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In the ancient Germanic worldview, the spoken word holds a lot of creative powers. Catharina Raudvere, a Scandinavian scholar, said that pronouncing words was seen as having a lot of influence over life. The impact that a spoken sentence had couldn’t be questioned and was never able to be taken back as if it were physical in some way. They believed words were able to create reality and not the other way around. Germanic society believed that if you spoke a thought out loud, you were making the thought a reality, altering all reality accordingly.
Each rune is a phoneme. This is the smallest sound unit in language, like “r,” “t,” or “s.” For today’s linguists, they often forget that there is a connection between the signified, the world’s reality, and the signifier. The sound that you use to say the world is simply arbitrary. But there are some linguists who embrace an opposing theory, which is referred to as “phonosemantics.” This is the thought that there is a connection between the sounds of a word and what the word means. Basically, this means the phoneme carries a meaning.
This view of language agrees with what Northern European’s believed. Runes create the inherent creative power of speech as a visual medium. Besides the fact that rune means letter second to mystery or secret, we need to remember the ordeal that Odin had to go through to discover these runes.
When looking at the runes through a phonosemantic perspective, it takes on another layer of significance. It shows that the relationship between the graphic representation and phoneme in meaningful. This means that the runes weren’t just a means of fostering communication. They could also facilitate communication between the invisible world and the visible world, which provided them the basis for a plethora of magical acts.
Runes have been used to write several different languages, which include Hebrew, Russian, Lithuanian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, English, Frisian, German, Gothic, and other Semitic languages. Runes are able to be read from left to right or right to left, even on a single artifact. This means that it is very hard to translate a runic inscription, and it is further complicated by the fact that runemasters would sometimes write cryptic puzzles.
