Runas Antigas são puramente um curso de línguas. Podemos ver isso a partir das numerosas e dispersas referências a ele em todo o cânone.
Livro 3 - Harry Potter e o Prisioneiro de Azkaban disseram:
“Every night, without fail, Hermione was to be seen in a corner of the common room, several tables spread with books, Arithmancy charts, rune dictionaries, diagrams of Muggles lifting heavy objects, and file upon file of extensive notes; she barely spoke to anybody and snapped when she was interrupted.
Livro 3 - Harry Potter e o Prisioneiro de Azkaban disseram:
“Harry looked around at the cluttered table, at the long Arithmancy essay on which the ink was still glistening, at the even longer Muggle Studies essay (‘Explain Why Muggles Need Electricity’) and at the rune translation Hermione was now poring over.
Livro 3 - Harry Potter e o Prisioneiro de Azkaban disseram:
“Why don’t you just drop a couple of subjects?” Harry asked, watching her lifting books as she searched for her rune dictionary.
Livro 3 - Harry Potter e o Prisioneiro de Azkaban disseram:
Ron threw something down onto Hermione’s rune translation. Hermione and Harry leaned forward. Lying on top of the weird, spiky shapes were several long, ginger cat hairs.
Livro 4 - Harry Potter e o Cálice de Fogo disse:
“Well, now we know what to do next time I can’t manage a spell,” Harry said, throwing a rune dictionary back to Hermione, so he could try again, “threaten me with a dragon. Right…” He raised his wand once more. “Accio Dictionary!” The heavy book soared out of Hermione’s hand, flew across the room, and Harry caught it.
Livro 5 - Harry Potter e a Ordem da Fênix disseram:
Harry did not read any further. Fudge might have many faults but Harry found it extremely hard to imagine him ordering goblins to be cooked in pies. He flicked through the rest of the magazine. Pausing every few pages, he read: an accusation that the Tutshill Tornados were winning the Quidditch League by a combination of blackmail, illegal broom-tampering and torture; an interview with a wizard who claimed to have flown to the moon on a Cleansweep Six and brought back a bag of moon frogs to prove it; and an article on ancient runes which at least explained why Luna had been reading The Quibbler upside-down. According to the magazine, if you turned the runes on their heads they revealed a spell to make your enemy’s ears turn into kumquats. In fact, compared to the rest of the articles in The Quibbler, the suggestion that Sirius might really be the lead singer of The Hobgoblins was quite sensible.
Este é apenas outro exemplo de leitura de runas. É certo que, neste caso, de cabeça para baixo e no Pasquim. O artigo é chamado "Segredos das Runas Antigas Revelado".
Livro 5 - Harry Potter e a Ordem da Fênix disseram:
Every single Divination and Care of Magical Creatures lesson was now conducted in the presence of Umbridge and her clipboard. She lurked by the fire in the heavily perfumed tower room, interrupting Professor Trelawney’s increasingly hysterical talks with difficult questions about ornithomancy and heptomology, insisting that she predicted students’ answers before they gave them and demanding that she demonstrate her skill at the crystal ball, the tea leaves and the rune stones in turn.
A adivinhação pode aparentemente envolver "runas de pedra". O que uma pedra rúnica é, ou se são alguma relação com o estudo de runas antigas, não é claro. Qualquer que seja o caso, as runas como uma forma antiga de escrita ainda funcionam bem neste caso. Ninguém está afirmando que folhas de chá podem ser usadas para lançar magias poderosas; é apenas uma maneira de fazer formas aleatórias ou, no caso de runas, letras.
Livro 5 - Harry Potter e a Ordem da Fênix disseram:
“She’s been breaking into your broom shed in the garden since the age of six and taking each of your brooms out in turn when you weren’t looking,” said Hermione from behind her tottering pile of Ancient Rune books.
“Oh,” said George, looking mildly impressed. “Well - that’d explain it.”
“Has Ron saved a goal yet?” asked Hermione, peering over the top of Magical Hieroglyphs and Logograms.
Segundo a Wikipedia, “um logograma, ou logografia, é um grafema que representa uma palavra ou um morfema (a menor unidade significativa da linguagem)”. Da mesma forma, um hieróglifo é apenas um método de escrita. Então este livro de Runas Antigas (como identificado no primeiro parágrafo) é sobre os hieróglifos e Logogramas usados no mundo mágico.
Livro 5 - Harry Potter e a Ordem da Fênix disseram:
“That’s the trouble with Quidditch,” said Hermione absent-mindedly, once again bent over her Runes translation, “it creates all this bad feeling and tension between the houses.”
She looked up to find her copy of Spellman’s Syllabary, and caught Fred, George and Harry all staring at her with expressions of mingled disgust and incredulity on their faces.
“Well, it does!” she said impatiently. “It’s only a game, isn’t it?”
“Hermione,” said Harry, shaking his head, “you’re good on feelings and stuff, but you just don’t understand about Quidditch.”
“Maybe not,” she said darkly, returning to her translation, “but at least my happiness doesn’t depend on Ron’s goalkeeping ability.”
Observe as referências repetidas à tradução. Além disso, o livro que ela está usando é um Syllabary que a Wikipedia define como “Um silabário é um conjunto de símbolos escritos que representam (ou aproximam) sílabas, que compõem palavras. Um símbolo em um silabário normalmente representa um som consoante opcional seguido por um som de vogal. ”Novamente, palavras não são mágicas.
