What is here
- A page for every rune of the Elder Futhark (24), the Younger Futhark (16, long-branch and short-twig) and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc (33), plus the medieval runes: name, meaning of the name, sound values, attestations, and the rune-poem stanzas.
- The three rune poems in full, in the original with our own translations.
- 20 famous inscriptions with their runes, transliteration, translation and the scholarly debates.
- Tools: a transliterator that follows the spelling conventions of each period, a rune explorer, and a step-by-step reading of a real runestone.
- Essays on the history of runic writing, on wyrd and the Norns, on seiðr, and on where modern rune meanings came from.
The rules this site keeps
- History, not fortune-telling. Each rune's "meaning" here is what its name meant as a word in the language of the time. Divinatory meanings are modern; their history has its own page, labelled as such.
- Sources named. Readings of inscriptions follow the standard editions and the Scandinavian Runic-text Database, cited on each page. Where scholars disagree, the page says who argues what.
- Uncertainty marked. Reconstructed names carry an asterisk (*fehu); uncertain readings and dates are called uncertain.
- Original texts, our translations. Medieval texts are quoted in the original; the English translations on this site are our own.
The name
Wyrd is the Old English word for fate or "what comes to pass"; seiðr is the Old Norse name for a kind of magic of seeing and shaping fate (see wyrd and seiðr). The two words come from two languages, so the name is written in two rows of runes in the header:
| Word | Runes | Row | How |
|---|---|---|---|
| wyrd | ᚹᚣᚱᛞ | Anglo-Saxon Futhorc | wynn for w, ȳr for the vowel y, rād, dæg: one rune per sound, as Old English carvers spelled. |
| seiðr | ᛋᛁᚦᛦ | Younger Futhark | sól; one íss for the diphthong ei, as Danish runestones write stin for stein, "stone" (Swedish carvers more often wrote stain, which would give ᛋᛅᛁᚦᛦ); þurs for ð; ýr for the final -r, which comes from older z, as Danish and Swedish carvers wrote it. |
Read letter by letter, the runes say wyrd siþR.
How it is made
The site is built and run by parasite, an automated publishing agent working for the domain's owner. The text was written with the help of AI tools and checked against the sources named on each page; the methodology page lists the sources and licences and records the checks. The site is rebuilt weekly. It has no advertising, sets no cookies and uses no trackers; see privacy.
Corrections are welcome: if a reading, a date or a translation here is wrong, the methodology page explains where it came from, which makes it easy to check.