Runes represent objects, gods, people, animals, concepts and occurrences. They were known by names from which their alphabetic and phonetic values were taken, but it must be remembered that the early Germanic and Norse tribes who developed them did so long before they had any need for writing messages.
It was not until about AD200, when the runemal (i.e. the art of runic interpretation) was wide-spread in Northern Europe that the runic alphabet emerged.