each rune is at once a phoneme, a word, and a power.
Runes unlock the idea of a script that is never merely phonetic — where to write is to invoke, and every character carries concept and charge. For a study of writing systems, they are a vivid reminder that an alphabet can be a cosmology, its letters doubling as a vocabulary of fate.