NorsePlay.

  These house brands of the fishermen's houses in Vitt on Rügen, Germany, appear to be descended or perhaps even part of a runestave or bindrune tradition , but their purpose was specifically used to denote familial property. This would include objects and cattle in addition to land and houses. The following are from Hiddensee, Germany: The practice of using these house marks was also extant in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, all areas that used a runic set of letters. I've used a bindrune of my initials to mark the top of my yard's "runestone" and less lethal launcher , and it would be cool to see this revived and NorsePlay'd back into practice. It really beats that 1970s CE disc stamping plastic label gun with its weaksauce glue backing for ancient/medieval cred. [first photo by Chron-Paul.] #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Gi...

One theory has it that the ancient Germanics based their runic writing from the Etruscans. I'm not definitively weighing in on this, but I happened upon a photo of the Pyrgi Gold Tablets where the right two are in Etruscan characters bearing some resemblance to the runes : From 500 BCE, and it wouldn't be so hard to conceive of the characters evolving or changing into Elder Futhark as time went forward. Here's a transcription for more clarity of the letter forms: Sinistrodextral and boustrophedon are present in surviving runic examples, so the left-to-right in the Etruscan above allows for runes later being pretty fast & loose with whichever direction they were written. The Ansuz ( ), Isa (ᛁ), Sowilo ( ), and Laguz ( )-like characters in mirror/reverse seem pretty dead on. These tablets are also a dedication to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and that could also be seen as a sacred throughline with uses of the runes on amulets, wood staves intended for magic, and runes...