Where the Rune Meanings Actually Come From

The names attached to the characters, and the meanings built on them, do not come from the inscriptions. They are reconstructed from three medieval rune poems, one Old English and two Scandinavian, which give each character a name and a short verse, and from a manuscript list of Gothic letter names. Those sources are centuries later than the row's period of use and disagree with each other, so a reconstructed name is a scholarly inference and its meaning is an inference on top of that. The divinatory use of runes as commonly practised today is more recent still.

Systems of drawing marked tokens and reading them by keyword were developed in the twentieth century, and the widely sold handbook that established the modern format dates from the 1980s. There is one ancient report of lot casting among Germanic peoples, in which marked slips cut from a branch are scattered on a white cloth and drawn while looking upward. It does not mention runes, does not describe an alphabet, and cannot be used to attest the practice it is usually cited for. The atlas records the historical script and the modern divinatory system as two different subjects, connected by the second having taken its material from the first.