Today, many people take written language for granted and use runes as an alphabet without really understanding the magical importance of doing so. When you write a word in runes, it empowers that word. The Norse would often finish inscriptions with the statement, "So-and-so wrote this", or "So-and-so made me". This was a way of magically connecting the writer or carver of the runes with what they had just written. For example, there was a bone plate found in Derbyshire which bears an inscription that reads, "God will preserve the honour of Hadda because he wrote this". Thus, the very act of writing something in runes is a spell in itself, bringing the statement into concrete reality.
Another way of using the runes for magic is to write out rune rows, or rune scripts. These are type of shorthand spell, made up of a sequence of two or more runes. For example, if you wanted to create a rune row to help enhance your psychic abilities, you might incorporate laguz/water (relating to the subconscious and mysteries), perth/dice-cup (for divination and magic), ansuz/Odin (the God of the runes), and kenaz/torch (for inspiration).
A bindrune; another means of empowering the runes; consists of two or more runes that have been superimposed or joined together in some way. Occasionally, runes like fehu, raiðo or wunjo would be joined at the base of their "stems", forming a wheel. Other times, runes would be joined side by side, or combined into a single rune. This latter method is the most popular today. Historically, bindrunes were used as "contractions" in an inscription, either to save space or to reduce the number of runes in the inscription to a more magically auspicious total. Today they are commonly used in rune magic by themselves to create a magical sigel that will encompass several runes at once. Additional runes will often appear when creating a bindrune, and these can contribute to or detract from the purpose. However, a rune is only truly present if you consciously include it by tracing its shape. If you can avoid including a conflicting rune by changing the configuration, then by all means do so, but you shouldn't worry about it too much.
