Fa

The Armanen row is a modern esoteric system with a documented author, a documented date and a documented method of composition. None of that is disputed, including by the people who use it.

What Guido von List said happened

Guido von List (1848-1919) was an Austrian writer of romantic nationalist fiction and journalism who had spent decades arguing that a suppressed indigenous Germanic religion lay beneath Austrian folk custom. In 1902 he underwent a cataract operation and was blind for about eleven months. During that period, he later wrote, the meaning of the runes was disclosed to him.

He published the result as a periodical article in 1906 and as the book Das Geheimnis der Runen in 1908. His claim was not that he had invented anything. It was that he had recovered the secret alphabet of the Armanen, a priest-king caste he believed had governed a pre-Christian Aryan civilisation.

No trace of that caste exists in any source.

What he actually assembled

The row can be checked against the epigraphic record, and when it is, its construction is plain:

• Sixteen of the eighteen characters are the Younger Futhark, the alphabet genuinely used across Scandinavia in the Viking Age.
• Two more, Eh and Gibor, were added.
• The names are largely the historical Scandinavian rune names, sometimes lightly altered, thurs to Thorn, kaun to Ka, madr to Man.
• The meanings are new. Where the medieval rune poems can be compared, List agrees with them only where it suits him.

The frequent claim in modern popular sources that Armanen runes are "not Elder Futhark" is true but misleading. The Elder Futhark has twenty-four characters and was out of general use by about 800. List was working from the sixteen-character system that replaced it.

Where eighteen came from

The number is the reason the two extra runes exist. In the Old Norse Havamal, the section called the Ljodatal has Odin recite eighteen charms that he alone knows. List read that as testimony to a lost eighteen-rune futhark.

The passage describes songs, not letters, and does not mention runes in the enumeration at all. No eighteen-character futhark appears anywhere in the thousands of surviving runic inscriptions. The number was fixed first and the alphabet was built to reach it.

Why this is still worth an entry

Because it is used, and because a great deal of what circulates as "rune meaning" on the modern market descends from List by way of intermediaries who no longer name him. Knowing that the Armanen row is a work of 1902-1908 by a named author is what makes it possible to read it as what it is, an early twentieth-century occult system with a coherent internal logic, rather than as evidence about the Germanic Iron Age.

The eighteen Armanen runes were published by the Austrian occultist Guido von List in Das Geheimnis der Runen in 1908. They are his construction, not a historical alphabet, and the useful question about any one of them is what he took and what he changed.

The character behind it

Fa corresponds to the Younger Futhark character whose historical name was fé, meaning livestock and, by extension, movable wealth. That character is genuinely attested: it appears on Viking-age inscriptions and in the medieval rune poems, where the verse on fé is about wealth and the trouble it causes between kinsmen.

What von List did with it

He kept the sound value F and the shape, retitled the character Fa, and attached to it a meaning of his own devising within his eighteen-rune system. Sixteen of his eighteen correspond in this way to the Younger Futhark row; the remaining two, Eh and Gibor, have no counterpart there. His sequence is also not identical to the Younger Futhark order at every point.

What the row is and is not

Von List presented the eighteen as an ancient Germanic priestly alphabet recovered rather than invented, and framed the number eighteen on the eighteen rune-charms of the Havamal. Historians of the subject do not accept the recovery claim. The row was subsequently taken up in volkisch circles and, in the 1930s and 1940s, by National Socialist organisations. That reception is documented, it is a real part of the object's history, and this atlas records it rather than omitting it.