Runes and tarot: what is the difference?
Runes are an alphabet: twenty-four letters that wrote real words on stone and bone. Tarot is a deck of playing cards from fifteenth-century Italy. The two meet only in the twentieth century, when rune books borrowed the shapes of card spreads, and past, present and future is one of them.
Where this comes from
oldest description runes: inscriptions from about AD 150 · tarot: the fifteenth century
The earliest runic inscriptions are about thirteen centuries older than the earliest tarot decks. The youngest of the three rune poems and the oldest surviving decks share the fifteenth century. Reading cards for meaning came first all the same, and reading runes for meaning is younger still: both practices are far younger than their objects.
What the poems say
Three medieval poems describe the runes letter by letter, and this site prints them whole. Nothing like them exists for tarot. That is the difference this site can show rather than tell.