Runes, magic and divination: what the sources say

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

Were runes used for magic? Did people in the Viking Age cast runes to see the future? These are the questions most of us bring to runes, and they are where the gap between popular belief and the evidence is widest. On this page I go through the main sources one by one, show you what each actually says and then gather it all in one table. I use runes for reflection myself, and I think the honest history makes the practice better, not worse.

Tacitus and the marked lots

Historical Around 98 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote the Germania, a short book about the peoples beyond Rome’s northern frontier. In its tenth chapter he describes how they sought guidance. In the translation by Alfred Church and William Brodribb (1868):

“A little bough is lopped off a fruit-bearing tree, and cut into small pieces; these are distinguished by certain marks, and thrown carelessly and at random over a white garment.”

A priest, for a public question, or the father of the family, for a private one, prays, looks up to the sky and “takes up each piece three times, and finds in them a meaning according to the mark previously impressed on them.” If the answer is unfavorable, there is no further consulting on that matter that day.

This is the main historical anchor for modern rune casting, and you can see why. It has pieces of wood, marked with signs, thrown on a white cloth and interpreted. The Latin about picking them up is ambiguous: it may mean each piece was lifted three times, or that three pieces were picked up one at a time. Many modern readers lay out a white cloth and draw three runes in deliberate echo of the second reading.

But look at what the passage does not say. Tacitus never calls the marks runes. He wrote decades before the oldest securely dated runic object, the Vimose comb of around 160 CE. The marks could have been early runes, or simple signs of some other kind. Tacitus was not an eyewitness either; he relied on earlier writers, and he partly wrote to hold the northern peoples up as a mirror to Roman vices. Scholars agree there is no direct evidence that his lots were runes.

The Eddic poems: Odin wins the runes

Historical The Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Norse poems preserved mainly in the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript written around 1270. Some poems are probably much older than the manuscript, but all were written down by Christians two or three centuries after Iceland’s conversion.

In Hávamál, “the sayings of the High One,” Odin tells how he won the runes. In Henry Adams Bellows’s 1923 translation:

“I ween that I hung on the windy tree, / Hung there for nights full nine; / With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was / To Othin, myself to myself.”

And a little later: “I took up the runes, shrieking I took them, / And forthwith back I fell.”

This is the mythic heart of much modern rune practice. Bellows notes, though, that the stanzas around it are fragments joined together. Some scholars wonder about Christian influence in the image of a god hanging pierced on a tree; others see a genuinely pagan myth of initiation. The passage shows that runes were imagined as divine and powerful. It does not describe how anyone used them.

After it, Hávamál lists eighteen charms Odin knows: to heal, to blunt an enemy’s weapons, to calm the sea, to win love. As Bellows observes, the charms themselves are not given. We learn what they are for, not their words.

Sigrdrífumál: kinds of runes

Historical In Sigrdrífumál, the valkyrie Sigrdrífa teaches the hero Sigurd a list of kinds of runes. In Bellows’s translation there are “winning-runes” for a sword hilt, “ale-runes” against betrayal (with “Need,” the n-rune, marked on the nails), “birth-runes” for labor, “wave-runes” for ships, “branch-runes” for healing, “speech-runes” and “thought-runes.”

This is the most detailed picture of rune magic in Old Norse poetry. Bellows calls the poem the most chaotic of all, probably a collection of fragments, and part of it is lost from the Codex Regius. And it never says which runes to carve or how. It shows what medieval Icelanders imagined runes could do. It does not preserve a working system.

Egil’s Saga and the other sagas

Historical The Icelandic sagas are prose stories written mostly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries about people of the Viking Age. In Egil’s Saga, chapter 44, the poet Egil suspects a poisoned drink. In W. C. Green’s translation (1893), Egil “drew his knife and pricked the palm of his hand. He took the horn, scratched runes thereon, and smeared blood in them.” He speaks a verse and the horn bursts.

