Here's a sample of what you'll find inside:
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Introduction
Welcome!
This book is my attempt at bridging the
gap between the esoteric study of runes and academic runology. I anticipate
that the majority of you who pick it up are mainly interested in the runes as
tools for magic and divination, that you are Pagans, Heathens, Shamans,
rune-workers (or would-be rune-workers), and/or Spiritualists. I wrote it, in
large part, because I feel as if most of the books aimed at us don’t offer
enough in the way of history or academics. Without those, we don’t get a
complete picture of the runes. We need to understand the problems inherent in
our primary source-material, the rune poems. We need to know how the
translators of those poems came up with their translations. We need to know
where the runes came from, who made them, and why. Understanding
these things doesn’t diminish the
magic of the runes; it makes us better rune-readers.
I give my students the following formula:
40% Solid Academic Research
40% UPG
(Unsubstantiated
Personal Gnosis)
20% Common Sense
Good solid academic research
gives us a firm grounding in the facts. History. Culture. Religious beliefs.
But we are still witches,
rune-workers, Pagans, Heathens, Shamans, and Spiritualists. We rely on our
intuition, our gut instincts, to guide us through life. We should rely on our instincts, our Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis
or UPG. (We also need to remember that our
personal gnosis may not be the same as others’ personal gnosis, and that’s okay
too. That’s what makes it personal.)
Working with the runes
isn’t like learning
multiplication tables in elementary school. It’s not about rote memorization.
Divination works best when you learn everything you can about the meaning
behind the symbols, when you open yourself up, when you meditate and allow
those symbols—in
this case the runes—to speak to you.
That doesn’t
mean to throw common
sense out the window. It’s easy to see what we want to in divination, to
interpret the runes the way we want
them to read. Objectivity is difficult, and these days, it seems as if common
sense is going the way of the dodo. So please remember to use your head as well
as your heart.
In the introduction
of his book Runica Manuscripta, René Derolez wisely advised that the runologist must also
be a philologher, a paleographer,
an historian, an art historian, and a
detective. I would add that you should also be part folklorist, part
anthropologist, and part theologian as well.
I discovered the Norse Gods in the sixth
grade. Or, rather, that’s when I discovered the authentic version of Them. I
was already familiar with Marvel’s version (of which I’m still a huge fan!)—but
when I hit the sixth grade and was finally granted access to the entire library
of my elementary school, I came across D’Aulaires’
Book of Norse Myths and was immediately hooked. It would take a few more
years before I found my way onto the Pagan path, but the groundwork was being
lain.
I was nineteen in 1988 when I found a copy
of Scott Cunningham’s Earth Power in
a local book store. Just a few months later, on Imbolc of 1989, I made my
solitary dedication to the Pagan Gods—to Mother Earth and Her Horned
Consort/Son. The moon was full and the air was freezing; I shivered as I sat
out on my apartment’s little balcony (overlooking the parking lot, but under a
beautiful starry sky) and performed a ritual I had cobbled together from the
three or four books I’d read. Shortly thereafter, I discovered the runes—but nothing
quite “clicked” for me, so I went off and studied tarot, other mythologies, and
a little bit about astrology, and Qabala.
Then, in 2002/2003, the runes crossed my
path again. I don’t recall what I was researching when I happened across Maria
Kvilhaug’s Youtube channel[1]
but listening to her take on the Norse myths rekindled my interest in the Norse
Gods and along with them, the runes. I went out and purchased a couple of books
and this time, things started to “click.”
Mostly.
It was like almost everything in a particular book made perfect sense—there
were just one or two rune-interpretations that didn’t quite feel “right[2].”
So I looked at a different book—but the same thing happened. Over and over, I
found books where almost everything
was “perfect,” but there were just one or two interpretations that felt off. In
some cases, it was a matter of liking this person’s interpretation of a
particular rune over that person’s interpretation of it (because some of those
interpretations are wildly different from one another). In a couple of
instances, no one’s interpretation
felt “right.” p
(*pertho/peorð) and I
(*eiwaz/eoh) in particular never
seemed to mean what the books said they should.
