Blah:
I've used the elder futhark for divination and magic years back when I was active with transwork and magic, and I've used the younger futhark in Stav, which is a martial art tradition based on the Younger Futhark passed on by a guy from Norway( for more info see http://stavinternational.org ). There's also the anglo-saxon futhark, and the armenan(sp?) futhark.
Where did all these futharks come from? In the Havamal the last part is a description of 16 runes...and there are 16 runes in the younger futhark, but, the 24 rune futhark is in more common usage now. I heard somewhere that there was a big meeting of rune masters at Upsalla (can't remember what century now) and they collaborated and decided upon a more standardised system, the Younger Futhark.
I know many who like to use a "daily rune" by reaching into a bag of runes and pulling one out which is a sort of divination about how your day and state of mind can be. This can also be good for anyone at any level since each time you pull out a rune, you can go look it up in a book or two and then note your day and how it corelates.
Spend time with the runes. Study them independant of the thoughts of
others.
After doing this for about a year .. get a book.
I use them as part of everyday life. graved into my tools and reddened (and regularly re-reddened depending on how rough a day im having*S*), for divination, meditation, on the mailbox, in the timber patterns of trusswork. If you look around, you will see runes almost everywhere.
Futharks . . . I meditate on the Elder, and use it in bindrunes and
galdor, but also do Stav, which is based on the Younger
Futhark---one of my goals as a heathen is to develop a series of
Stav movements (like a kata) based on the Elder. One of the
interesting things about the Younger is that it *shrank* during a
period when the Danish language was actually GAINING
phonemes, not losing them . . . I believe this was because the
Futharks represent our core mythology; making it shorter made it
easier to teach, and remember, our lore during the conversion
era.
The Armanen Runes were developed in late 1800s, iirc, by Guido von
List, in Germany, based on his occultic meditation on the 18 rune
charms in the Havamal. Von List was part of the general Germanic
folkway revival of that period, and an early pioneer in Germanic
ceremonial magic circles and occult societies. *Some* of this material
was, like the swastika, resurrected by the Nazis, particularly the SS,
for their own purposes, but predates Hitler by a wide margin.
Thorssen does a rather extensive treatment of the Armanen system in
"Rune Might" . . . and Guido von List's own work may even be available
in translation, I'm not sure.