Later (chapter 75 in Green; numbering differs between editions), Egil finds a sick young woman with badly carved runes on a whalebone under her bed. A young man had tried to carve love runes and got them wrong. Egil scrapes them off, burns the bone, carves new runes and she recovers. His verse begins: “Runes none should grave ever / Who knows not to read them.”

These are wonderful stories, with a sensible moral. But the saga was written about three centuries after the events, by a Christian author, as literature. Neither scene describes divination; both describe runes used as charms. And the blood belongs to the story, not to any practice I would ever recommend. In the saga of Grettir the Strong, an old woman carves runes on a root, reddens them with her blood and sets it drifting to bring about Grettir’s downfall. By the thirteenth century, runes had a literary reputation as a tool of sorcery.

What archaeology shows

Historical Objects give us harder evidence, and a few do show runes in charms:

• The Ribe skull fragment, Denmark, around 725 CE: a piece of human skull with a hole bored through it and an inscription that a recent reading takes as calling on Ulf, Odin and “High-Tyr” for help against a “dwarf,” probably an illness or the spirit thought to cause it.

• The Sigtuna amulet, Sweden, eleventh century: a small copper plate with a charm against an illness, perhaps a fever, ordering it to flee. Scholars read parts of it differently.

• Medieval charms from Bergen and elsewhere against illness, bad luck and difficult childbirth, often mixing Christian prayers with older formulas.

• Curses on runestones against anyone who breaks or moves the stone.

• Formula words. A handful of words recur on early gold bracteates and amulets. The most common, alu, appears from the third to the eighth century, for example on the Elgesem stone in Norway from around 400 CE. Scholars link it to ale, the drink of feasts and rituals; to a word for “amulet” or “protection”; or, following Edgar Polomé, to a heightened state of mind. Laþu is often read as “invitation” or “summoning,” and laukaz means “leek,” a plant that seems to have had a symbolic role. Nobody knows which reading of alu is right, and it may have meant different things over five centuries.

So runes were sometimes used in charms for healing and protection, and occasionally in curses. That is real history. It is also a small part of a large record dominated by names, memorials and everyday writing.

What we do not have

Historical This is the most important point on the page. No source, from any period, describes drawing or casting runes to tell the future. There is no list of divinatory meanings, no description of a rune reading, no spread and no instructions. The sagas and poems are full of prophecy, but it comes from seeresses in trance, from dreams and from omens, not from cast runes.

That does not prove no one ever used runes as lots. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and much was never written down. But if they did, the method is lost.

The evidence at a glance

Where modern rune reading comes from

Modern Modern rune divination is a modern creation, built from the rune names, the rune poems, Tacitus, the Eddic poems and twentieth-century imagination. The version most people know began in 1982, when the American writer Ralph Blum published The Book of Runes with a set of tiles in a bag. Blum was open that he drew on books about the I Ching for the spirit of his interpretations. He rearranged the runes in his own order and added a blank twenty-fifth tile, which no historical source has. Reversed meanings, the blank rune and most spreads all come from this modern layer.

How to read a confident claim

Because so much is uncertain, books and websites often fill the gaps with confidence. When you meet a claim such as “the Vikings cast runes before every battle” or “alu means divine power,” ask three questions. Which source says so: an inscription, a poem, a saga or a modern author? When was that source written, compared with the time it describes? And does the source describe a practice, or only tell a story? Most claims fall apart at the first question, because they come from a modern author repeating another modern author.

Why the sagas are not manuals

It is tempting to read the saga scenes as instructions: carve these runes, redden them with blood, get this result. But they are literature, shaped by storytelling, and they often present runes as something dramatic from the pagan past. They are good evidence for what medieval Icelanders imagined, and weak evidence for what Viking Age people did. When a modern book calls Egil’s poison cup an “ancient rite,” it is turning a story into a practice.

Reading runes honestly today

None of this means you cannot read runes. It means you can do it with your eyes open. “I use a modern method inspired by Tacitus, the rune poems and the Eddic poems” is a true sentence, and a perfectly good foundation. If you would like to start, see how to cast and read runes and rune spreads for beginners.