Frustrated, I decided to use my own
formula and went back to the source material. For the runes, that’s the rune
poems. There are three, and you will find them all quoted in most esoteric rune
texts—but the rune poems don’t always agree with one another about the meanings
of the runes. The rune ur (u) is probably the
best example. In the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, we are told that ur means aurochs, an extinct bovine with
very big horns and a stubborn temperament. In the Icelandic Rune Poem, we are
told that ur is sleet or icy drizzle.
In the Norwegian Rune Poem, we are told that ur is slag or dross.
Which is correct?
More confused than ever, I decided it
would be better to stick with one source to start, and since there are only
sixteen stanzas in the Icelandic and Norwegian Rune Poems (and twenty-four runes
in the Elder Futhark), I decided that
source would be the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem (also called the Old English Rune
Poem, or OERP).
The first thing I noticed when I looked it
up was that it is twenty-nine stanzas long and has twenty-nine runes. I’d seen
a few of them before but never given them much thought since none of the rune
books I’d read had much (if anything at all) to say about them. But being the
girl who always wanted the biggest box of crayons (you know, the one with the
most colors!), I was instantly intrigued. I started hunting out books that
dealt specifically with these “extra” runes as well as continuing to look at
the OERP.
That’s when I clued in on something else:
every single book I picked up had a slightly different translation of the rune
poems. Sometimes the differences were subtle—a word choice, the order of a
sentence. Other times, the differences were substantial enough to change the
reading of a stanza significantly. And since my last real exposure to Old English
literature had been reading Beowulf
in high school, I had no idea which translation was “right.” The only solution
I could think of was to translate the OERP for myself—so that’s what I did.
 |
My drawing of a runic
inscription found on Kingigtorssuaq Island, Greenland. It dates from
approximately 1250-1330 CE, and exemplifies many of the challenges we face when
trying to understand the runes. Several runes appear to be written backwards;
others appear in variant forms. There are symbols here that are not runes, but
we have no idea if they were purely decorative or if they meant something
significant to the person who carved them.
|
[2] “Right” is incredibly subjective
when it comes to the interpretation of the runes. Dates, places, history—those
are things we can be right or wrong about (or we may simply not know because we
don’t have enough evidence). Intuition is something that only feels right or wrong. In short, I am not
saying my way of interpreting the runes is the
“right way”; my way is a “right way”.
There are many others.
Runes are letters, just like the letters
used to make up this sentence. The words “futhark” and “futhorc” are like the
word “alphabet,” which takes its name from its first two letters, A and B, or alpha and beta—only instead of the first two letters, the futhark and futhorc
take their names from their first six letters. The first column below shows the
first six runes/letters of the Elder Futhark; the second shows the first six
runes/letters of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.
*fehu (F, f)
*uruz (U, u)
*þurs (Th, T)
*ansuz (A, A)
*raido (R, r)
*kenaz (K, k)
feoh (F, f)
ur (U, u)
þorn (Th, T)
ós (O, o)
rad (R, r)
cen (C, c)
These are only two of the
futharks/futhorcs known to us. The three most common are pictured below. Each
is divided into groups or “families” called ætts.
Even when the number of runes in the futharks/futhorcs changed, the ætts retained their order, always
beginning with the same three runes (f,
h, and t). I’ve divided
them below using slashes (/).
Elder Futhark (in use from the 2nd-8th
centuries, CE):
fuTarkgw /
hnijIpzs / tbemlNdo
Younger Futhark
(in use from the 8th-12th centuries CE):
fuTarS
/ jniᛅs
/ tbzlk
Anglo-Saxon
Futhorc (in use from the 5th-10th centuries, CE):
fuTorcgw / hniᛄIpzs
/ tbemlNod
/ aAyjqᛢSᛦG
[1]
Because
the development and writing of the runes wasn’t governed by any political body,
school, or religious group, you will find differences in the way runes are
written even within a single futhark/futhorc. Some of these variations are
simply the difference between one person’s handwriting and another’s; some are
regional differences; others are copyists’ errors.