Livro 5 - Harry Potter e a Ordem da Fênix disseram:
“How were the Runes?” said Ron, yawning and stretching.
“I mistranslated ehwaz,” said Hermione furiously. “It means partnership, not Defense; I mixed it up with eihwaz.”
O exame inclui tradução. Nada mais é mencionado.
Livro 6 - Harry Potter e o Enigma do Príncipe disse:
“I know I messed up Ancient Runes,” muttered Hermione feverishly, “I definitely made at least one serious mistranslation. And the Defense Against the Dark Arts practical was no good at all. I thought Transfiguration went all right at the time, but looking back —”
Mais uma vez, o exame é referenciado como contendo tradução.
Livro 6 - Harry Potter e o Enigma do Príncipe disse:
“Yes, I’ve already agreed it was fishy, Harry,” said Hermione a little impatiently. She was sitting on the windowsill in Fred and George’s room with her feet up on one of the cardboard boxes and had only grudgingly looked up from her new copy of Advanced Rune Translation. “But haven’t we agreed there could be a lot of explanations?”
Livro 6 - Harry Potter e o Enigma do Príncipe disse:
“We got so much homework for Runes,” she said anxiously when Harry and Ron joined her. “A fifteen-inch essay, two translations, and I’ve got to read these by Wednesday!”
Mais uma vez, Runes é mostrado, mesmo no nível NEWT, como traduções. Não há "treinar Rune X".
Livro 7 - Harry Potter e as Relíquias da Morte diz:
“Oh, of course,” said Ron, clapping a hand to his forehead. “I forgot we’ll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library.”
“Ha ha,” said Hermione, looking down at Spellman’s Syllabary. “I wonder . . . will we need to translate runes? It’s possible. . . . I think we’d better take it, to be safe.”
She dropped the syllabary onto the larger of the two piles and picked up Hogwarts, A History.
O Syllabary de Spellman é anteriormente conhecido como um livro didático de Runas Antigas. Observe que seu único uso mencionado é na tradução de runas. Além disso, se runas foram usadas para lançar algum tipo de magia 'defensiva', como é comum em fanon, você não acha que estaria na lista 'definitivamente pegue' e não na lista 'to be safe'?
Livro 7 - Harry Potter e as Relíquias da Morte diz:
Scrimgeour now pulled out of the bag a small book that looked as ancient as the copy of Secrets of the Darkest Art upstairs. Its binding was stained and peeling in places. Hermione took it from Scrimgeour without a word. She held the book in her lap and gazed at it. Harry saw that the title was in runes; he had never learned to read them. As he looked, a tear splashed onto the embossed symbols.
As runas são para leitura, não magicing.
Livro 7 - Harry Potter e as Relíquias da Morte diz:
"And as for this book." Said Hermione, "The Tales of Beedle the Bard … I've never even heard of them!"
"You've never heard of The Tales of Beedle the Bard?" said Ron incredulously. "You're kidding, right?"
"No, I'm not," said Hermione in surprise. "Do you know them then?" "Well, of course I do!"
Harry looked up, diverted. The circumstance of Ron having read a book that Hermione had not was unprecedented. Ron, however, looked bemused by their surprise.
"Oh come on! All the old kids' stories are supposed to be Beedle's aren't they? 'The Fountain of Fair Fortune' … 'The Wizard and the Hopping Pot'… 'Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump'…"
"Excuse me?" said Hermione giggling. "What was the last one?"
"Come off it!" said Ron, looking in disbelief from Harry to Hermione. "You must've heard of Babbitty Rabbitty –"
"Ron, you know full well Harry and I were brought up by Muggles!" said Hermione. "We didn't hear stories like that when we were little, we heard 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' and 'Cinderella' –"
"What's that, an illness?" asked Ron.
"So these are children's stories?" asked Hermione, bending against over the runes. "Yeah." Said Ron uncertainly. "I mean, just what you hear, you know, that all these old stories came from Beedle. I dunno what they're like in the original
Os contos de Beedle, o bardo é escrito em runas e é um livro de histórias infantis. Da mesma forma, Hermione lê o título como Os Contos de Beedle, o Bardo, que também está em runas, como dito por Harry.
Livro 7 - Harry Potter e as Relíquias da Morte diz:
Apparently she had not been listening to him. She leaned forward and held out The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
“Look at that symbol,” she said, pointing to the top of a page. Above what Harry assumed was the title of the story (being unable to read runes, he could not be sure), there was a picture of what looked like a triangular eye, its pupil crossed with a vertical line.
“I never took Ancient Runes, Hermione.”
“I know that; but it isn’t a rune and it’s not in the syllabary, either. All along I thought it was a picture of an eye, but I don’t think it is! It’s been inked in, look, somebody’s drawn it there, it isn’t really part of the book. Think, have you ever seen it before?”
Para resumir um post muito longo: cada instância de runas sendo usada para qualquer coisa nos livros tem a ver com traduzi-las ou lê-las. Portanto, a parte prática do assunto provavelmente é apenas mais tradução. A única pequena exceção a isso são as runas na Penseira de Dumbledore e como elas nunca fazem nada (brilho, pulso etc), e Harry não lê runas (como ele afirma na citação acima), elas podem dizer 'propriedade de Dumbledore' para tudo o que sabemos.