Magical formulas

What counts as a formula

Most runic inscriptions are names. A memorial names the dead and the person who raised the stone; an object names its owner or its maker. That is the bulk of the corpus and there is nothing mysterious about it.

A formula is different: a word that appears on unrelated objects, in different regions, over a long period, in contexts that have nothing else in common. Recurrence like that cannot be personal names or ordinary vocabulary. It is a fixed phrase doing a job.

Three such words are securely identified in the Elder Futhark corpus:

alu, the commonest, on bracteates, amulets and cremation urns from Denmark to England. Etymologically connected to ale and intoxication, and by extension to ecstatic states and to the dead.

laukaz, leek, sometimes abbreviated to lauz or a single rune. Alliums had a real role in Germanic ideas about health and growth.

auja, luck or divine favour.

That is the list. Three words. Everything else described as a runic formula is either much later, much rarer, or a modern construction.

Readable and untranslatable

Here is the uncomfortable centre of the subject.

We can read alu. The runes are unambiguous, the word is stable across scores of objects, and its etymology is reasonably clear. What nobody can say is what writing it on a cremation urn was supposed to accomplish.

That is not a gap that better scholarship will close. There is no text from the period explaining the practice, because there are no texts from the period at all beyond the inscriptions themselves. The Germanic world of the fifth century is prehistoric in the literal sense: it is before its own written record.

Everything said about what alu was for — protection, consecration, an invocation of ecstatic states, a libation reference — is inference from etymology and context. Some of it is good inference. None of it is testimony.

The same holds for the whole category. We have the words. We do not have the instructions.

The curse stones

Two monuments in Blekinge, in southern Sweden, are the strongest evidence that runes were believed to do something.

The Björketorp stone stands 4.2 metres high and carries, in Proto-Norse, a text usually read as: I, master of the runes, conceal here runes of power. Incessantly plagued by maleficence, doomed to insidious death is he who breaks this monument. I prophesy destruction.

The Stentoften stone nearby carries a related formula, and adds something else: it uses the Jera rune on its own as an ideogram, standing for a good harvest rather than for the sound j. That single detail is the best evidence in the entire corpus that runes could be read as concepts and not only as letters.

The key word at Björketorp is ginnarunaz — usually rendered runes of power or mighty runes. It is the corpus speaking about itself: an inscription that describes what it is doing.

The scale matters too. Somebody quarried, raised and inscribed a four-metre stone in order to threaten whoever might interfere with it. Whatever they believed about the threat, they invested heavily in it.

The sequences nobody can read

A number of inscriptions carry runic sequences that are not words in any known language, and how these are treated is the single biggest fault line in the subject.

The Lindholm amulet, a bone piece from Sweden, reads in part ek erilaz sa wilagaz hateka — I, the erilaz, am called the wily — and then continues with a long sequence of repeated runes, including a run of eight a-runes and further clusters.

The Kragehul spear-shaft from Denmark carries a similar pattern: a legible opening followed by repetition.

The standard interpretation is that these are magical: repetition as intensification, numerical significance, a spoken charm rendered graphically.

The standard objection is that undeciphered is not the same as magical. A sequence we cannot read might be a language we have not identified, an abbreviation system we have lost, a carver practising, a mistake, decoration, or an alphabet-magic gesture that means nothing more specific than this is writing. Assigning it to magic because we cannot read it is a fallacy with a long history in the study of ancient scripts.

Both positions are held by serious people. The honest report is that the sequences are real, deliberate, patterned, and not understood.

The literary formulas are later

Much of what circulates as runic magic comes from Old Norse literature rather than from inscriptions, and the distinction is worth holding.

The Sigrdrífumál has a valkyrie instruct Sigurðr in victory-runes, ale-runes, birth-runes, sea-runes, limb-runes, speech-runes and mind-runes, with directions on where to carve each. The Hávamál has Óðinn list eighteen charms he knows. Skírnismál has Skírnir threaten a woman by carving þurs and three staves besides. Bósa saga contains the Buslubæn, a curse ending in a runic riddle.

All of this is thirteenth century or later, written in Christian Iceland about a legendary past, six to eight hundred years after the Elder Futhark went out of use.

It is excellent evidence for what medieval Icelanders believed runes could do. It is not evidence for what fifth-century carvers did, and treating the two as one body of material is the commonest error in popular writing on the subject.

What can honestly be said

A short summary, since this is a topic where confident overstatement is the norm.

Yes: three words recur formulaically in the older corpus. Two monumental inscriptions curse anyone who damages them, and one of them calls its own runes mighty. A rune is used as an ideogram on the Stentoften stone. Repeated and stacked runes occur on weapons and amulets in patterns that look deliberate. Medieval Icelandic literature describes elaborate runic magic in detail.

No: nobody can translate the function of alu. No instructional text survives from the period of the inscriptions. The undeciphered sequences are not proven to be magical. The literary material is not contemporary. There is no attested formula for divination, healing or love in the epigraphic record, whatever the sagas describe.

The useful posture is to hold the evidence and the gap at the same time, and to say which is which.