>>3743They originated with the Elder Fuþark during the Proto-Germanic (or Common Germanic) period, before the division into the major Germanic language families that were the ancestors of the individual regional languages we have today. They were most likely derived from the Etruscan alphabet or another Old Italic alphabet, but this conclusion is based on letterform similarities rather than written history or a clear archaeological trail. During this period there were a canonical 24 runes, representing a near one-to-one relationship between characters and phonemes.
Of course, in the Havamal, Oðin "takes up" the runes (
nema, v: to take; in descendant languages: to steal, to learn, to capture, to mine) at the end of his ordeal on the world-tree, but it is not known what relation, if any, this has to the historical proliferation of writing among the Germanic peoples.
As the Germanic peoples spread across northern and central Europe, they brought the runes with them. In the North Germanic areas, they were culled down to the 16 runes of the Younger Fuþark. Here, several characters represented multiple phonemes, like the vowels do in the Modern English alphabet today. In some places such as Denmark, the letterforms were slightly reworked. In Sweden, they further underwent a couple of rounds of simplification.
In the West Germanic areas, the Elder Fuþark instead expanded on its way across the English Channel with the migration of Germanic people to the British Isles. The Anglo-Saxon (or Anglo-Frisian) Fuþorc added additional characters to represent new phonemes as the phoneme inventory shifted and expanded with the development of Old English from the languages of the West Germanic people.
Three rune poems survive, the Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems providing lore on the runes surviving in the Younger Fuþark, and the Anglo-Saxon rune poem providing lore on the Fuþorc. For the runes of the Elder Fuþark that did not make the cut into the Younger, the Anglo-Saxon rune poem is our only surviving lore. There is overlap between all three for the runes that exist in all of the fuþarks, and there are also differences. From these we can gather some possible information about ancient ideographic origins of the runes, but for some they may simply be convenient mnemonics.
With the expansion of Rome, and Christianity with it, monks and Christian scribes displaced the runemasters and the mysterious ᛖᚱᛁᛚᚨᛉ, and likewise the Latin alphabet displaced the fuþarks. Two runes survived into the insular Latin script of the British isles used to transcribe Old English:
wynn (Ƿ) and
thorn (Þ), derived from the runes of the same names, ᚹ and ᚦ. Wynn didn't last long because it looks too much like the latin letter P, but the thorn survives even today in Icelandic orthography.
Presumably the "deus vult" crowd heeded the warning of the rune poem that ᚦ is an evil thing for a knight to touch, and so it marches on as the last survivor. The lowercase þ is peculiar in that it is the only character in Latin minuscule with both an ascender and a descender.