Runes

A real Germanic writing system used mostly for ordinary messages — with a divinatory practice that is modern, a blank rune invented in 1982, and a political problem practitioners cannot avoid.

What it is

Runes are the alphabets used to write Germanic languages before and alongside the Latin script.

Three main systems:

Elder Futhark — 24 characters, in use roughly from the second to the eighth century, across the Germanic-speaking world
Younger Futhark — 16 characters, the Viking Age Scandinavian script
Anglo-Saxon futhorc — expanded to as many as 33 characters, used in England and Frisia

Each rune has a name — fehu (cattle, wealth), uruz (aurochs), thurisaz (giant or thorn), ansuz (a god), and so on — and modern divinatory practice reads those names as meanings.

Where it came from

Runes are a writing system. This is the central fact and it is frequently obscured. Around six thousand runic inscriptions survive, on memorial stones, weapons, jewellery, combs, coins and bone.

The best evidence of what they were actually used for comes from Bryggen in Bergen, where hundreds of runic inscriptions on wood were recovered from a medieval wharf. They are business letters, ownership tags, trade notes, prayers, jokes and obscenities. Ordinary writing by ordinary people.

Some inscriptions are magical — charms, curses, protective formulas — and there is no doubt runes were sometimes used for such purposes, as literacy has been used everywhere. That is different from a system of divination.

The evidence for rune divination is thin, and rests almost entirely on one passage. Tacitus, in Germania (98 CE), describes Germanic peoples cutting a branch from a fruit-bearing tree into strips, marking them with notae — signs — scattering them on white cloth, and having a priest take up three and interpret them.

This is genuine evidence of lot-casting with marked pieces of wood. It is not clearly evidence of runes: Tacitus does not use the word, developed runic writing may not yet have existed when he wrote, and notae means marks of some kind. The identification is an assumption made by later readers, and it is doing a great deal of load-bearing work.

The rune poems — Old English, Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic, from between roughly the eighth and fifteenth centuries — are the source of modern rune meanings. They are real medieval texts, but they are mnemonic verses for remembering an alphabet, giving each rune's name and a short descriptive stanza. They are not divinatory manuals and do not present themselves as such.

Modern rune divination is a twentieth-century construction. The mass-market version derives from Ralph Blum's The Book of Runes (1982), which sold in very large numbers and shaped nearly all subsequent popular practice. Blum devised his own order and interpretations, drawing on the I Ching as much as on Germanic material — and invented the blank rune, sometimes called Odin's rune or the rune of fate, which appears in most commercial sets sold today and has no historical basis whatsoever. It is forty years old and was made up by one author.

How it is practised

Runes are inscribed on tiles of wood, stone, bone or clay, drawn from a bag or cast onto a cloth, and read singly or in spreads borrowed largely from tarot.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the runes themselves are entirely real, well attested and historically important, and that runology is a serious scholarly field.

We can say the divinatory system is modern, the meanings are extrapolated from mnemonic poems, and the blank rune is a 1982 invention. A practitioner is free to find the practice valuable; the antiquity claim is simply false.

And there is a political problem here that cannot be left out. Runes have been extensively appropriated by the far right, and this is not a fringe association. Guido von List invented an eighteen-rune "Armanen" system in 1908, claiming to have received it in a vision, embedded in Ariosophy — an explicitly racial-mystical movement. Nazi organisations adopted runic symbolism directly: the SS insignia is a doubled sowilo, and the odal and tiwaz runes were used as unit and organisational symbols. Contemporary white-nationalist groups continue to use them, and several runes appear in hate-symbol databases maintained by monitoring organisations.

This is a genuine burden on modern heathen and Ásatrú practitioners, most of whom are not remotely sympathetic to it, and many of whom have organised explicitly against the appropriation — publishing statements, refusing far-right members, and campaigning to reclaim symbols that were taken from a shared European heritage and used to justify murder. Anyone taking up runes should know the symbols carry that history whether or not they intend it, and that the communities most invested in the tradition are the ones fighting hardest about it.

We cannot say what pre-Christian Germanic peoples did with marked wood, because the evidence does not reach that far. Something involving lots and signs is attested. The rest is reconstruction, and honest practitioners generally say so.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading