Runes

Runes are an alphabet before they are anything else: the letters early Germanic peoples cut into wood, bone, metal and stone. This page gives a rune of the day the way modern rune readers use it, and next to it what the old rune poems actually say. The two are not the same thing, and we keep them apart.

Rune of the day for 23 October 2026

Rune of the day

Thurisaz · giant; thorn

caution
defence
a pause before acting

Before you answer something sharp today, take one slow breath.

Your own rune

The 24 runes of the Elder Futhark

Freyr’s ætt

The first eight runes, from Fehu to Wunjo. The row really was split into three groups of eight on 6th-century bracteates, but the group names are late: they come from Icelandic writings of the 17th and 18th centuries, made for the shorter Younger Futhark.

Fehu Uruz Thurisaz Ansuz Raidho Kaunan Gebo Wunjo

Hagal’s ætt

The second eight, from Hagalaz to Sowilo. Like the other two, the name is a late Icelandic one; what the groups were first called is not known.

Hagalaz Naudiz Isaz Jera Eihwaz Perthro Algiz Sowilo

Týr’s ætt

The last eight, from Tiwaz to Othala, again under a late name. On the Kylver stone Dagaz comes before Othala, on the bracteates after it.

Tiwaz Berkanan Ehwaz Mannaz Laguz Ingwaz Dagaz Othala

Where the runes come from

An alphabet called futhark

The Elder Futhark is an alphabet of 24 runes, in use from about AD 150 to 800. The name futhark comes from the first six letters of the row: f, u, th, a, r and k. The oldest known inscription is on a comb from Vimose, from around 160, and reads harja. The order of the letters is well attested: the Kylver stone from Gotland, carved around 400 and now in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, carries the earliest complete row, and two 6th-century bracteates show it in three groups of eight. The names of the runes are another matter. None is recorded for the Elder Futhark itself; the names used here are scholars’ reconstructions in Proto-Germanic, pieced together from the later English and Scandinavian rune names and from the Gothic letter names that Alcuin wrote down in the 9th century.

What runes were used for

Most early inscriptions are short. They give a name, a maker’s formula such as the Einang stone’s ‘... painted the rune(s)’, or a word on a comb, a brooch, a weapon or a bracteate. Some carry charm words: alu is the commonest, found from the 3rd to the 8th century, and nobody is sure what it meant, although many scholars link it to ale and ritual drinking. The Kylver row was cut into the underside of a grave slab, where no living person could read it, and scholars guess it was meant to protect against the dead or to settle them. The memorial runestones that many people picture came later, in the 10th and 11th centuries, in the Younger Futhark, and most of them are Christian. A typical one says that someone raised this stone in memory of someone else.

Tacitus, Odin and what is not known

In AD 98 the Roman historian Tacitus described how Germanic tribes cast lots. A twig from a fruit-bearing tree was cut into slips, each marked with signs, and scattered on a white cloth; a priest or the father of the household prayed, looked up to the sky and picked up three slips, which he then interpreted. It is undecided whether those signs were runes. Tacitus gives too little detail, and he wrote about sixty years before the oldest runic object we know. In the Hávamál, Odin hangs ‘on the windy tree ... nights full nine’, wounded with a spear, ‘myself to myself’, and takes up the runes. That poem was written down by Christians around 1270, and its rune stanzas are a patchwork of fragments. Neither text describes casting runes to read the future.

The modern oracle

Rune reading as it is practised today is modern. In 1908 Guido von List published Das Geheimnis der Runen, with a row of 18 runes he said had come to him in a vision while he was blind after a cataract operation. His ‘Armanen runes’ were taken up by völkisch occultists, by the SS under Himmler and later by neo-Nazis; this site uses none of his names or meanings. The book most English-speaking readers know is Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes of 1982, sold with a bag of stamped tiles, and Blum said himself that his meanings drew heavily on the I Ching. He also added a blank rune, which has no historical basis, and this site leaves it out. Later writers borrowed spreads from tarot.

Runes and their misuse

In the 20th century some rune shapes were taken up as Nazi symbols: the s-rune as the single or doubled ‘Sig rune’, Othala with feet or wings, Tiwaz on badges. In Germany these stylised forms are banned, and they are still used by neo-Nazi groups. The letters themselves are well over a thousand years older than any of this. This site shows only the plain letters of the alphabet, drawn in the shapes of the old inscriptions, and leaves out the shape of the s-rune altogether; in the row it appears as the letter s.

Reversed runes

Many modern books give a rune a second meaning when it lands upside down, sometimes called ‘merkstave’. No medieval or ancient source does anything of the kind. In real inscriptions, mirrored and upside-down runes are simply spelling variants, a carver’s choice. The word merkstave appears in English rune-magic books of the 1980s and is not found in the Old Norse dictionary. Where this site gives a reversed reading, it is that modern device and is marked as such; runes that look the same when turned round have none.

Other traditions: the tarot card of the day · the Norse sky.

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