Welcome, dear reader, to the exciting and complicated realm of runes. You may have seen them in a museum J.R.R. Tolkien's work , or that one scene in Stardust — they're the little stones with mysterious (probably incomprehensible) symbols carved in them that you draw from a bag or "cast." Those of you who know them from your local esoterica store may equate rune stones with tarot cards — a mystical means of divination with set, designated meanings. But they haven't always been this way. Way back when, "runes" were actually just an alphabet. The earliest runic alphabet is thought to be modelled after the Latin alphabet, and it most likely first appeared in southern Europe among Germanic tribes.