I guess the thing about the runes is that some people, a lot of people, a long time ago, thought that the pieces of information that the runes represent were really important. Like, so important that they were worthy of being represented by the most fundamental unit of information capable of being written down. And however distant we are from those peoples and that time and the sort of life those people lived, many of us over the centuries have continued to hear the call of the runes and have continued to feel that there is something really important being described or alluded to here.

Even those of us who don’t feel called to the runes often feel called to explore our ancestral heritage and the old ways of our ancestors, to glimpse the way our ancient predecessors lived, to reach out and touch the distant past. And our modern age with all our technology has given us so much access to information, we know so much more, but it can be hard to see the forest for the trees, or maybe it can be hard to sift through the thousands of acres of forest and identify the most fundamental and important types of trees. How can we sift through the overabundance of available information to find what’s really true and important? The modern age has made many things easier and given us many comforts that could hardly have been dreamt of in the age of the runes, and so we are extremely distant from the sort of life the original runemasters lived. How do we see and access what’s really fundamental and important to the nature of life and death through the veil of modern living?

Are the runes a set of keys for unlocking these ancient mysteries?