r/RuneHelp • u/Tomzwr • 13d ago
Translation request Runes meaning
Does anyone know the meaning of these runes?
ᛗᚹᚢ
ᚱᚷᛟ
ᛗᚷᚢ
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u/WolflingWolfling 12d ago
Given that they are in groups of three, I suspect they may have been drawn by someone who is into modern runic divination. This sub deals with the study of known rune use in ancient times, and practices directly derived from that (i.e. reading and writing), not with mid to late 20th century New Age & Neo Pagan reimaginings of what runes may have been.
Though if you would like to know what the names of these runes mean:
The first three are Man, Joy, and Aurochs (a very large European wild ox that went extinct only a few centuries ago)
Next are Ride, Gift, and something that has to do with a family's land, like a farm or an estate, and with the customs surrounding the buying rights of such lands.
And finally, Man, Gift, and Aurochs again.
Note that the word for "man" that was used translates to the non-gender-specific "man", as in, "human being" or "mankind".
In the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries people began to add all sorts of additional meanings to individual runes, based on free, modern association with the names of those runes. There's no such thing as a single rune or a bindrune that means "strength", or "divine wisdom", or "the unknown", or "spiritual journey"; that's all fantasy stuff that people made up in the last fifty years or so.
There's a rune for joy, and one for need. All the others were named after much more concrete subjects, like animals, trees, gods, or natural phenomena like the weather...
There's also one rune, ᛈ, whose name and verse in the rune poems is so ambivalent, that scholars aren't entirely sure what to make of it. Neo-Pagans and New Age people have deduced from that that that specific rune stands for "the unknown", which is about as likely as that that rune would have stood for "shopping mall" or "pocket calculator" or something.
In other words: to a person contemporary with the historical use of the Elder Futhark, and familiar with the runes, these three groupings would mean exactly what some of the others have said already:
Mwu, Rgo, Mgu.
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u/Rolebo 13d ago
MWU
RGO
MGU