In the historical record runes served writing and charm-carving rather than a fixed oracle. In the modern revival Tiwaz is read for justice, honor, self-sacrifice, courage and victory won by right conduct. It should be noted that the Tiwaz character, like several runes, was appropriated as an emblem by twentieth-century Germanic-nationalist and, later, National Socialist organizations, where it served as a unit insignia; that political misuse is distinct from both the ancient meaning and contemporary reconstructionist practice. The divinatory keywords given here belong to the modern esoteric tradition and are presented as a symbolic system, not a prediction.
Tiwaz sits close to the centre of the honest reckoning this atlas insists on for the whole subject: its reconstructed meaning, justice, sacrifice and self-limiting duty, draws directly on the attested mythology of the god Tyr, making it one of the runes where a genuine, well-documented ancient religious association exists, in sharp contrast to the modern, twentieth-century invention of rune divination as a practice. The Armanen rune system devised by the Austrian Guido von List, published in Das Geheimnis der Runen (1908) and adopted by later völkisch and, in the Nazi-era Ahnenerbe research institute associated with Karl Maria Wiligut, explicitly esoteric-nationalist circles, drew on Tyr-associated symbolism of this kind for its own racially inflected reinterpretation, a documented historical appropriation this atlas records plainly rather than passing over.