What runes are

In this lesson: runes as a real alphabet, where the word rune comes from, the words futhark and aett, and six myths you will meet online.

Before runes were symbols on pendants or tiles in a bag, they were letters. People wrote their names with them, signed their work, raised memorial stones and sent each other notes. This first lesson gives you the real picture, the basic words you will need and a quick way to sort what you read online.

An alphabet first

Historical Runes are the letters of a family of alphabets used by Germanic-speaking peoples from at least the second century CE well into the Middle Ages. The earliest securely dated runic object is a comb from the Vimose bog in Denmark, from around 160 CE. In a remote part of Sweden, Dalarna, a local form of runes was still being written into the twentieth century.

Most runic writing is practical: owners’ names, makers’ signatures, memorials for the dead, labels on goods and, in medieval Bergen in Norway, everyday notes on sticks of wood, from business messages to prayers, love notes and jokes. Some inscriptions are charms, and a few seem magical in purpose. But the great majority are ordinary writing.

The shapes tell you how runes were first used. They are built almost entirely of straight lines, upright staves and slanting branches, with very few curves and almost no horizontals. That suits carving across the grain of wood, where most early writing probably was and has rotted away. Early inscriptions run right to left, left to right or back and forth, and single runes may be reversed without changing their meaning. Keep that in mind when you meet modern claims about “reversed” runes.

The word, and who could read

Historical The English word rune goes back to an old Germanic word with a wider meaning than “letter”. In Gothic, rūna means “secret, mystery” and also “counsel”. In Old English, rūn can mean “whisper”, “secret” or “rune”. So the word did carry a sense of private knowledge.

That tells us how people felt about writing, a rare and powerful skill, rather than proving that every rune was secret magic. The Finnish word runo, “poem”, is usually explained as a very early loan from Germanic, a link I enjoy, though it came to mean the old sung poetry rather than letters.

Runic literacy was probably limited at first, among craftsmen and specialists. By the late Viking Age thousands of memorial stones stood beside roads and bridges for passers-by to read, and medieval townspeople wrote to one another on wood. Runes became more ordinary over time, not more secret.

What real runic writing sounds like

Historical It helps to hear a few real voices before we go on. On the Gallehus horn from the early fifth century, a craftsman wrote “I, Hlewagastiz Holtijaz, made the horn.” On thousands of Viking Age stones, families wrote some version of “X raised this stone in memory of Y, his father.” In Orkney, Norse visitors scratched into the tomb of Maeshowe that a woman named Ingigerth was the most beautiful of women.

And among the wooden sticks found at Bryggen in Bergen is one that is usually read as “Gyða says that you should go home”, which sounds very much like a message from a wife to a husband who had stayed out too long. These are people signing their work, mourning their dead, showing off and nagging each other. That is the real world of the runes, and it is a warmer one than the online myths suggest.

How we know what we know

Historical Our knowledge of the runes comes from three kinds of evidence. The first is the inscriptions themselves, more than 6,000 known today, most of them in Scandinavia, catalogued and studied by runologists, the scholars who specialize in runic writing. The second is medieval manuscripts, such as the rune poems you will meet in lesson 4, a few learned treatises and the Codex Runicus, a Danish law book from around 1300 written entirely in runes.

The third is archaeology, which dates the objects and tells us where they were found and with what. When a modern book makes a claim about runes, a good question is: which of these three does it rest on? If the answer is none, the claim belongs in the modern layer.

Futhark, aett and three layers

The runic alphabet is called the futhark after its first six letters, f, u, th, a, r, k, just as “alphabet” comes from alpha and beta. The Elder Futhark has 24 runes, used from at least the second to about the eighth century, and it is the row most modern readers use and this course teaches.

The Younger Futhark is the Viking Age row of 16. The Anglo-Saxon futhorc grew to as many as 33. The Elder Futhark is divided into three groups of eight called aettir (singular aett). The division is old, since it is marked on a gold pendant from about 500 CE, but names like “Freyr’s aett” are much later.

As everywhere on this site, I label three layers: Historical for evidence, Later tradition for what nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers added and Modern for practice today. Runes need this more than almost any subject, because so much writing blends the layers without warning.

