My runic journey

I was fascinated by the runes from the moment I first came across them in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and I deciphered the whole elder futhark from the endpapers of The Hobbit, aged 12, and proceeded to write in the runes on a regular basis. 

The endpapers of The Hobbit
 [Marquette University]

It was not until I met a fellow reenactor who was also a rune-master called Richard when I was 19 that I found out that they were an ancient system of writing with esoteric meanings (you have to remember...