Runes As Secrets, Whispers

Historically, the runic alphabet is a derivation of the Old Italic scripts of antiquity, with the addition of some innovations. Which variant of the Old Italic family in particular gave rise to the runes is uncertain. Suggestions include Raetic, Venetic, Etruscan, or Old Latin as candidates. At the time, all of these scripts had the same angular letter shapes suited for epigraphy, which would become characteristic of the runes. […]

The name comes from the Germanic root run- (Gothic: ????, runa), meaning “secret” or “whisper”. In Old Irish Gaelic, the word rún means “mystery”, “secret”, “intention” or “affectionate love.” […]

Similarly in Welsh and Old English, the word rhin and rūn respectively means “mystery”, “secret”, “secret writing”, or sometimes in the extreme sense of the word, “miracle” (gwyrth). […]

There are no horizontal strokes: when carving a message on a flat staff or stick, it would be along the grain, thus both less legible and more likely to split the wood. … Runic manuscripts (that is written rather than carved runes, such as Codex Runicus) also show horizontal strokes. […]

The stanza 157 of Hávamál attribute to runes the power to bring that which is dead back to life. In this stanza, Odin recounts a spell:

I know a twelfth one
if I see up in a tree,
a dangling corpse in a noose,
I can so carve and colour the runes,
that the man walks
and talks with me.[21]

Source: Runes – Wikipedia