Bind-runes

What a bind-rune is

A bind-rune is a ligature: two or more runes written so that they share a single vertical stave, with each letter's branches attached to the same upright.

The mechanism is obvious once you know how runes are built. Nearly every letter in the Germanic rows is a stave plus one or more branches. If two consecutive letters both need a stave, you can economise by giving them one between them and hanging both sets of branches off it.

The result reads as a single compound character and is unpacked by the reader into its constituent letters.

This is not exotic. The Latin alphabet has done the same thing for as long as it has been written by hand: æ, œ, the ampersand & (which is a ligature of et), and in medieval manuscripts a large repertoire of joined letter pairs. Bind-runes are the runic case of an entirely ordinary scribal habit.

Mostly, it is about space

The commonest reason for a bind-rune is that the carver was running out of room.

Runic inscriptions are laid out on physical objects with hard edges: the arris of a stone, the length of a comb, a band around a brooch, the flat of a blade. The text has to fit. Where it does not, a carver can compress by ligaturing, and the ligatures frequently appear precisely at the ends of lines and panels.

On the Franks Casket, whose text runs around the borders of carved panels, ligatures show up where the border is running short.

That is not a romantic explanation and it is the one the distribution supports. A practice that clusters where space is tight is a practice about space.

A second practical use is speed. Fewer strokes means faster carving, which matters on a wooden tally you are going to throw away.

The Christian ones

The most striking attested bind-runes are not pagan at all.

St Cuthbert's coffin, made at Lindisfarne in 698, is incised with figures labelled in a mixture of runes and Latin letters, sometimes within a single word. Among the labels are bind-runes spelling the sacred abbreviations for Christ — the ihs xps of Greek-derived Christian nomenclature — and the names of evangelists.

That is a bind-rune used at the centre of a major Christian relic, by monks, for holy names, forty years after the Synod of Whitby.

It should be set against the common assumption that ligaturing runes was an occult technique. Here the technique is being used for exactly the reason a scribe ligatures anything: it is compact, it is decorative, and the reader can unpack it.

Runic coinage does the same thing. Moneyers' names on Anglo-Saxon sceattas and pennies sometimes ligature, because the flan of a coin is small.

Where the magical reading comes from

There is a real basis for thinking bind-runes sometimes did more than save room, and it is worth stating what it is and is not.

Stacked and repeated runes occur on weapons and amulets — most famously the t-runes associated with Tiwaz on spearheads, and the repeated sequences on the Lindholm amulet and Kragehul spear. Where the same letter is written several times over one stave, space is clearly not the motive.

That is a genuine pattern, and it is the strongest case for a deliberate non-alphabetic use of ligaturing.

What does not follow is the modern system built on top of it: that any two runes can be combined to fuse their meanings, producing a bespoke talisman whose power is the sum of its parts.

No inscription describes that. No medieval text explains it. The best-known example in circulation — Algiz bound with Thurisaz for protection with an aggressive edge — is a modern claim about a genuine practice, not a documented Iron Age formula. It may be a reasonable extrapolation. It is an extrapolation.

How to think about a modern bind-rune

People design bind-runes constantly — for tattoos, jewellery, logos and personal work — and there is nothing wrong with it. It is worth being clear about what it is.

Designing a bind-rune is composition in a historical script, in the same way that writing a poem in a sonnet form is. The form is inherited; the content is yours. That is a legitimate creative act and it does not become more legitimate by being described as ancient.

Three things worth knowing before making one:

Runes are letters first. A bind-rune of two runes spells two letters. Anyone literate in the script will read it as a spelling before they read it as a symbol.

Meanings are traditions, not properties. Kenaz means a torch in England and an ulcer in Scandinavia. A bind-rune built on the torch is built on one witness against two, which is fine as long as you know that is what you are doing.

Some runes carry baggage. Sowilo doubled is the SS insignia; Othala is in the Anti-Defamation League's Hate Symbols Database. A design containing either will be read by some viewers as a statement, regardless of intent.