Germanic & Scandinavian Runes

Enter the Rune Library →

Runes were a writing system long before they were a magical or divinatory one. The oldest runic objects, from around 150 CE, carry names, makers’ marks, and memorials. Charms, curses, and amulets come too, and they continue well into the Christian Middle Ages. But nothing in the historical record tells us how, or whether, runes were used for fortune-telling. The divinatory system you will find here is modern, and I want you to know exactly where each part of it comes from.

The sources, part by part:

• Names, poems, and historical meanings: the medieval rune poems (Old English, Old Norwegian, and Old Icelandic), in Bruce Dickins’s 1915 edition, checked against the work of runologists such as R. I. Page and Sven B. F. Jansson.
• The esoteric meanings: adapted from Edred Thorsson’s Runelore (1987), which draws on both historical sources and the early twentieth-century German Armanen tradition.
• The divinatory readings: the modern tradition begun by Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (1982), which also popularized the blank rune.
• The correspondences (planets, signs, colours, trees): Kristyna Arcarti’s Runes: A Beginner’s Guide. Modern authors disagree about these, and no historical system of them exists, apart from three planetary notes in a fifteenth-century Icelandic manuscript, which I show separately.
• The casting spreads: Thorsson (the Nornic method), Kveldulf Gundarsson (the nine-rune cast), and Karl Spiesberger (the Dodona method, originally for an eighteen-rune row).

Throughout the section, each piece of information is labelled as historically attested, reconstructed by scholars, from later medieval tradition, or modern. Modern does not mean wrong. It means modern, and practitioners today work with it meaningfully. I simply think you deserve to know which is which.

A note on Edred Thorsson (Stephen E. Flowers). Probably the most influential modern author on rune esotericism, and widely used by practitioners today. His system is built on the historical 24-rune Elder Futhark, and he holds a doctorate in Germanic languages. Scholars note that his esoteric meanings are a modern synthesis, drawing on early twentieth-century German rune occultism as well as historical sources, and they debate how far it reflects historical practice. (von Schnurbein, Norse Revival, 2016.)

As always, this is not meant to be a strict and unassailable presentation of truth. If you can improve its accuracy, please email me with your sources. I will review them, update the page, and gladly credit your help in the citations section.

— Evander Blackwood