A Brief Background on Runes

What are runes and where did they come from?

As a result of the extensive migrations north and west from this area, the early rune alphabet spread through Europe and eventually reached Scandinavia.

Most of the Germanic tribes used runes as did the Angles and Saxons. The Norsemen (or Vikings) of Norway, Denmark and Sweden adopted the rune alphabet and brought it to Iceland and Greenland.

Many old rune inscriptions have survived to our times. All told, we have records of about 6,000. Over 3,000 of these are found in Sweden with Norway accounting for some 1,600 and Denmark about 800.

Where the Norsemen thought runes came from

Odin's quest for the runes is described in Håvamål, a beautiful and very famous poem that has survived through the ages. The verses describing the quest are shown in the left column of this page. The quotes about runes on this page were all taken from my favourite Håvamål translation which you can find online at OMACL - The Online Medieval & Classical Library

Håvamål contains many other references to runes and their power besides Odin's quest. Runes were powerful symbols, no doubt about it:

All will prove true that thou askest of runes --
those that are come from the gods,
which the high Powers wrought, and which Odin painted:
then silence is surely best.

What do runes look like?

Here is an example showing the two first words from the Rasmundsberget rune stone from Jäder in Södermanland, Sweden.

Figure 1: Runes

There are a number of runologist at various universities who specialize in the study and interpretation of runes. One of these institutions publishes a newsletter called Rune news for those who want to stay in touch with the academic community.

The Rune project at the University of Bergen, Norway offers free access to the Searchable Norwegian Rune Database

For our purposes, we shall concentrate on a brief overview of the runes that were used by the Norsemen.

The rune alphabets

The first rune alphabet had 26 characters and is called the "Elder FUTHARK". FUTHARK comes from the first six characters where "TH" combination is represented by one rune. The Elder Futhark is thought to have been developed from about AD 200. No confirmed runic inscriptions have been found that date earlier than this. The Elder Futhark was in use until about AD 750-800. We know of only some 350 inscriptions from this era.

A variant of the Elder FUTHARK evolved in Anglo-Saxon England. This rune alphabet included some additional characters not found in the Elder FUTHARK.

In the latter half of the second century, the Scandinavian rune alphabet was reduced to 16 characters. These are the "normal" runes which were in use until the 11th century. These runes are also known as the "long twig" runes. Figure 2 shows an example of these runes.

In the eleventh century, a further variation of the runes evolved which is known as the Medieval FUTHARK. These runes were in use until the 16th century.

Figure 2: The 16 character long twig FUTHARK

In addition to the long twig runes of the 16 character FUTHARK, there were two further variants. One variant simplified the runes by reducing some strokes and are called the "short twig" runes. They are quite similar to many of the long twig runes, but you can easily tell from Figure 3 that they would have been simpler to scribe.

Figure 3: The 16 character short twig FUTHARK

The other variant created a virtual rune shorthand by eliminating a lot of strokes all together.This rune short hand was done with the so called "stave less" runes. One look at Figure 4 and you see why "short hand" is an apt metaphor.

Figure 4: The 16 character stave less FUTHARK

Writing with runes

The runes were basically constructed of straight lines and sharp angles which are the most practical to reproduce in stone or wood. There were only upper case characters, no lower case. The runes could be written in any direction; left to right, right to left, up or down. We also know of cases where they were graved as mirror images, up side down or run together.

Runes that were run together, for example by sharing a stave, are called "bind-runes" because of how they "bind" or "tie" words together.

The runes were associated with individual sounds in the Old Norse language. However, as the language and the FUTHARK evolved, the runes changed the sounds they represented. In the table below, the most commonly assigned sound values are shown for the 16 character long twig FUTHARK.

Table 1: Rune sound map

Rune	Main Sound	Alternate sounds	Notes
	f	v
	u	v, o, y, ö
	th		This sound is similar to the English "th" as in "the".
	o	a, ä	The main sound in the 16 character FUTHARK is "o" despite its position.
	r
	k	g
	h	g
	n
	i	e, ä, y, j
	a	ä, e
	s
	t	d
	b	p
	m
	l
	R	e	The "R" represents the "sje" sound which is similar to the English sound for "she".

Punctuation was poorly developed with runes typically strung together with few or no breaks. Sometimes a mark like a double dot similar to a colon was used to space words or sentences.

An important confounding factor was the reduction from 26 to 16 runes which resulted in some fairly inventive linguistic contortions which stretched the runes to their limits and beyond.

This lack of presentation standards obviously makes interpretation of rune inscriptions difficult and ambiguous.

The magic of runes

The use and interpretation of runes as instruments of divination, casting of spells and for magic purposes in general, is considerably more controversial and much less well documented that the more "mundane" uses of runes we looked at above.

Still, we do have some clues like this reference to rune magic from the Song of Spells in Håvamål:

........ if I see in a tree
a corpse from a halter hanging,
such spells I write, and paint in runes,
that the being descends and speaks.

........ if some thane would harm me
in runes on a moist tree's root,
on his head alone shall light the ills
of the curse that he called upon mine.

Runes today

In the old days, runes were hand carved, graved, scribed - take your pick. Today, there are a number of fonts available that more or less faithfully captures the original rune alphabets. The examples on this page were made with characters in the font Gullskoen which is available both for PC and MacIntosh.

Perhaps the most common use of runes today is as a method of divination similar to e.g., Tarot cards. If you want to explore this aspects of runes in more detail, The Runic Journey takes you on a tour of runes, their meaning and how they are used for magical purposes.

You can also find runes used ornamentally by some jewellers. In the end and for most of us, runes are interesting simply because they are an important link to our past and continue to teach us new things about the people before us.

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