Six myths you will meet

• “Runes are an ancient Viking divination system.” Runes are six centuries older than the Viking Age, and no surviving text describes reading the future with them. Modern rune divination took shape largely after 1982.
• “Tacitus proves they cast runes.” Around 98 CE he described marked lots of wood cast on a white cloth, but he never says the marks were runes, and he wrote decades before the oldest dated runic object.
• “Runes are a magic alphabet.” Some inscriptions are charms. Most are practical writing.
• “There is a blank rune.” No historical source has one. Ralph Blum introduced it in 1982, drawing openly on the I Ching.
• “The meanings are thousands of years old.” The oldest written evidence for the names comes from rune poems of roughly the ninth to fifteenth centuries. Some original names are simply unknown.
• “All runes are hate symbols now.” They are not. A few shapes, used in particular ways, have been misused, and lesson 5 shows you how to tell.

Runes beside the Latin alphabet

Historical Runes were never the only script in the north for long. Roman coins, objects and ideas reached Germanic peoples from the first centuries CE, and after the conversion to Christianity the Latin alphabet arrived with the Church. For several centuries the two scripts lived side by side. Some medieval Scandinavians could write both, and a few runic inscriptions even contain Latin prayers or phrases written in runes. Runes did not vanish overnight. They faded slowly, lasting longest in rural Sweden, where a late form known as Dalecarlian runes was still used in modern times.

This matters for beginners because it corrects a common picture. Runes were not a secret code kept apart from ordinary life. They were one writing system among others, chosen for wood, stone and metal, and often for short practical messages.

A small practice: your name in two scripts

Write your first name in Roman letters, then in Elder Futhark runes using the table on the Elder Futhark page. Notice where sounds do not match neatly, such as a letter like c or q. Runic writing followed sounds, not modern spelling, so you will need to choose the rune for the sound you actually say. That small puzzle is exactly the one ancient carvers solved every day.

Questions beginners ask

Do I need to learn Old Norse to study runes? No. Scholars provide translations of almost every inscription, and this course gives you everything you need. Learning a few words of Old Norse or Old English is a pleasure, not a requirement.

Are runes a language? No, they are a writing system. The same runes were used to write several languages, from Proto-Norse to Old English and Old Swedish, just as the Latin alphabet is used for English, Finnish and many others.

Which row should I learn first? This course teaches the Elder Futhark because it is the row most modern books and sets use. If you later want to read Viking Age stones, you will add the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark, which is easier than it sounds once you know the older row.

Can I use runes if I am not Scandinavian or of Germanic descent? Yes. The runes were used by many peoples, and today they are studied and enjoyed all over the world. Lesson 5 explains how to do so respectfully.

Are runes dangerous? Studying letters is not dangerous. What can go wrong, as with any reflective practice, is anxiety or over-reliance, which is why every lesson has a short safety note.

A practice variation: a runic walk

If you live near a museum with runic objects, or have access to an online collection, try a slow look. Choose one object, such as a comb, a brooch or a stone. Spend five minutes looking before reading the label. Notice the material, the size, where the runes sit and how they were cut. Then read the label and the translation. Write three sentences: what you noticed, what the inscription says, and one question you still have. Many national museums in the Nordic countries publish photographs and translations online, so this works from home too.

A worked example

Imagine someone who sees a pendant advertised as “the ancient Viking rune of protection, used by warriors for divination for thousands of years”. She sorts it. The shape is a real rune, Algiz, which is historical. The name “protection” is a modern keyword: the old name is uncertain, perhaps “elk”. “Viking” is doubtful, since that rune belongs to the older row. “Divination for thousands of years” has no evidence at all. She can still like the pendant. Now she knows what she is buying.

Try this

Find one claim about runes online, on a pendant listing, a social media post or a video title. Copy it into your notebook and sort each part into three columns: historical evidence, later tradition, modern practice. Note which parts you cannot place yet.

Recap

Runes are first of all letters, used for about fifteen centuries, mostly for practical writing. The word once carried a sense of secret counsel, but literacy grew over time. The futhark is named after its first six runes, and the Elder Futhark has 24 runes in three aettir. Divination, the blank rune and fixed ancient meanings are modern or unproven, and runes are not all hate symbols.

What next

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Origins and the first inscriptions. For an overview of the whole row, see my Elder Futhark guide.

Further reading: R. I. Page, Runes (British Museum Press, Reading the Past series, 1987), a short and reliable introduction.

Sources

• R. I. Page, Runes (Reading the Past, London: British Museum Press, 1987).
• Michael P. Barnes, Runes: A Handbook (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012).
• Erik Moltke, Runes and their Origin: Denmark and Elsewhere (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 1985).

Go deeper: the runes pages on this site

Mark as done