If the medieval sources do not supply a divinatory system, something else must have, and the trail is short and well documented.
The nineteenth-century groundwork
Germanic philology matured in the nineteenth century, and with it a romantic nationalist interest in recovering a pre-Christian Germanic religion. The rune names and rune poems became widely available in print. Occult writers began treating them as a symbol-system.
Guido von List, 1902-1908
The Armanen row, eighteen runes, published 1906 and 1908, is the first fully worked modern esoteric rune system. It is built on the Younger Futhark rather than the Elder, and this atlas records it separately. Its significance here is that it established the pattern: a fixed row, one meaning per character, a mystical rationale.
Ralph Blum, 1982
The single most influential source for English-language rune divination is Ralph Blum's The Book of Runes, published in 1982 and sold with a bag of ceramic tiles. It sold in enormous numbers and shaped what most people in the English-speaking world understand rune reading to be.
Three things about it should be stated plainly:
- Blum did not use the futhark order. He devised his own arrangement.
- Blum added a twenty-fifth blank rune. There is no blank rune in any historical futhark. It is his.
- Blum's interpretive method was substantially drawn from the I Ching, which he had been using, rather than from Germanic material.
Blum was not dishonest about this. He described his readings as inspired rather than reconstructed and made no scholarly claim. The subtitle his publisher gave the book, A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle, did the misleading, and the book's success did the rest.
Where that leaves the entries in this atlas
The meanings recorded here are the ones practitioners use. They descend from the rune names, which are old; from the rune poems, which are medieval; and from a twentieth-century interpretive tradition, which is not.
A modern practice honestly labelled is worth recording. The same practice sold as an unbroken ancient tradition is a different thing, and the difference is the only part that requires defending.