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The Rune and Its Name

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The Rune and Its Name

Wunjo is the eighth and final rune of the first aett of the Elder Futhark, carrying the phoneme "w." Its reconstructed name means joy or bliss. The rune closes the aett of Freyr on a note of well-being: harmony, comfort and the contentment of one who wants for nothing and is free of sorrow. Its name is among the more stable across the Germanic languages.

Wunjo stands eighth and last in the aett of Freyr. Its Old English futhorc counterpart, wynn, meaning joy, receives a stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describing joy as belonging to one who knows little of suffering, sorrow or anxiety, and who has prosperity and happiness enough to be content. Wunjo is another of the eight Elder Futhark runes with no surviving Younger Futhark counterpart, so it is attested only in the Old English poem.

Runologists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form behind the name as *wunjō, part of the comparative linguistic evidence, alongside cognate vocabulary across the older Germanic languages, used to establish the name's original sense independent of the later rune poems themselves. The Old English futhorc's own list of twenty-nine runes retained Wunjo unchanged in shape and value, unlike some later Anglo-Saxon additions devised for sounds the original twenty-four did not cover.

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