Eighteen Characters Built on Sixteen

The construction is straightforward once it is stated plainly. List took the sixteen character row used in Viking Age Scandinavia, added two further characters, and renamed and reinterpreted the whole set, giving each a meaning within a doctrine of ancestral wisdom he presented as recovered rather than composed. The eighteen count matches the eighteen charms Odin lists in an eddic poem, and that correspondence is offered as evidence that the row is the original one. He also proposed a generative figure, a many armed star shape he called the mother rune, and argued that every character in the row can be found within it. That idea has no counterpart in the historical material and belongs to a nineteenth century taste for systems that unfold from a single seed.

None of it is attested. No inscription, no rune poem and no medieval manuscript gives an eighteen character row or this set of names, and the historical rows are documented well enough, across a wide enough area and a long enough period, that an unrecorded parallel tradition surviving in secret is not a live historical possibility. The atlas therefore describes the row as a modern construction. That is a statement about where it came from and when, and not a statement about whether the people who use it find it valuable, which is a different question the atlas does not answer for anyone.