The starting point: Tacitus's lots
The text most often quoted for rune divination is chapter 10 of the Germania, written by the Roman historian Tacitus in AD 98:
Virgam frugiferae arbori decisam in surculos amputant eosque notis quibusdam discretos super candidam vestem temere ac fortuito spargunt. Mox, si publice consultetur, sacerdos civitatis, sin privatim, ipse pater familiae, precatus deos caelumque suspiciens ter singulos tollit, sublatos secundum impressam ante notam interpretatur. They cut a branch from a fruit-bearing tree into slips, mark them with certain signs, and scatter them at random over a white cloth. Then, if the consultation is public, the priest of the community, or if private, the father of the family, prays to the gods, looks up at the sky, picks up three slips one at a time, and interprets them by the signs marked on them beforehand.Tacitus, Germania 10
This is a real description of Germanic lot-casting, but it does not mention runes. The "signs" (notae) could be anything: tribal marks, symbols, or simple notches. Tacitus wrote about sixty years before the oldest securely dated runic inscriptions, and there is no evidence that runes existed yet in the regions he describes. The passage tells us that Germanic peoples cast lots, not that they cast runes.
Runes in magic: what the sources do show
Runes were used in magic, and that is not a modern invention. The evidence is of a specific kind:
- Formula words. Early inscriptions, especially on 5th- and 6th-century gold bracteates, carry words such as alu, laþu and laukaz ("leek"), which most scholars take as charm words of some kind. Complete futhark rows on objects such as the Kylver stone may also have had a protective purpose, although that is debated.
- Curses and protections. The Björketorp stone threatens anyone who breaks it; medieval rune-sticks from Bryggen include healing charms and Latin prayers.
- Myth. In Hávamál 138–139, Óðinn hangs on a wind-swept tree for nine nights, "given to Óðinn, myself to myself", and then "took up the runes, screaming I took them". In Sigrdrífumál 6–7 a valkyrie teaches Sigurðr "victory-runes" to carve on a sword-hilt, naming Týr twice, and "ale-runes" against a host's treachery.
- Sagas. In Egils saga (ch. 72), a girl is ill because a local man carved runes on a whale-bone to win her, and carved them wrong. Egill scrapes them off, burns the bone and says:
Skalat maðr rúnar rísta, / nema ráða vel kunni. / Þat verðr mörgum manni, / es of myrkvan staf villisk.No man should carve runes unless he knows well how to read them; that happens to many a man, that a dark stave leads him astray.Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, ch. 72
All of this is magic done with writing: words and signs carved to make something happen. None of it is reading the future from drawn runes, and no source gives the individual runes fixed divinatory meanings. The rune poems, often cited as if they were divination keys, are mnemonic verses about the things the rune names mean (cattle, ice, a birch), written by Christians.
The first rune mystic: Johannes Bureus
Johannes Bureus (1568–1652), tutor to the young Gustavus Adolphus and Sweden's first Custodian of Antiquities, was also the first great student of Swedish runestones. Alongside his recording work he built a private mystical system, which he called Adulruna, combining runes with Christian Kabbalah and Hermetic ideas. It had little influence at the time, but it is the first known attempt to read hidden spiritual meanings into the individual runes.
Guido von List and the "Armanen" runes (1908)
Modern esoteric runes begin with the Austrian writer Guido von List (1848–1919). He said that while he was temporarily blinded after a cataract operation in 1902, the "secret of the runes" was revealed to him. In Das Geheimnis der Runen (1908) he presented a row of eighteen runes, the "Armanen" runes, which corresponded to no historical futhark: he matched them to the eighteen charms that Óðinn lists in Hávamál (stanzas 146–163), which in the poem are not runes at all. To each rune he gave a mystical meaning and a German "key word". List's work belonged to the völkisch movement, mixing nationalism, racial theory and occultism.
In the 1920s and 1930s his followers, among them Friedrich Bernhard Marby and Siegfried Adolf Kummer, developed "rune gymnastics", in which people held their bodies in the shapes of runes. Under National Socialism, runic signs were taken for the regalia of the SS and other organisations (the doubled sowilo "sig" rune, the othala "odal" rune), and some runes still carry that association.
Ralph Blum and the blank rune (1982)
Rune divination in its now-familiar form comes from the American writer Ralph Blum's The Book of Runes (1982), sold with a bag of ceramic rune tiles. Blum used the 24 Elder Futhark runes but put them in an order of his own, gave each a short meaning and advice for "upright" and "reversed" draws, and added a 25th, blank tile, which he called the rune of Odin and tied to the unknowable; later books often call it the "Wyrd" rune. Blum said his interpretations owed much to the Chinese I Ching. The blank rune and the reversed meanings have no source in any runic tradition. The book sold very widely and most later rune-reading guides follow its pattern.
In the same years, Stephen Flowers, writing as Edred Thorsson, published Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic (1984), which drew on List and on the academic literature, and has been influential in modern esoteric and some Heathen circles.
How the meanings were made
Most modern divinatory meanings are built from three things: the rune names as known from the medieval poems (fé "wealth" becomes "abundance", íss "ice" becomes "standstill"); reconstructed Proto-Germanic names, some of which are scholarly guesses (the names of pertho and algiz are uncertain, which has not stopped them acquiring confident meanings); and the inventions of List, Blum and their successors. On this site each rune's page gives what its name meant as a word, how sure the reconstruction is, and where it is attested. That is all the medieval evidence supports.