*Ōþala

Common card · No. 204809

ᛟ is a rune that is transliterated as o and œ in the Elder Futhark and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc writing systems respectively. It is known as ēþel ("inheritance, home, native land") in Old English, from which hypothetical Proto-Germanic names such as *ōþala have been reconstructed. As with other Elder Futhark runes, the origins of ᛟ are unclear, beyond an ultimate ancestor in the Phoenician alphabet. Various intermediate scripts and characters have been proposed, including the Greek Ω, which closely resembles it. Even more similar to the rune are some symbols representing "o" sounds in Etruscan and Alpine scripts. The rune may in turn be the origin of the Gothic letter 𐍉 ("utal"), used by Wulfila in the 4th century CE for his Gothic Bible, although Greek letters may also have been used as a source. As ᛟ does not occur in Younger Futhark, it largely disappears from the Scandinavian record around the 8th century, but its usage continued in England into the 11th century, where alongside inscriptions...

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