Runes

The runes are letters. That is the first and most important thing to say about them, because almost everything else claimed for them is later, and the epigraphic record is large and unambiguous.

The Elder Futhark is the oldest complete set, twenty-four characters, named from the sound values of its first six, and it is attested on inscriptions from around the second century CE across the Germanic-speaking world. It was adapted from an Old Italic alphabet, which is why several characters look like recognisable Latin letters. It divides into three groups of eight, the aettir, and each character has a name, Fehu cattle or wealth, Uruz the aurochs, Thurisaz the giant or thorn, Ansuz the god or mouth, and so on, recorded in rune poems written down in Old English, Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic, considerably later than the inscriptions themselves.

As the languages changed, so did the alphabet. Scandinavia reduced it to the Younger Futhark of sixteen characters by the Viking age, which meant a single rune had to serve several sounds; England expanded it to the Anglo-Saxon futhorc of up to thirty-three. Runes continued in ordinary use well past Christianisation, the Bryggen finds at Bergen include hundreds of medieval inscriptions on wood, and a great many of them are business notes, name tags, love messages and obscenities.

That last point is worth dwelling on. The surviving corpus of runic inscriptions is overwhelmingly mundane: this person made this, this person owns this, this person is remembered here. A minority are charms or invocations, and a handful are genuinely obscure. The picture of runes as a body of magical script that happened also to be used for writing is not what the material shows.

What the tradition itself says about runes and what modern rune divination does are separated by a considerable gap, and the gap has identifiable contents.

The mythological charter is strong. In the Havamal, Odin hangs nine nights on the windswept tree, wounded by a spear, given to himself, and takes up the runes screaming, an image of knowledge won through ordeal that has no equivalent in the alphabetic origin stories of other scripts. The Eddas and the sagas contain rune charms: for healing, for childbirth, for cursing, carved and reddened. Bind-runes, characters combined into a single figure, appear on real objects. The magical use is genuine.

Divination is thinner. Tacitus, writing about the Germans around 98 CE, describes cutting a fruit-bearing branch into strips, marking them with signs and casting them on a white cloth, and this is the standard citation for runic divination. It is also the only substantial classical description, it predates the earliest surviving runic inscriptions, and Tacitus says notae, marks, not runes. Nothing in the medieval Norse corpus describes a rune-casting system of the kind now practised.

The modern practice, drawing runes from a bag, laying them in spreads, reading upright and reversed positions, assigning each a divinatory meaning, was assembled in the twentieth century, and the popular English-language form of it dates largely to the 1980s. Reversed meanings in particular are borrowed from tarot practice; several runes are symmetrical and cannot be reversed at all, and the systems handle that inconsistently.

A darker layer also has to be named. The Armanen runes of Guido von List, invented in 1902, are an eighteen-character system with no epigraphic basis, and List's occult nationalism fed directly into the runic symbolism the Nazi state adopted. Modern heathen organisations have publicly repudiated that use, and the symbols remain contested in consequence.