Norse Runes
Introduction
The land of Adelais, the heroine of the Rune Song epic fantasy trilogy, is fictional but I drew heavily on historical facts. So if Adelais’s Vriesian world of rune magic and seidhkonur (sorceresses) feels real, it is because I have tried, as far as I can, to create a world that pre-Christian Norse people would recognise. Hammer of Fate, the first of the Rune Song trilogy, has been an Amazon #1 Best Seller for ‘Norse and Viking’, for ‘Norse Myth and Legend,’ and, most significantly, for ‘Epic Fantasy’.
This page is a brief overview to runes. For introductions to individual runes and their meanings, there’s a pull down menu under the Norse Runes tab. All are runes of the ‘Elder Futhark’ in use from c.400-900CE.
For those wanting to dive deeper into rune lore, I recommend the YouTube channels of Arith Härger or Jackson Crawford.. Arith covers both academic and esoteric aspects. Jackson is primarily academic.
Please contact me if you have any comments or questions. I’d love to hear from you.
Norse runes; inscriptions from an oral culture
For perhaps two thousand years, norse runes have held an image of mystery. Many have believed that they offer a glimpse into the future, or an understanding of the present. In the present day they have seen a resurgence and acquired new meanings. Some even claim that they can not only foretell the future, but change it. But what did runes mean to the Nordic peoples who carved these angular symbols into stones or the hafts of their weapons?
Unlike their contemporaries in imperial Rome, Germanic and Nordic peoples were a largely oral culture. Folk learned legends of gods and heroes from wandering skalds. It would have been wondrous that words could be cut and then re-spoken by later generations. The carvings themselves would seem to be imbued with power, and their significance magnified by their rarity.
Alphabet or ideographs?
Enough runic artefacts survive to know that runes were never simply an alphabet. Runes had phonetic values, but were also ‘ideographs’ that expressed abstract concepts, in a similar way to Egyptian hieroglyphs. For example the rune bjarkan – ᛒ – was a phonetic ‘b’ but also the rune of the birch goddess, the earth mother, with connotations of nurturing, healing, caring, and rebirth. The rune algiz – ᛉ – meant ‘protection’. It lives on in the palm-outwards, upright thumb and two fingers warding gesture against evil that is still used in some cultures.
Symbols or Magical Inscriptions?
So were runes a writing system, or did they have mystical meaning? Academics do not agree. Personally I believe they had deep, esoteric significance, at least to those who worshipped the Nordic pantheon. Their very name stems from a word meaning ‘mystery’, or ‘secret’.
Few written records survive from before the 13th century, and even these may reflect their authors’ Christian beliefs. However Icelandic texts of that era include the poem Hávamál, which describes how the god Odhinn learned the power of the runes by hanging on the world tree Yggdrasil in voluntary self-sacrifice, his side pierced by a spear. Odhinn ascribes runes the power of life and death;
‘if I see up in a tree, a dangling corpse in a noose, I can so carve and colour the runes, that the man walks and talks with me’.
By the time Hávamál was written, norse runes had been in un-documented use for over a thousand years. We find them etched into weapons or carved into memorial stones, not formalised in texts. But if anyone doubts that runes were believed to have magical powers, they should look at the 6th-century Björketorp runestone, which warns;
I, master of the runes, conceal here runes of power. Incessantly plagued by maleficence, [and] doomed to insidious death is he who breaks this monument. I prophesy [his] destruction.
Stave, song, and mystery
Norse runes (there were other runic systems) varied across geographies and evolved through time. Some are lost. Enigmatic rune poems have survived for many in Old Norse Icelandic, and Old English. Academics debate their purpose, but the great joy of the novelist is the licence to stray into unproven territory.
Most would agree that a rune is a shape, a sound, and that what lies beyond is a mystery. Many believe that runes are windows into the warp and weft of fate that was so intrinsic to pre-Christian Nordic beliefs. The water rune lœgr, for example is a stave, – ᛚ -, and a song, lœgr er vellanda vatn, ok viðr ketill, ok glömmungr grund; ‘water is the eddying stream, and broad geysir, and land of the fish’. But lœgr is also a concept and a mystery, rooted in the life-giving aspects of water, the world’s blood. The sorceresses of old, the seidhkonur, would say the uninitiated have as little hope of understanding its full meaning as they would have of mapping a stream’s path to the sea from the sound it makes trickling over rocks.
The seidhkonur left no records, but speculating on their ability to alter fates with rune song makes for a great story.