I, master of the runes, conceal here runes of power. But if anyone doubts that runes were believed to have magical powers, they should look at the 6th-century Björketorp runestone, which warns We find them etched into weapons or carved into memorial stones, not formalised in texts. ‘if I see up in a tree, a dangling corpse in a noose, I can so carve and colour the runes, that the man walks and talks with me’.īy the time Hávamál was written, norse runes had been in un-documented use for over a thousand years. Odhinn ascribes runes the power of life and death However Icelandic texts of that era include the poem Hávamál, which describes how the god Odhinn learned the power of the runes by hanging on the world tree Yggdrasil in voluntary self-sacrifice, his side pierced by a spear. Their very name stems from a word meaning ‘mystery’, or ‘secret’.įew written records survive from before the 13 th century, and even these may reflect their authors’ Christian beliefs. Personally I believe they had deep, esoteric significance, at least to those who worshipped the Nordic pantheon. So were runes a writing system, or did they have mystical meaning? Academics do not agree. It lives on in the palm-outwards, upright thumb and two fingers warding gesture against evil that is still used in some cultures. For example the rune bjarkan – ᛒ – was a phonetic ‘b’ but also the rune of the birch goddess, the earth mother, with connotations of nurturing, healing, caring, and rebirth. Runes had phonetic values, but were also ‘ideographs’ that expressed abstract concepts, in a similar way to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Alphabet or ideographs?Įnough runic artefacts survive to know that runes were never simply an alphabet. The carvings themselves would seem to be imbued with power, and their significance magnified by their rarity. It would have been wondrous that words could be cut and then re-spoken by later generations. Folk learned legends of gods and heroes from wandering skalds.

Unlike their contemporaries in imperial Rome, Germanic and Nordic peoples were a largely oral culture. But what did runes mean to the Nordic peoples who carved these angular symbols into stones or the hafts of their weapons?

Some even claim that they can not only foretell the future, but change it. In the present day they have seen a resurgence and acquired new meanings.

Many have believed that they offer a glimpse into the future, or an understanding of the present. Norse runes inscriptions from an oral cultureįor perhaps two thousand years, norse runes have held an image of mystery. Please contact me if you have any comments or questions. Arith covers both academic and esoteric aspects. All are runes of the ‘Elder Futhark’ in use from c.400-900CE.įor those wanting to dive deeper into rune lore, I recommend the YouTube channels of Arith Härger or Jackson Crawford. For introductions to individual runes and their meanings, there’s a pull down menu under the Norse Runes tab. Hammer of Fate, the first of the Rune Song trilogy, has been an Amazon #1 Best Seller for ‘Norse and Viking’, for ‘Norse Myth and Legend,’ and, most significantly, for ‘Epic Fantasy’. So if Adelais’s Vriesian world of rune magic and seidhkonur (sorceresses) feels real, it is because I have tried, as far as I can, to create a world that pre-Christian Norse people would recognise. The land of Adelais, the heroine of the Rune Songepic fantasy trilogy, is fictional but I drew heavily on historical facts.

Elder futhark runes historical meanings