Where runes come from: a short history

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Runes are often sold as mysterious, ancient and secret. Their real history is better than the myth. It is the story of an alphabet: borrowed, reshaped, carved on combs and spearheads, raised on memorial stones, scratched on wooden sticks as love notes, and later dressed up in theories it never belonged to. On this page I walk through that story in order, from the first finds to the modern revival, and I mark which layer each part belongs to.

Three layers to keep apart

Historical Everything we know about early runes comes from objects: inscriptions on stone, metal, bone and wood, plus a few medieval manuscripts. That is the historical layer, and it is where this page spends most of its time.

Later tradition From the seventeenth century on, scholars, mystics and nationalists wrote about runes and added meanings of their own. Some of this work was careful. Some of it was invented. That is the later tradition.

Modern Today, many people use runes for reflection and divination, and runes are part of the living religion of Heathenry. That is modern practice. It is real and it can be meaningful, but it is not the same thing as the history.

Origins: an alphabet borrowed and made new

Historical Scholars agree that the runes were not invented from nothing. Someone who understood how alphabetic writing worked adapted a Mediterranean alphabet to suit a Germanic language and the habit of carving on wood. Several runes look strikingly like Roman letters: compare the runes for f, r, h, i, b and m with Latin F, R, H, I, B and M. Others look quite different.

Which alphabet served as the model is still debated, and there are two main candidates.

• The Latin theory. Germanic peoples met the Roman alphabet through trade, war and service in the Roman army along the Rhine and Danube. Latin was the alphabet they were most likely to see. The weakness of the theory is that some rune shapes and sounds have no obvious Latin model.
• The North Italic theory. The alphabets of the Alps and northern Italy, related to Etruscan, share some features with runes, such as writing in either direction. A bronze helmet found at Negau, in modern Slovenia, carries a North Italic inscription that seems to include a Germanic name, Harigast, which suggests some Germanic speakers knew these scripts.

An older theory that the Goths borrowed runes from Greek has been dropped, because the oldest finds in Scandinavia are older than Gothic contact with the Greek world. A sensible summary is this: the runes were adapted from Latin or a North Italic alphabet, by Germanic speakers in contact with Rome, probably in the first century CE or a little earlier.

The rune row had its own order, starting f, u, th, a, r, k, which is why it is called the futhark. Each rune also had a name, an ordinary word that began with its sound: fehu, cattle or wealth, for f; sōwilō, sun, for s. The names are reconstructed from later sources, so on this site they carry an asterisk or a note on how certain they are.

What nobody has found is evidence for a secret origin. Claims that runes came from Atlantis, a lost Arctic homeland or an ancient priesthood belong to the later tradition, not to the evidence.

The earliest inscriptions

Historical The oldest runic objects are small, personal and practical.

The Vimose comb. In a bog at Vimose on the Danish island of Funen, archaeologists have recovered thousands of objects that were deliberately put there, many of them weapons. Among them is a small antler comb from around 160 CE, carved with five runes that read harja. It may be a name, or it may simply mean “comb.” It is still the oldest securely dated runic inscription.

The Øvre Stabu spearhead. An iron spearhead with silver inlay, found in a Norwegian grave in 1890, reads raunijaz, often taken to mean “tester” or “prober,” a fitting name for a spear. It is dated to about 210 to 240 CE.

The Hole stone from Svingerud. Between 2021 and 2023, archaeologists from the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo excavated a grave field at Svingerud in Norway and found fragments of a sandstone slab carved with runes. Radiocarbon dates from the graves place it between about 50 BCE and 275 CE, which makes it the oldest datable runestone known. It carries what is probably a woman’s name, idiberug, and the first three runes of the row in order: f, u, th.

The Meldorf brooch. A brooch from northern Germany, dated to the first half of the first century CE, carries four scratched signs. Some scholars read them as early runes. Others see Latin letters. The debate is open, and it shows how close the runes stand to the Roman world.

The Kylver stone. Found on Gotland in 1903 and dated to around 400 CE, this grave slab carries the oldest complete futhark, all 24 runes in order. It faced the dead inside the grave. Why someone carved the whole alphabet there is unknown.

There are roughly 350 known inscriptions in the Elder Futhark, found from Norway and Sweden to Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, England and as far south as Hungary, Romania and the Alps. The people who carved them were not one nation. They were Danes, Swedes and Norwegians in the making, Goths, Alamanni, Franks, Saxons, Angles, Frisians and others who spoke related Germanic languages. On this site “Germanic” means a family of languages, never a race.

