Runes: An Introduction

Ralph Elliott's Runes: An Introduction is a standard scholarly study of the Germanic runic alphabets, their linguistic development, inscriptional use and the scholarly debate over how much genuinely magical or divinatory significance runes carried for the cultures that used them versus their ordinary use as a practical writing system. Elliott's authority as a philologist specializing in Old English and Germanic studies gives the book real standing in runic scholarship. Because popular modern interest in runes as a divination system considerably outpaces the actual surviving evidence for that specific ancient use, Elliott's own treatment is notably cautious about claims of widespread ritual or magical use, a caution worth carrying into any claim this source is used to support about runes and divination specifically.