Edred Thorsson

Edred Thorsson is the name under which Stephen Flowers publishes esoteric work, and the separation is stated by the author rather than inferred. He took a doctorate in Germanic languages and medieval studies at the University of Texas at Austin, has published academic and translation work under his legal name, and reserves the pen name for the initiatory material, on the argument that the two kinds of writing answer to different standards and should not be read as though they were one. The atlas records the distinction because it is unusual: most modern esoteric authors working with historical material do not draw the line at all, and a reader who does not know it exists will take a claim from one shelf as though it came from the other.

The system taught under the pen name is built on the Elder Futhark, the twenty four character runic row of the earliest inscriptions, with each character given a meaning, a sound, a posture and a place in a course of graded work. He founded the Rune Gild as the body that carries that course, structured as an initiatory order with stages rather than as a study group. He has also written at length on the earlier German rune occultism of Guido von List and the Armanen current, treating it as a subject of historical study as well as a predecessor.

Academic runology and modern rune practice are describing different things, and the gap is worth stating precisely rather than polemically. The surviving corpus of runic inscriptions is overwhelmingly ordinary: names, ownership marks, memorial formulas on stones, orders and messages on wooden sticks, a certain amount of graffiti. A small number of inscriptions look formulaic in ways that may be operative. There is no surviving instruction for divination with runes from any period in which they were the everyday script, and the passage most often cited for it, in the Germania of Tacitus, describes drawing marked slips of wood but does not say the marks were runes and predates the earliest inscriptions.

The rune poems, in Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic, are medieval mnemonic verses in which each character gets a stanza, and they are the main source for the traditional names. They are not a system of meanings for interpretation, though they are the raw material from which modern ones are constructed. A widely sold twentieth century handbook added a blank rune with no historical precedent at all. Thorsson published work is explicit that the practice he teaches is a modern construction resting on the historical evidence, which is the reason the atlas can hold both bodies of material without confusing them.