While many contemporary authors, both
academic and occult alike, tell us the word “rune” derives from words meaning
“mystery,” “private council,” or “secret knowledge[1].”
(Sheffield, p. 11; Elliott, p. 1; Looijenga, p. 8; Kemble, p. 2[2]),
the truth is that it’s not nearly so simple.
Linguist Richard Morris, following
seventeenth century scholar Aylett Sammes (who himself was following after the
Danish runologist Ole Worm), suggests that
the word “rune” comes from ren,
meaning a cut or channel for water and/or ryn
the furrow left behind in the wake of a plough in the field, because the runes
are “ploughed out” into stone or wood, or with a pen on parchment in much the
same way furrows are ploughed into the field. (Morris’s book Runic and Mediterranean Epigraphy is an
interesting, if dense, read.)
Both runologists R.I. Page (in Runes
and Runic Inscriptions)
and
Ralph Elliott (in Runes) give us some
cognates for the word
“rune”
(you will see these repeated by other authors as well):
·
Old
Irish run, meaning “secret” or
occasionally “cryptic text”
·
Middle
Welsh rhin, meaning “magic charm”
·
Finnish
runo, meaning “song, perhaps
originally incantation”
Others tell us that the word “rune” may be
related to verbs such as OE runian,
Old Saxon runon, and Old High German rûnen, which all mean “to whisper.”
Maureen Halsall[3]
and Christine Fell[4]
both tell us that “rune” has been glossed with the Latin mysterium and Greek μννστήριον,
words meaning “mystery,” but that these “mysteries” are understood as “Divine
Christian Mysteries,” not Pagan magic[5].
The Bosworth-Toller Old English Dictionary
(online edition) tells us the word “rune” means:
1.
A
whisper; speech not intended to be overheard, confidence, council, consultation
2.
A
mystery c.f. geryne
3.
A
secret
4.
Of
that which is written with the idea of mystery or magic
5.
A
rune, a letter
But in her paper, “Runes and Semantics,”
Christine Fell picks apart Bosworth-Toller’s definition with
merciless tenacity, examining each entry with care and citing multiple examples
to support her view that “to whisper” is the only accurate gloss or definition
for the word “rune[6].” One of her
central arguments is that our modern English word “rune” is not a survival from
Old English or even Middle English, but rather a “reintroduction into the
language from Scandinavian through the medium of Latin authors,” and that
“there is no period of Modern history where the serious study of Old English
runic material has not been influenced by Latinized Old Norse[7]” (Fell, p. 205).
She tells us that “our English historians
and poets were not initially familiar with any Old Norse” (Fell, p. 202) and believes
that we “impose error and encourage delusion about magic and paganism” when we
apply the meanings of “secret” and “mystery” to the word “rune.” Further, if
there was a connection in the Anglo-Saxon mind-set between “rune” and “secret”
or “mystery,” “it is only because “the sixteenth century absorbed the belief that
runes were linked with magic and paganism…” [emphasis mine] (p. 215).
While I find Fell’s arguments both
thoughtful and thought-provoking (and recommend her paper highly[8]),
I personally believe that the very nature of the runes is mystery. Not some unknowable secret, but rather that which has
yet to be revealed simply because we have not yet learned how to read the
signs. The Eddas tell us that the runes were carved into the very fabric of the
cosmos where they were later discovered by Oðinn in an episode that can only be described as a
Shamanic ordeal. That means they are knowable, we
simply have to unlock their mysteries.
Before moving onto the next topic, I would
like to give you two final thoughts regarding the word “rune.” The first
concerns the Finnish word runo,
meaning “song.” The idea of connecting the runes to “song” puts me immediately
in mind of the seiðkona[9],
whose magic requires that her (or sometimes his) “audience” sings the correct
songs necessary to sustain her trance/journey work.