The Migration period: gold, formulas and three aettir

Historical The fifth and sixth centuries, often called the Migration period, give us some of the most beautiful runic objects.

Bracteates. These thin gold pendants, stamped on one side, were inspired by Roman imperial medallions but show Germanic motifs, such as a head above a horse. Many carry runes. Some carry names. Many carry formula words such as alu, whose meaning is debated. The Vadstena bracteate from Sweden, from around 500 CE, shows the complete futhark divided by dots into three groups of eight. Those groups are called aettir. The bracteate was stolen in 1938 and has never been found, but a second one struck with the same stamp survives.

The Golden Horns of Gallehus. Two great gold horns were found in Denmark in 1639 and 1734. The second carries one of the most famous early inscriptions: ek hlewagastiz holtijaz horna tawido, “I, Hlewagastiz, son of Holt (or from Holt), made the horn.” The horns were stolen and melted down in 1802, so they are known today from drawings and copies.

Stones of the Migration period. The Tune stone in Norway records who made a memorial and who inherited. The Eggja stone, from the late seventh or early eighth century, mixes older and newer rune forms and shows the language changing.

Notice what these objects say. A maker names himself. A memorial names an heir. A pendant carries a short, perhaps protective word. They are human messages, mostly short, mostly about people.

The Viking Age: from 24 runes to 16

Historical Between about 700 and 800 CE, something surprising happened in Scandinavia. The spoken language was changing quickly, and you might expect the alphabet to grow. Instead, it shrank from 24 runes to 16. This shorter row is called the Younger Futhark.

With only sixteen runes, each one had to do several jobs. The u-rune covered u, o and w; the k-rune covered k and g; the t-rune covered t and d. Readers worked out the sound from context. Why the row became shorter is still argued over, and no explanation has won everyone over.

The Younger Futhark came in two main styles. Long-branch runes, common in Denmark, look closest to the older forms. Short-twig runes, common in Sweden and Norway, are quicker to carve. In parts of Sweden people even wrote staveless runes, little slashes with the upright lines left out.

This was the great age of the runestone. There are about 3,000 runestones in Scandinavia, most of them from the tenth and eleventh centuries, and Sweden has the largest share.

• The Rök stone in Östergötland, Sweden, from around 800, carries the longest known runic inscription in stone. Its text is full of riddles, and scholars still debate what it is about.
• The Jelling stones in Denmark were raised by King Gorm and his son Harald Bluetooth. The larger one, from around 965, says Harald “won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.” It carries the oldest image of Christ in Scandinavia.
• The Uppland stones around Stockholm and Uppsala were mostly raised in the eleventh century, and about seven in ten are openly Christian, with crosses and prayers such as “God help his soul.” Many are signed by professional carvers.

Runes also traveled with Scandinavians. They were carved on the Piraeus Lion in Greece in the eleventh century, inside the Maeshowe tomb on Orkney in the twelfth, and on a small stone at Kingittorsuaq in Greenland in the late Middle Ages.

The big lesson of the Viking Age is that many of the most impressive runic monuments are Christian. Runes were a script, and people wrote what mattered to them, including their new faith.

Runes in England: the futhorc

Historical The Angles, Saxons and Jutes who settled in Britain from the fifth century brought runes with them, and so did the Frisians. As their languages changed, old runes took on new sounds and new runes were added. The fourth rune came to stand for o, so the English row is called the futhorc, with 26, 28 or as many as 33 runes depending on time and place.

English runes met a rich Christian book culture. The Franks Casket, a whalebone box from eighth-century Northumbria now in the British Museum, puts Germanic legend, Roman history and the Bible side by side, framed with runic inscriptions. The Ruthwell Cross in Scotland carries lines of Old English religious poetry in runes. The poet Cynewulf signed his poems by weaving the runes of his name into the verses. Two runes even entered the Latin alphabet used for Old English: thorn, þ, and wynn. The “ye” in signs like “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe” is a misread thorn, and it was always said “the.”

The Old English rune poem, one of our three key sources for the rune names, comes from this world. Its manuscript burned in 1731, and the text survives only because George Hickes printed it in 1705.

Medieval runes: a second everyday script

Historical Runes did not end with the conversion to Christianity. In medieval Scandinavia they were used alongside the Latin alphabet for centuries. Carvers added dots to some runes to show more sounds, until by the thirteenth century the runic alphabet could match Latin letter for letter. Runes appear on church bells, fonts and grave slabs, and many medieval inscriptions are prayers, sometimes in Latin written in runes.

