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Wynn
Letter of the Old English alphabet From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Wynn or wyn[1] (Ƿ ƿ; also spelled wen, win, ƿynn, ƿyn, ƿen, and ƿin) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound /w/. It was a continued use of the Anglo-Frisian Futhorc runes. Futhorc was the native alphabet of Old English before the Latin alphabet was adopted, and it was a sibling alphabet to the Younger Futhark alphabet that Old Norse used. Both alphabets come from Elder Futhark.
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History
The letter "W"
While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph ⟨uu⟩, scribes soon revived the rune wynn ᚹ from Old English's native alphabet, Anglo-Frisian Futhorc, for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use during the Middle English period, circa 1300.[2] In post-wynn texts, it was sometimes replaced with ⟨u⟩ but often replaced with a ligature form of ⟨uu⟩, which the modern letter ⟨w⟩ developed from.
Meaning
The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss", known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poems:[3]
ᚹ Ƿenne brūceþ, þe can ƿēana lẏt
sāres and sorge and him sẏlfa hæf
blǣd and blẏsse and eac bẏrga geniht.
— Lines 22–24 in the Anglo-Saxon runic poem
Who uses it knows no pain,
sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself has
prosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter.
— Translation slightly modified from Dickins (1915)
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Unicode
The following wynn and wynn-related characters are in Unicode:[4]
Computing codes
References
See also
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