Magic, divination and what the sources say

Were runes used for magic? Were they used to tell the future? These are the questions most of us care about, and they are where the gap between popular belief and evidence is widest. In this lesson we read the main sources one by one, and you will leave able to say exactly what modern rune reading is built on.

Tacitus and the white cloth

Historical Around 98 CE the Roman historian Tacitus described, in Germania chapter 10, how some northern peoples sought guidance. In Church and Brodribb’s 1868 translation: “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 or the father of the family prays, looks up to the sky, “takes up each piece three times” and interprets the marks. The Latin can also mean that three pieces were picked up, which is why many modern readers draw three runes on a white cloth.

Notice what Tacitus does not say. He never calls the marks runes, and he wrote decades before the oldest securely dated runic object. He was not an eyewitness, and he used the northern peoples partly as a mirror for Roman vices. The passage shows divination with marked lots. It does not show that runes were a divination system.

Tacitus in Latin, and two more Roman-era lots

Historical The key words of Tacitus are worth seeing in Latin, because so much depends on them. He writes that the marked pieces are scattered “temere ac fortuito”, carelessly and at random, over a white cloth, and that the reader “ter singulos tollit”, which can mean “takes up each one three times” or “takes up three, one at a time”. Translators disagree, and the second reading is the source of the modern three-rune draw.

Historical Two other early writers mention lots among Germanic peoples. Julius Caesar, in The Gallic War (book 1, chapter 53), tells how a captured envoy, Valerius Procillus, survived because the lots were consulted three times over whether he should be burned, and each time they said to wait. And in the ninth century, Rimbert’s Life of Ansgar describes Swedes at Birka casting lots to learn the will of their gods. None of these sources mentions runes. They show that drawing lots was a known way of seeking guidance, which is a different thing from a runic divination system.

Odin on the tree

Historical The Poetic Edda survives mainly in the Codex Regius, written in Iceland around 1270, two or three centuries after the conversion. In Hávamál (stanzas 138 to 145, numbered 139 to 146 in Bellows’s 1923 translation), Odin says: “I ween that I hung on the windy tree, / Hung there for nights full nine,” and later, “I took up the runes, shrieking I took them.”

The poem then lists eighteen charms Odin knows, but not their words. In Sigrdrífumál a valkyrie teaches the hero kinds of runes: winning-runes for a sword hilt, ale-runes, birth-runes, wave-runes, branch-runes for healing. Bellows calls it the most chaotic poem in the collection, a set of fragments. These poems show that runes were imagined as divine and powerful. Neither preserves a working method.

Sagas, amulets and charms

Historical In Egil’s Saga, written down in the thirteenth century, Egil scratches runes on a poisoned horn and it bursts (chapter 44 in Green’s 1893 translation). Later he finds badly carved love runes hidden under a sick young woman’s bed, scrapes them off, burns the whalebone and she recovers (chapter 75), with the verse “Runes none should grave ever / Who knows not to read them.” These are literary scenes, set centuries before they were written, and they describe charms, not divination.

Archaeology adds real objects. The Ribe skull fragment, around 725 CE, seems to call on Odin and other gods for help against a “dwarf”, probably an illness. An eleventh-century copper plate from Sigtuna orders a fever spirit to flee. Medieval Bergen has charms that mix saints’ names with older formulas, and a few runestones curse anyone who moves them. Runes were sometimes used in charms. That is a small part of a record dominated by names and memorials.

The missing manual and the rune poems

Historical Here is the most important point of the lesson: no source from any period describes a method of drawing or casting runes to tell the future. There are no divinatory meanings, no spreads and no instructions. Prophecy in the sagas comes from seeresses, dreams and omens. Absence of evidence does not prove nobody did it, but if they did, the method is lost.

What we do have are the three rune poems: the Old English poem of 29 stanzas, known from George Hickes’s printing of 1705 because its manuscript burned in 1731; the Old Norwegian poem of 16 two-line stanzas, printed by Ole Worm in 1636 before its manuscript burned in 1728; and the Old Icelandic poem of 16 riddling stanzas, usually dated to the fifteenth century. They are medieval and Christian, and they describe the rune names, which are ordinary words: hail, need, ice, sun. For eight of the 24 Elder Futhark runes, only the English poem survives.

Modern Modern rune divination is a modern creation, built from the rune names, the poems, Tacitus, the Eddic poems and twentieth-century imagination. You can practice it wholeheartedly and still say so. That honesty is the foundation of this course.

