Pop Culture Runes
I don’t know about you, but I’ve binged myself round on various series and movies over the last few decades. From the Witcher, to Lord of The Rings, Star Wars to the Vikings. To name a few. I love a good story and what I’ve realised is that we as humans are governed by stories, stores we are told initially, stories we tell ourselves, and stories we consume.
One of the common things that lots of human stories have is that there is secret lore, often hidden in arcane and mysterious language. If like me you’ve watched the marvel movies you’ll see different languages used to make the mysterious symbols that the hero/bad guy uses.
Harry Potter even has a whole sub text about ‘Ancient Runes’ in room 6B.
One of the things I love about runes is that they are secret and ancient. Building on concepts and feelings that have been killed or died out over the centuries. The runes are a truly secret language. The old norse called them Rún meaning secret. The ú makes the oo sound.
Runes, literally means secret in the language of the people who created them. Therefore they are imbued with so much power, and why Hermione Granger and Ragnar Lothbrok used their powers. Fiction writers have been forever fascinated by the power of runes, the hidden and ancient energies contained there in. in game of thrones, Ser Ilyn Payne wields a silver greatsword six feet long and bright with runes. Runes are everywhere in modern fiction.
Why?
Well, they have power. There is always power in the hidden, in the unknown. This is because if it’s unknown its unlimited. If you don’t know what a thing is you cant put limits on it.
The famous story of Plato:
According to Diogenes Laërtius, when Plato gave the tongue-in-cheek definition of man as "featherless bipeds," Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man," and so the Academy added "with broad flat nails" to the definition.
Without a definition, we don’t know how powerful a thing is, and by their very name Runes are unknown. We know where they start, as we can see them, physically carved into rocks, or tattooed onto skin, or burned into wood. We don’t know where their energies end.
This is part of what makes them fascinating. Why authors love them, why set designers lover them. Runes can mean and do anything. They are fundamentally unknown.
From a historical perspective the only people who truly understood the runes were killed, and those with a sketchy knowledge of what the runes meant and did were left to pass the knowledge. This only increases the mystery, as with the greater lack of ancestral knowledge the unknown knowledge increases. This makes the potential power in the runes increase.
And into this gap of unknown the authors, magic users, witches and mystics form the world put even more of their knowledge, and desire into the runes. This energy increases the power of the runes that can be accessed, as no one know exactly how the runes were made to be used.
We know that the god of kings Odin gave the runes to us, ages ago, a story shrouded in myth and legend. We also know that the conversion to Christianity removed almost all ancestral knowledge from most of Europe.
What this has left us with is a pool of energy that is underutilised, and indeed used for nefarious purposes. Power only exists if it is used, and the runes cry out to be used.
What is great about this unknown Rún power is that we have access to it now and can choose how we manifest that power in our worlds.
Big love
Rich xxx