The most remarkable find comes from Bryggen, the old harbor of Bergen in Norway. After a fire in 1955, archaeologists found around 670 runic inscriptions on wood and bone, mostly from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. They include merchants’ labels, business letters, prayers, lines of poetry, rude jokes and love messages, including one asking for a kiss. They are the closest thing to medieval text messages we have, and they suggest that a great deal of everyday writing on wood has simply rotted away elsewhere.

The Norwegian rune poem was written down in the late thirteenth century and the Icelandic one in the fifteenth. Both are medieval and Christian, and both describe the rune names as ordinary words: hail, ice, the sun, a birch tree.

After the Middle Ages, runes lingered in practical use. Runic calendars, wooden staffs marking feast days and moon cycles, were used in Scandinavia into the nineteenth century. In Dalarna in Sweden, a local runic script was written on furniture and tools from at least 1596, and some people still used it in the twentieth century. Runes were never entirely a lost secret waiting to be rediscovered.

Revival: scholars, mystics and nationalists

Later tradition In the seventeenth century, Sweden and Denmark were rivals, and both looked to the ancient past for prestige. The Swedish scholar Johannes Bureus recorded runestones and published a runic primer in 1611. He was also a mystic who built his own esoteric rune system, which makes him an early forerunner of rune mysticism. The Danish physician Ole Worm published major studies of runic monuments and first printed the Norwegian rune poem in 1636. Their work preserved texts that would otherwise have been lost.

In the nineteenth century, Romanticism and nationalism turned to ancient poetry and national origins. Runology became a serious academic subject. At the same time, in German-speaking lands, a set of ideas grew up that treated ancient Germanic peoples as a superior race. Runes became one of its emblems.

The Austrian writer Guido von List was the key figure. In 1902, while temporarily blind after an eye operation, he said the secret of the runes had been revealed to him in a vision. He created a new row of eighteen runes, now called the Armanen runes, and published it in 1906 and as a book in 1908. The Armanen runes are not a historical alphabet. They are an early twentieth-century invention, and several Nazi emblems came from List’s row rather than from the ancient futhark.

Misuse, and why it does not get the last word

Later tradition When the Nazi party came to power in 1933, it adopted runic and rune-like emblems. The SS emblem of two angular s-runes was designed that year. Forms of Othala and Algiz appeared on insignia. After the war, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups took up some of the same shapes.

Modern Today a handful of rune forms appear in hate-group imagery, most often Othala with extra strokes at its feet, Algiz used as a “life rune” logo and a doubled, stylized Sowilo. Context decides. The Anti-Defamation League, which keeps the best-known public database of hate symbols, makes the same point: a rune in a museum, a Heathen’s practice or a medieval inscription is not a hate symbol. I cover how to recognize misuse on runes and misused symbols.

None of this has anything to do with the people who carved the Vimose comb, the Jelling stone or the Bryggen love notes. The best answer to misuse is the real history, told plainly.

Modern practice

Modern Rune divination as most people know it began in 1982, when Ralph Blum published a popular book sold with a bag of rune tiles. He drew on the I Ching for the spirit of his meanings, changed the order of the runes and added a blank rune, which has no historical basis. Many later authors built their own systems. On this site, the modern meanings on each rune page are built from the rune poems and broadly shared usage, and they are marked as modern.

Runes are also part of Heathenry, a modern religion that draws on pre-Christian Germanic gods and customs. The Ásatrúarfélagið in Iceland was founded in 1972, and The Troth in the United States in 1987. Most Heathen groups are inclusive and welcome anyone, and around 2016 many signed Declaration 127, a public statement against racist misuse of their religion. If you use runes, it is worth remembering that for some people they are sacred.

A timeline of the runes

All dates are approximate, and many are debated.

How to read rune history well

A few habits will help you with any book or website about runes, including this one.

• Ask for the object. When someone makes a claim about ancient runes, ask which object, from which site, dated by what method.
• Watch the dates. Archaeology moves. The Hole stone changed the story in a single season, and dates are usually ranges.
• Separate the layers. A medieval poem is not a first-century source, and a 1902 vision is not a medieval poem.
• Enjoy the ordinary. Combs, spearheads, love notes and memorials are the real heart of the story.

If you want to learn the runes themselves next, start with the Elder Futhark, then meet them one at a time, beginning with Fehu. Everything else is on the runes hub.