Wunjo

The shape

A vertical stave with a small closed triangle at the top. It is Raidho (ᚱ) without the leg, and on worn or hastily cut inscriptions the two are among the easiest pairs in the row to confuse.

Like Thurisaz, this letter outlived the script it belonged to. Anglo-Saxon scribes writing Old English in the Latin alphabet kept wynn as ƿ, because Latin had no letter for the w-sound. It survived in English manuscripts for several centuries. Norman scribes preferred a doubled u, which is where modern w and its name come from.

The name

Proto-Germanic wunjō, joy or delight, from a root meaning to be content or to be pleased. Old English wynn is the direct descendant, and it survives in modern English only fossilised inside winsome, which originally meant joyful rather than charming.

The same root gives German Wonne and, more distantly, English win and wish. It sits close to a family of words about wanting and getting, which fits a rune whose poem defines happiness in terms of having enough.

Joy described in negatives

Wunjo has only the Old English stanza, because the rune was dropped when the Scandinavian row shrank to sixteen. That one stanza is more interesting than the rune's usual gloss suggests.

It does not say what joy is. It says who has it: the man who knows few woes, few pains and sorrows. Two thirds of the definition is a list of absent bad things. Only then does it add the positives, and they are concrete rather than emotional: prosperity, bliss, and enough of strongholds.

That last item is easy to skate past. Byrga geniht, sufficiency of fortified places. Joy in this poem includes having somewhere defensible to be. This is a definition of happiness written by people for whom safety was not assumed.

So Wunjo is not ecstasy and not celebration. It is the state of a household where nothing is currently going wrong, there is enough, and the walls hold. Modern rune books that render it as bliss or spiritual joy are reaching past what the source says.

The end of the first ætt

Wunjo closes Freyr's ætt, and the eight runes read in order make a sequence that is hard to unsee once noticed: wealth, wild strength, danger, the god or the word, the journey, the burning thing, the gift, and then contentment.

Whether the carvers intended a narrative is unknowable. The futhark order is old and fixed, confirmed complete on the Kylver stone around 400 CE, and no source explains why it runs as it does. The ættir divisions are attested, on the Vadstena and Grumpan bracteates, but the reasoning behind them is not.

What can be said is that the next rune is Hagalaz, hail, and the ætt it opens is by a distance the harshest of the three. Wunjo is the last good thing before the weather.

In inscriptions

As the letter w it appears in the corpus wherever the sound is needed, including in personal names and in Woduridaz on the Tune stone in Norway, a memorial carved boustrophedon around 400 CE which mentions the preparation of burial ale by his daughters.

There is no attested use of Wunjo as a standalone charm for happiness. Modern practice uses it that way frequently. That usage is a twentieth-century development.

In reading, upright

Wunjo upright is a settled state. In a spread it usually means the thing being asked about is, or is about to be, all right.

It is a quieter rune than its keyword suggests. Where Sowilo is the sun and Jera is the harvest coming in, Wunjo is the evening after: nothing dramatic, nothing outstanding, the household in order. In practical readings it often marks the resolution of something that has been difficult rather than the arrival of something new.

The fellowship reading is worth keeping. The stanza's joy is domestic and communal, not private. Wunjo tends to appear on questions about belonging, and it reads as being among your own people rather than as being pleased on your own.

In reading, reversed

Wunjo reverses cleanly.

Inverted it is the same household with something wrong in it. Discontent, a group you no longer fit, a situation that looks settled from outside and is not. The alienation reading is the strongest one: reversed Wunjo often marks a person surrounded by people and separate from them.

It also covers the false version, contentment maintained by not looking at something. And it can simply mean the good stretch is ending, since the stanza defines joy as the absence of trouble and reversal restores what was absent.

Modern esoteric layers

The ash, the element of earth and the deity attributions above are twentieth-century, principally Thorsson and Aswynn. No medieval source assigns them.

Wunjo also carries an uncomfortable modern history that is worth stating plainly. Because its shape closely resembles a banner or pennant, and because of Guido von List's invented Armanen system and its afterlife in the Third Reich, several Elder Futhark runes were adopted into Nazi and later neo-Nazi symbology. Wunjo itself was used in that period in a modified form as a badge of the Hitler Youth's rural service. The rune is a two-thousand-year-old letter and the appropriation is recent, but anyone using runes in public should know which ones carry that baggage.

The others most affected are Sowilo (ᛊ), doubled as the SS insignia, Algiz (ᛉ), used as the Lebensrune, and Othala (ᛟ), which is still listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.

With other runes

Wunjo with Gebo (ᚷ) closes the first ætt on its own terms, exchange and contentment together. One of the warmest pairs available.

Wunjo with Othala (ᛟ) or Berkano (ᛒ) is domestic and specific: a household, a family, a home in good order.

Wunjo with Hagalaz (ᚺ) is the hinge between the first two ættir and reads as exactly that, a settled situation about to meet weather it did not choose.

Wunjo with Isa (ᛁ) is contentment that has stopped moving, which is usually the point at which it stops being contentment.

Wunjo with Mannaz (ᛗ) or Ehwaz (ᛖ) puts the joy in company, and is the clearest fellowship reading in the row.