The second comes from Christine Fell. It has nothing to do with history
or semantics, magic or Paganism, but everything to do with this present study
of the runes:
It [the word runcofa] is used in the metres of
Boethius in a passage explaining that no person, however depraved, if she looks
into her own heart or runcofa will
not find for herself the stirrings of righwisness,
right thinking or possibly conscience. (Fell, p. 214)
Fell’s point here is that run cannot possibly have any dubious
connotations (as suggested by some of her resources) if it was being used as
stated above. My point is that a
kenning for “heart” is runcofa, i.e.
“rune coffer” or “rune container”—and that’s an image I rather like.
[1] Examples include OE run, Old High German rûna, Old Icelandic rúnar, and Gothic garuni.
[2] Quoting Grimm, but quite firm in
his own definition of the word “rune”: “It’s original meaning is strictly mysterium, a mystery…” but then he
follows up with: “And so the verb rŷnan,
which is derived directly from it, means to
whisper, to tell secrets…” (Kemble, p. 2)
[3] In her book The Old English Rune Poem, A Critical Edition.
[4] In her paper “Runes and Semantics,”
which can be found on pp. 195-229 of the monograph Old English Runes and Their Continental Background, edited by Alfred
Bammesberger.
[5] Fell, in particular, goes into
great depth, citing that “it is important to bear in mind that though
Anglo-Saxon homilists refer often enough to pagan beliefs and practices, they do not use the words run or geryne when they do so.” (Fell, p. 198.) [emphasis mine]. She
cites multiple examples from Latin glosses and translations of the Christian
Bible, where the word “mystery” (as in the “mysteries of God” or “mystery of
the Cross”) is translated to “rune.” Examples include Bishop Wulfila’s—also
known as St. Ulfilas (ca. 311-383)—fourth-century translation of
the Bible into Gothic (which, in fact, is our only surviving Gothic-language text).
[6] She goes into great depth, citing
that “it is important to bear in mind that though Anglo-Saxon homilists refer
often enough to pagan beliefs and practices, they do not use the words run
or geryne when they do so.”
(Fell, p. 198) [emphasis mine].
[7]Fell quotes from several prominent
works, including Leeds Studies of English
Language and The Wars of Alexander
to add weight to her thesis.
[8] I feel that all too often we
simply accept whatever definition or meaning an author gives us without
examining their sources or, better still, reading their opposition. I may not
agree with Fell’s definition of the word “rune” (at least not in principle, for
with her scholarship I can find no fault), but I found her arguments
invaluable. Her paper is a dense read, but if you can find a copy of Old English Runes and Their Continental
Background in your local library, I highly recommend reading it for
yourself. (Worldcat.org is an
excellent resource for tracking down books in libraries. Many libraries
participate in Inter-Library Loan programs, allowing you to have a book sent
directly to your local library, rather than having to trek across the state.)
[9] A seiðkona (sometimes called spaekona or spae-wife) is a practioner of seiðr, a type
of trancework, the aim of which is to deliver prophesies for the audience or
clients, often by means of communing with the dead or spirits of the land. It
is said that the Goddess Freya taught seiðr to Oðinn, although it is considered a strictly
“feminine magic” and therefore a completely “inappropriate” (ergi) activity for any God—or human
male for that matter—to be engaging in. (In
a nutshell, any activity which was considered “passive” or “receptive,” as in
receiving the spirits of the dead or the land into one’s self, was considered
“feminine.”) But apparently Oðinn wasn’t one to let a little social taboo stand
in His way when it came to the acquisition of wisdom! (However it is important to note that accusing
someone of ergi was one of the more
vile insults a person could hurl in Norse/Germanic culture—the kind of insult
that could lead to bloodshed. In our modern world, we see things
differently—and it’s important to remember that.)
[1]
In nearly all academic texts, q is
the shape of both the runes ear and cweorð. In occult texts
cweorð is invariably drawn ᛢ. Likewise, in occult texts we find
the j-rune appearing only
as ᛄ in the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, with no
mention of the fact that ᛄ is found only in late-period
manuscripts. The usual shape of the j-rune
from later Anglo-Saxon epigraphical sources is j; in older inscriptions, it takes
the form of j
from the Elder Futhark.
