Kenaz

The k-rune’s Proto-Germanic name is not known for certain. The form most often given is *kauną (also written *kaunan), matching the Old Norse rune name kaun, ‘ulcer’ or ‘boil’; reference tables mark even this reconstruction with a question mark. The name Kenaz, common in modern rune books, is built instead on the Old English rune name cēn, ‘torch’. Neither can be proved for the oldest period. A Gothic name, chozma, is written in the Salzburg Codex, a manuscript copy of a Northumbrian text, and the Gothic letter itself is usually called kusma. The rune stands for the sound k.

It is the sixth rune of the Elder Futhark, used from about the second to the eighth century, and the last of the six letters that give the row its name: f u þ a r k. It is fully carved in the oldest complete row, on the Kylver Stone of about 400, and it is in the rows on the Vadstena and Mariedamm bracteates of the sixth century and the Grumpan bracteate of about 500. Its early shape is an angle like <; there is wide agreement that it comes from the letter C of the Old Italic or Latin alphabets.

English and Scandinavian forms later went separate ways. Dickins (1915) points to the spear-shaft from Kragehul on Funen and a carved piece from Lindholm in Skåne, which share an in-between form of k with the earliest English inscriptions. In the Younger Futhark, whose 16 runes were complete by the late eighth century, the rune became kaun, ᚴ, and stood for k, g and ng, because that row no longer wrote voiced and unvoiced sounds apart. In England it became cēn, ᚳ. When c came to be said in more than one way before front vowels, a new rune, calc, ᛣ, was made for the hard k; it appears on the Ruthwell Cross.

The Austrian writer Guido von List built his ‘Armanen’ rune row, first in a 1906 article and then in a 1908 book, on the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark plus two of his own. Its sixth rune, Ka, is the Younger Futhark kaun with the same k sound. List said the runes were revealed to him in 1902 while he was blind after cataract surgery; the system is his own invention, not an old tradition.

The völkisch nationalist movement took up List’s runes, and under Heinrich Himmler runic signs were used on SS flags, uniforms and other items until 1945. No specific use of this rune in that setting is recorded in the sources used here. After the war Karl Spiesberger reworked the system and removed its racist parts. Heathen Heritage rejects any racist or extremist use of the runes.

In modern rune divination the rune often goes by the name Kano: Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (St. Martin’s Press, first edition 1983 in the listing used here) gives it the keyword ‘Opening’. That reading is Blum’s own.