Where the Eighteen Came From

The number is the tell. No historical runic row has eighteen characters: the older Germanic row has twenty four, the Scandinavian row that replaced it has sixteen, and the English row expanded rather than contracted. Eighteen is the count of the charms Odin lists at the close of the Havamal, where the poem enumerates the spells he knows without giving them names or shapes. List took that list as the key, treated the sixteen character row as a damaged remnant, and supplied two further characters to complete what he understood the poem to be describing. The reasoning is circular and was not hidden.

List presents the row as recovered rather than composed, revealed to him during a period of blindness after eye surgery, and offers the Havamal correspondence as confirmation of a truth he already had. Nothing in the inscriptional record supports an eighteen character row at any period, and the medieval Icelandic and Norwegian rune poems that do give names to runes give them to the historical rows. The atlas records the construction as a modern one and the correspondence with the Havamal as List's reading of that poem, not as a property of the poem. What the eighteen charms of the Havamal actually were is a separate question that the eddic scholarship treats on its own terms.