| Another interesting fact about the so-called Elder Futhark is that all the names are made-up, apparently in 1966.
These are words in Proto-Germanic, the hypothetical reconstructed ancestor of the Germanic languages. Proto-Germanic was never written down. It did not use these runes.
The earliest written Germanic languages are Old Norse and Gothic, both from around 300 CE. These were significantly different from each other, and their common ancestor would have existed many centuries before.
Given that in Old English the letter W was given the name wynn 'joy', and Th was called thorn, and so on through the rest of the known historical futhorc of Old English, we may indulge in a pleasant flight of imagination, and suppose that if the Proto-Germanic speakers had known the secret of writing, then they might have used the same naming principle and called their W letter wunjo, unwritten and hypothetical ancestral form of the word wynn.
The first time any of these "names" were actually written was in the early to mid nineteenth century, as linguists studied records of existing languages and pieced together what the ancestor must have looked like to produce them.
I don't know whether Bopp and Schlegel and other founders of the study of comparative philology passed their idle moments (on weekends perhaps) in inventing names of runes for people who had never seen runes, but I suspect that the inventors lived closer to us, around about the 1980s, when a cute little game came out, a bag of faux-bone runestones with a booklet. But I don't know: marketing isn't really my field. They took a scholar's (1966) reconstructions of the earliest forms and popularized them. | 
