Wynn and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Wunjo

Wynn is the eighth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name and reading a direct continuation of Wunjo, whose own name likewise means joy, one of the clearest and most stable continuities in the whole row, both traditions naming an identical abstract feeling rather than any object or animal that might have invited reinterpretation along the way.

R. I. Page's account notes that Wynn also went on to a second life in Old English writing well beyond runic inscription proper, adopted into the Latin based manuscript alphabet Anglo-Saxon scribes used for ordinary writing as the standard letter for the w sound, a role it held for centuries until the digraph uu and eventually the borrowed letter w itself replaced it in later Middle English, making Wynn one of the few futhorc runes with a documented afterlife in mainstream literate culture entirely separate from its original runic and divinatory context. This closes the poem's first eight stanza group, the section whose content and order both traditions share most closely, before the ninth stanza, Haegl, opens a run of runes whose Anglo-Saxon readings diverge somewhat further from their Elder Futhark ancestors.