The runic tradition is the only major mark-making tradition I have engaged with that developed specifically around a tool and a material: the knife and wood. The angular forms of the Elder Futhark are not accidental — they are the forms that can be cut across the grain of wood without splitting it, which means no horizontal strokes and nothing that follows the grain. The alphabet was shaped by its material in a way that the brush-based scripts were not.
This raises a question I have not resolved: to what extent is the studio practice shaped, as the rune is, by its materials? The forms the hand makes in ochre on stone paper are not the forms the hand makes in charcoal on vellum. The resistance of the surface, the behavior of the pigment, the speed at which the medium allows the mark to be made — these are not just variables in the production of a predetermined form. They are contributors to what form is possible at all. The glyph system was developed in specific materials. Would different materials have produced different glyphs? Almost certainly.