The rune poems in their own words

Historical The poems are short, and reading a few lines shows how different they are from modern guidebooks. Here is the Fé stanza from the Old Norwegian poem, with Bruce Dickins’s 1915 translation. The Old Norse reads “Fé vældr frænda róge; føðesk ulfr í skóge”, and Dickins gives “Wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen; the wolf lives in the forest.”

The Old Icelandic poem gives three short phrases for the same rune, “Fé er frænda róg ok flæðar viti ok grafseiðs gata”, which an English version based on Dickins renders as “source of discord among kinsmen and beacon of the flow and path of the serpent”. These are poetic names for gold, called kennings.

And the Old English poem says: “Wealth is a comfort to all men; yet must every man bestow it freely, if he wish to gain honour in the sight of the Lord.” Three poems, three angles on one word: wealth causes quarrels, wealth is gold with many poetic names, wealth must be shared. A modern keyword such as “abundance” is a much smaller thing than this.

Hávamál on writing runes

Historical A few stanzas after Odin’s ordeal, Hávamál turns to the runes themselves. In Bellows’s translation (1923):

“Runes shalt thou find, and fateful signs, / That the king of singers colored, / And the mighty gods have made.”

Then comes a series of questions:

“Knowest how one shall write, knowest how one shall rede? / Knowest how one shall tint, knowest how one makes trial?”

These lines tell us that writing, reading, coloring and testing runes were imagined as skills to be learned. They do not tell us how any of it was done. “Tint” suggests that runes were sometimes colored, which fits painted runestones, but the poem gives no recipe.

Sigrdrífumál on ale-runes

The valkyrie’s teaching in Sigrdrífumál also gives a little detail. In Bellows’s translation: “On the horn thou shalt write, and the backs of thy hands, / And Need shalt mark on thy nails.” “Need” here is the rune name, the same as Naudiz. It is one of the rare places where a poem names a single rune and a place to write it. Still, it is a poem, not a handbook, and nobody knows whether anyone ever did this.

Questions beginners ask

If no manual survives, is rune reading fake? It is modern, which is different from fake. It is a practice built from real historical material, and it can be honest if you say so.

Did Odin invent the runes? In the myth, Odin wins the runes through an ordeal. Historically, as you saw in lesson 2, the runes were adapted from a Mediterranean alphabet. Both can be meaningful, as long as you know which is which.

Can I use the Hávamál stanzas in my practice? Yes, as poetry and inspiration. Quote them as myth and do not present them as instructions.

Myths to drop: Tacitus did not describe rune casting. The sagas are not handbooks. And “ancient Viking divination meanings” do not exist in any source.

A practice variation: three poems, one rune

Choose one rune that appears in all three poems, such as Hagalaz, Isa or Sowilo. Copy the three stanzas into your notebook in translation. For example, for Sowilo: the Old English poem says the sun “is ever a joy in the hopes of seafarers”, the Norwegian poem says “Sun is the light of the world” and the Icelandic poem, in an English version based on Dickins, calls it “shield of the clouds and shining ray and destroyer of ice”. Write one modern keyword of your own that does justice to all three, and note which poem you find most beautiful.

A worked example

Imagine someone filling in the three columns. For Tacitus she writes “marked wood, white cloth, picked up three times” in the middle column and “ancient rune casting” in the last. For Hávamál she writes “Odin wins the runes through ordeal, no method given”. For Egil, “a charm in a saga written centuries later”. Her sentence reads: “I use a modern reflective method inspired by Tacitus, the rune poems and the Eddic poems.” She tapes the page inside her notebook cover.

Try this

Make a three-column page headed “Source”, “What it actually says” and “What people often claim it says”. Fill in one row each for Tacitus Germania 10, the Hávamál rune stanzas and Egil’s poison horn. Then write one honest sentence describing the method you will use, such as “I use a modern method inspired by…”

Recap

Tacitus describes marked lots on a white cloth but never mentions runes. The Eddic poems show runes as sacred knowledge without giving a method. Sagas and amulets show runes in charms, not divination. No casting manual survives. The three medieval rune poems are our best guide to the meanings of the names, and modern rune reading is a modern practice built on them.

What next

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Misuse, ethics and your ground rules. For the texts in more depth, see rune magic and divination: the sources and the rune poems.

Further reading: Bruce Dickins, Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples (Cambridge, 1915), freely available online, and R. I. Page, An Introduction to English Runes (second edition, Boydell, 1999).

Sources

• Tacitus, Germania, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (London: Macmillan, 1868).
• The Poetic Edda, translated by Henry Adams Bellows (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923).
• The Story of Egil Skallagrimsson, translated by W. C. Green (London: Elliot Stock, 1893).
• Michael P. Barnes, Runes: A Handbook (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012).

Go deeper: the runes pages on this site

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