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Runes are not one alphabet but a family of them, used by Germanic-speaking peoples for well over a thousand years. They were a writing system first: for names, memorials, ownership, letters, and poetry. They were also used, sometimes, for charms and curses. This page is the short version of what the evidence shows, and how this Guidebook labels what it tells you.

The runic alphabets

• The Elder Futhark (c. 150 to 700s CE): 24 runes, used across the early Germanic world. This is the row most modern rune books use, and the one in the Rune Library.
• The Younger Futhark (from the 700s, standard by the 800s): 16 runes. This, not the Elder Futhark, is the alphabet of the Viking Age. Compare the two.
• The Anglo-Saxon futhorc: the English branch, which grew to around 30 runes. The Old English Rune Poem quoted throughout this section belongs to it.
• Medieval runes: Scandinavians kept writing in runes long after conversion to Christianity, into the 1400s, alongside the Latin alphabet.

What runes were used for

The oldest securely dated runic object is a comb from a bog at Vimose, Denmark, from around 150 CE. It carries a single name: harja. The earliest inscriptions are mostly names and makers’ marks. Later come memorial stones, messages, and everyday notes. Among some 466 inscriptions from the medieval wharf at Bryggen in Bergen, Norway, about one in nine is a practice alphabet, and most of the rest are ownership tags, trade notes, letters, love messages, and jokes.

Charms and curses are real, but they are a minority. A skull fragment from Ribe, Denmark (c. 725 to 760) names Óðinn in a charm against pain. A copper amulet from Öland asks Þórr’s hammer to protect its owner. Two seventh-century stones in Blekinge, Sweden, curse anyone who breaks them. Medieval charms in runes are often Christian, calling on saints and the Virgin Mary. Scholars still debate how much of the early material is magical: some read the oldest full rune-rows as protective, others are more cautious.

What about divination?

No historical source describes divination with runes. The Roman historian Tacitus describes Germanic lot-casting around 98 CE, but he does not say the lots were marked with runes, and his account is older than the oldest securely dated runic object. The rune-casting practised today, with rune stones drawn from a bag and read in spreads, was developed in the twentieth century and became popular in the 1980s. Read the evidence.

How this Guidebook labels information

Every rune entry marks where each piece of information comes from:

• Historically attested Found on the runic objects themselves, or in texts from the time.
• Scholarly reconstruction Worked out by linguists and runologists from the evidence, such as the original names of the runes.
• Later tradition From medieval sources written down centuries after the runes were first used, such as the rune poems and the Eddas.
• Modern Developed since the nineteenth century: most divinatory meanings, reversals, correspondences, and the blank rune.
• Meaning unknown Where the honest answer is that nobody knows.

Modern does not mean wrong. It means modern, and practitioners today work with it meaningfully. The labels are there so that you always know which is which.

Sources for this page

• Rune poems and names: Dickins, Runic and Heroic Poems (1915)
• Inscriptions: RuneS database (Göttingen Academy); Rundata (Scandinavian Runic-text Database)
• Scholarship: R. I. Page, Runes (1987); Sven B. F. Jansson, Runes in Sweden (1987); Imer and Vasshus on the Vindelev bracteates (2023)
• Tacitus, Germania 10 (c. 98 CE)

— Evander Blackwood