Anglo-Saxon Futhorc
A number of extra letters were added to the runic alphabet to write Anglo-Saxon/Old English. Runes were probably bought to Britain in the 5th century by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians (collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons), and were used until about the 11th century.
Runic inscriptions are mostly found on jewellery, weapons, stones and other objects. Very few examples of runic writing on manuscripts have survived.
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A brief history of the Theban alphabet
Note: This alphabet is widely called `Theban runes' today, but this seems to be a recent invention by users who noticed the usage parallelism with Futhark. The letterforms are actually cursive rather than runic; they contain many curves and are not well-suited to be incised or scratched into hard materials as are true runic alphabets like Futhark, Ogham, or Tolkien's Cirthas Daeron. The term `Theban runes' is not attested before the 20th century; older sources refer to either `Theban letters' or the `Theban alphabet', the practice I have followed here.)
The earliest known source for the Theban alphabet is Cornelius Agrippa's ``Three Books of Occult Philosophy'' first published at Antwerp, 1531 (an annotated edition was published by Llewellyn Books in 1994). Agrippa gives the Theban alphabet in chapter 29 of book 3 and writes ``Of this kind of character therefore are those which Peter Apponus notes, as delivered by Honorius of Thebes''.
This almost certainly refers to the author of the early-14th-century ``Liber Juratus, or the Sworne Booke of Honorius''. (The better-known ``Grimoire of Honorius'' is a 17th-century forgery long postdating Agrippa.) However, the characters do not appear in any manuscript of the Liber Juratus, nor in any edition of Peter De Abano (whose only extant magical work is the Heptameron).
One clue suggesting the Theban alphabet is older still is implicit in the Latin-alphabet equivalents given by Agrippa. The absence of U/J/W suggests that the Theban alphabet originated as a Latin cypher before the 11th-century introduction of W and long before the late-15th-century development of U and J.
The origin of the letterforms is obscure. They do not resemble any of the scripts likely to have been known by Agrippa (Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, or Futhark). There is a passing resemblance to the more elaborate letters in the Avestan or Pahlavi scripts used to write Old Persian. However, they are obviously an invented alphabet rather than an evolution of Avestan; they have too many superfluous flourishes of the sort actual use would have worn away. All the evidence is consistent with an origin as an early alchemical cipher alphabet influenced by Avestan.
Near the end of the 1800s the Theban alphabet were adopted by the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn and its successor orders (notably the Ordo Templi Orientalis or O.T.O) from Agrippa (filtered through later compilations plagiarizing Agrippa, notably Francis Barrett's 1801 ``The Magus'').
The Theban alphabet seem to have passed to the Wiccans from successor orders of the G.D. as part of the Gardnerian reinvention of Wicca during the 1930s. Today they are primarily associated with Wicca and indeed are sometimes referred to as the ``Wiccan Alphabet''.
The Theban alphabet has always been employed primarily for talismanic inscriptions and magical formulae; also occasionally as a manuscript cipher. It is not associated with any particular language. Most of their early corpus was Latin, but modern usage is probably mostly in English.
Most Wiccans recognize the Theban alphabet, but the skill to sight-read or write it without a reference is uncommon. Nevertheless, given the estimate now usual among sociologists of religion that there are more than half a million Wiccans in the U.S. alone, there may be as many as a hundred thousand people worldwide who have employed it.
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