Runes
"With golden roof and silver floor,
and Runes of power upon the door
the light of sun and star and moon…"
~ J.R.R. Tolkien
The Runes are the written letters that were used by the Norse and other Germanic peoples before the adoption of the Latin alphabet in the later Middle Ages. Unlike the Latin alphabet, which is an essentially utilitarian script, the Runes are symbols of some of the most powerful forces in the cosmos. Runes allow one to access, interact with, and influence the world-shaping forces they symbolize. Thus, when Odin sought the runes, he wasn’t merely attempting to acquire a set of arbitrary representations of human vocal sounds. Rather, he was uncovering an extraordinarily potent system of magic.
There are more than one Runic systems, but I bow to the Elder Fuþark - the original fuþark that Odin grasped when he fell after spending nine days and nights hanging from the cosmic tree Yggdrasil pierced by his own spear. Once he grasped the wielding knowledge of the Runes, Odin became one of the mightiest and most accomplished beings in the cosmos. Odin learned the hidden chants of the Runes through which he was able to heal both emotional and bodily wounds, to bind his enemies and render their weapons worthless, to free himself from constraints, to put out fires, to expose and banish practitioners of malevolent magic, to protect his friends in battle, to wake the dead, to win and keep a lover, and to perform many magic feats like these. J.R.R. Tolkien has based one of his invented languages on the Norse Runes, and successfully captured some of the Runic magic through his world weaving, and he was able to gift us with the marvelous world that has captivated many of us through ages.
Runes are powerful forces of cosmos captured in symbols that were conveyed to human kind through Allfather and are used for all kinds of magic; from casting them to read the imminent future, to binding them together and birthing new enchantments for your all intended purposes.