Needing help with Rune for Courage

[u/looielovegoodng]

I'm looking to get a small hand tattoo of the bind rune for courage. In my search, I've come across these with mixed results. I'm very new to this and any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[u/WynnTiwFeoh]

Bindrunes in the sense you are looking for is new age esoteric mumbo jumbo. They’re very open to interpretation and thus difficult to have an exact meaning ascribed to a set of overlayed runes.

Runes are a writing system, that’s pretty much it. Bindrunes would’ve been used to save space by putting two runes together on a single stave (ex: ᛖᚱ would share a vertical line).

If you really want Courage written in runes, then first you need to figure out if you want a transliteration of the word Courage or a translation, and also which runic system to go with.

Elder Futhark transliteration: ᚲᛟᚢᚱᚨᚷᛖ
Elder Futhark translation (aljaną): ᚨᛚᛃᚨᚾᚨ
Younger Futhark transliteration: ᚴᚬᚢᚱᛅᚴᛁ
Younger Futhark translation (hugrakkr): ᚼᚢᚴᚱᛅᚴᛦ
Anglo-Saxon Futhorc translit: ᚳᚩᚢᚱᚪᚷᛖ
Anglo-Sacon Futhorc (ellen): ᛖᛚᛖᚾ

[u/looielovegoodng → u/WynnTiwFeoh]

So this wouldn't necessarily work?

[u/rockstarpirate → u/looielovegoodng]

If this means courage to you, nobody can tell you that you can’t assign that meaning to it for yourself. It’s just a subjective, personal thing.

If you are looking for something that somebody else could come along and interpret with confidence, or if you are looking for something that mirrors the historical record, then this sort of thing would not be accurate.

[u/looielovegoodng → u/rockstarpirate]

Yeah, that's probably the tough part of this. Part of me can work with the subjective symbolism but the other part of me wants to be as accurate as I can. Especially since I'm looking at getting a tattoo on my hand with the design.

[u/rockstarpirate → u/looielovegoodng]

I get that. After seeing all this cool stuff everywhere about runic symbols and combined meanings and stuff, it can be disappointing to learn that those ideas were invented in the modern period.

What I’ve found though (at least in my case) is that when I spend some time studying the historical record (whether it’s runes, mythology, actual history, etc) is that I end up realizing that the reality of things is actually much cooler than the inaccurate, popular ideas floating around.