Wunjo

The rune’s Proto-Germanic name is usually reconstructed as *wunjō, “joy”. Like every Elder Futhark name it is a reconstruction. The Old English name wynn (“joy, bliss”) supports it, but the Gothic letter for w, recorded as uuinne in a ninth-century manuscript of Alcuin, is read as winja, which may mean “pasture” instead, and scholars are unsure how old those Gothic names are. The rune stands for the sound w.

Wunjo is the eighth rune of the 24-rune Elder Futhark, used from roughly the second to the eighth century. It closes the first group of eight, after g. The earliest full listing of the row, on the Kylver Stone from Gotland (about 400), includes it, though its w is only partly cut. The sixth-century Vadstena and Mariedamm bracteates and the Grumpan bracteate open with the same sequence, f u þ a r k g w. Its shape is a vertical stave with a small pointed loop at the top, much like a Latin P; where the form came from is uncertain, and Latin P or Q and a north Italic letter have all been suggested.

When the Scandinavian row was cut down to sixteen runes in the seventh and eighth centuries, w was one of those dropped, and the u rune covered the sound. In England the rune lived on as wynn in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc. Scribes writing Old English first spelled the sound uu, then took the rune into their Latin script as the letter ƿ. It stayed in use through the Anglo-Saxon period and fell away in Middle English, around 1300, when w replaced it.

Because wunjo has no place in the Younger Futhark, it is also missing from the systems built on that row. Guido von List’s “Armanen” runes of 1908, an invented eighteen-rune set based on the Younger Futhark plus two signs of his own, have no rune for it.

The rune came back in modern divination that uses the full Elder Futhark. Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first published in 1982 or 1983; sources differ), whose set added a 25th blank stone and put the runes in an order of its own, includes Wunjo among its stones, with joy as its keyword. No specific misuse of this rune’s shape is recorded in the sources consulted.