Rune divination

The honest headline

No inscription describes drawing runes to answer a question. No law tract mentions it. No saga describes a rune-casting as a scene, in a literature that describes a great deal of divination in detail. No archaeological find has ever been identified as a divination set, and no runic object comes in a group of twenty-four.

The surviving runic corpus is memorial, territorial, commercial, personal and occasionally aggressive. It contains ownership tags, trade tallies, curses, love notes, obscenities, Latin lessons and one man's complaint that another man's carving made a woman ill. It does not contain oracles.

That is the situation, stated plainly, and it is the thing most rune books do not say.

What Tacitus actually wrote

One passage carries almost the entire historical claim, and it is worth reading closely rather than in paraphrase.

In Germania 10, written around 98 CE, Tacitus describes a Germanic divination practice: a branch is cut from a fruit-bearing tree and sliced into strips; marks — notae — are made on them; they are scattered at random on a white cloth. A priest, for public matters, or the head of a household, for private ones, prays, looks up at the sky, and lifts three, one at a time, interpreting each according to the mark previously made.

That is a real account of a real practice and it is genuinely striking. Three problems stop it supporting rune divination.

Date. Tacitus writes around 98 CE. The earliest datable runic objects are roughly contemporary or later, and a fully attested futhark row does not appear until the Kylver stone around 400. He is describing something at or before the beginning of the runic record.

Vocabulary. He says notae, marks or signs. He does not say letters, and he was perfectly capable of saying letters. Elsewhere he remarks that Germanic men and women alike are ignorant of secret correspondence, which sits oddly with a literate divination system.

Method. Even taken at face value, the procedure is not modern rune casting. It is three strips lifted one at a time from a scatter, on a white cloth, after prayer and looking at the sky — not a bag, not a spread, not reversals.

The passage supports Germanic divination with marked wooden strips. It does not support Vikings reading the futhark.

The one thing that is genuinely true

There is a real fact underneath all this, and it deserves to be stated as clearly as the debunking.

Runes carried ideographic meaning as well as sound values. This is not speculation.

The Stentoften stone in Blekinge uses the Jera rune on its own, standing for a good harvest rather than for the sound j. That is a rune read as a concept, on a real monument, by the people who used the script.

The Anglo-Saxons did the same thing. The scribe of the sole surviving Beowulf manuscript writes the ᛟ rune three times as a standalone logogram in place of the word eþel, in a text otherwise entirely in Latin letters. The practice has a name, begriffsrunen.

And the rune poems exist precisely to fix a concept to each letter. An alphabet whose letters are named for cattle, hail, ice, need, joy and the grave is an alphabet where every character carries a semantic charge.

So the raw material of divination — letters that mean things — is genuine and attested. What is missing is any evidence that anyone assembled that material into an oracle.

Where modern practice comes from

The method almost everyone uses is traceable, and it is recent.

Ralph Blum, The Book of Runes, 1982. It sold enormously, it came packaged with a set of ceramic tiles, and it is the direct ancestor of the contemporary practice. Blum was candid that he was constructing something: he modelled his method substantially on the I Ching and on tarot spreads, and he used an ordering of his own devising rather than the futhark sequence.

He also introduced the blank rune, presented as Odin's rune, the unknowable, fate. It appears in no historical source of any kind. Every blank tile in every rune set sold since is downstream of that book.

Around and after Blum, a body of more historically engaged work developed — Edred Thorsson and Freya Aswynn in the 1980s in particular — which supplies most of the elemental, tree and deity correspondences now treated as traditional. Those systems are coherent and thoughtfully built. They are also forty years old, not a thousand.

Behind all of it sits Guido von List, whose invented eighteen-rune Armanen row of 1902 introduced meanings that still circulate unattributed, and whose system was subsequently absorbed into Völkisch and then Nazi symbology.

The reversal question

One practical point that follows directly from the sources rather than from tradition.

Modern practice assigns most runes a reversed or merkstave meaning. But nine of the twenty-four Elder Futhark runes are symmetrical top to bottom and cannot be reversed at all: Gebo, Hagalaz, Naudhiz, Isa, Jera, Eihwaz, Sowilo, Ingwaz and Dagaz.

Sets and books that supply a reversed meaning for those nine are inventing one, because the shape does not permit it.

There is a further wrinkle. Sowilo is rotationally symmetrical but not mirror-symmetrical, so a Sowilo cut facing the other way is not reversed — it is facing the other way. Treating that as an inversion is reading a manufacturing variation.

This site gives reversed meanings only for the Elder Futhark runes that actually have an orientation, and none at all for the Younger Futhark, Futhorc or Ogham, because reversal is an Elder-Futhark-centred modern convention and extending it further would be invention.

So should you read runes

Yes, if you want to, and there is no need to be defensive about it.

This site takes the same position on tarot. The psychological reading of the tarot is a twentieth-century development layered onto a fifteenth-century card game, and it works. Being modern is not the same as being worthless.

What modern rune reading has going for it is unusually strong raw material: twenty-four to twenty-nine letters with genuinely ancient names, attached to genuinely ancient poems, describing cattle, weather, need, protection, journeys, gifts, ice and the grave. That is a richer and more concrete vocabulary than most divinatory systems start with, and it comes with a documented tradition of disagreement that rewards actually reading it.

The recommendation is simply this. Know which layer you are standing on. Hagalaz means hail is a fact. The Old English stanza notes it turns to water afterwards is a fact. Hagalaz is the seed of transformation is a modern reading, and a good one. This is how the Vikings did it is false.

The first three are enough to work with.