ᛗᚣᛋᛏᛖᚱᚣ ᚩᚠ ᚦᛖ ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ

These pages are set in the Anglo Saxon Futhorc, letter for letter, so they can be read back into English. Single runes stand in for the digraphs TH, NG, EA, AE, EO, IO and OE. Following Old English practice, C serves for K, F serves for V, CW serves for Q, and Eolh serves for X and Z.

The word itself

The word rune descends from an older Germanic word meaning a secret, a mystery, a thing whispered in counsel. The same root shows in the Old English run, the Old Norse run, and the Gothic runa, and every one of them carries that sense of something hidden which must be uncovered rather than simply learned.

This is no accident of language. The Germanic peoples did not think of the runes as a clever invention for keeping accounts. They thought of them as forces already present in the world, waiting to be found. The runes existed before anyone carved one. They were discovered.

Odin on the tree

The great telling of that discovery is in the Havamal, the Sayings of the High One, where Odin speaks for himself.

He hung on Yggdrasil, the world ash, swaying in the wind for nine full nights. He was pierced by a spear and given to Odin, an offering of himself to himself. No one brought him food, and no one lifted a horn to his lips. He peered down into the depths below.

And at the end of the ninth night he cried out, seized the runes from beneath him, and dropped from the tree.

Read it closely and the shape of the thing is plain. The knowledge could not be bought, inherited, or received as a favour. It had to be paid for with something irreplaceable, by a god who already held every other power. He gave himself to himself. The highest wisdom in that world was not granted to the strong. It was taken by the one willing to hang.

The other wells of wisdom

Odin pays again elsewhere. At the well of Mimir, beneath a root of the world tree, he surrenders an eye for a single drink of its water. Half his sight for a whole depth of knowing.

The pattern repeats across the tradition, and it repeats in Ireland too. The salmon of wisdom lives in the deepest pool. The poets trained for twenty years. Tyr put his hand into the mouth of the wolf and left it there. Wisdom in these traditions is never free. It is always bought, and the price is always a thing you cannot replace.

Where the shapes came from

The runes are almost certainly not a gift from nowhere. Their forms resemble the alphabets of the Alpine peoples of northern Italy, the Etruscan script and its neighbours, with whom Germanic peoples were in real contact around two centuries before the common era. Some letters also echo Latin.

But the system that resulted is Germanic through and through. The names, the ordering into families, the poems, the meanings, the use in charm and memorial and law were all their own. The shapes may have travelled. The tradition did not.

The Elder Futhark

The oldest of the alphabets is called the Elder Futhark, named after the sounds of its first six runes. It holds twenty four runes and appears in inscriptions from about the middle of the second century of the common era through to the eighth, across a vast reach of land from Denmark and Sweden down into the continent and over the sea to Britain.

What is striking about the earliest of these inscriptions is how few of them are ordinary. Early Greek and Sumerian writing is full of grain tallies and trade. The early runic material is full of names, makers, short formulas, and things that look very much like charms. Writing and power were bound together from the beginning.

The three traditions

Somewhere around the seventh and eighth centuries the Elder Futhark divided into three.

In Scandinavia it shrank. The Younger Futhark holds only sixteen runes, which is strange, because it appears exactly as runic writing was spreading widely and the language itself was growing more complex. The great carved memorial stones of the Viking age are written in this reduced set, and it seems the ambiguity that created was simply tolerated.

On the continent a third tradition, sometimes called Marcomannic, is less well recorded and died out earlier.

And in England it did the opposite. It grew.

The Anglo Saxon Futhorc

Old English had a richer field of vowels than the inherited alphabet could carry, so the Anglo Saxons made new runes. Twenty four became twenty eight, and in some manuscripts as many as thirty three.

This tells us something important. These were not people carving prestige monuments in a half understood script. They wanted to write their own language accurately, and when the inherited system fell short they extended it. Ac the oak, Asc the ash, Yr the bow, Ior the river creature, and Ear the grave are all their own work.

When a people enlarges its alphabet it makes a statement. It says that the world holds more than our ancestors accounted for, and that these things deserve names.

Runes and the new faith

The common story is that Christianity swept the runes away. The truth is far stranger and much better.

The greatest runic monument in the English language is a Christian cross. The Ruthwell Cross stands over five metres high, carved with scripture and Latin letters, and around its narrow faces runs a runic inscription of the Dream of the Rood, in which the cross itself speaks and describes the crucifixion as a warrior mounting for battle.

The Franks Casket, a small whalebone box, carries Weland the smith at his forge on one half of its front panel and the three wise men bringing gifts to the infant Christ on the other. Runic and Latin letters. Germanic myth, Roman history, and scripture. One of its inscriptions is written in cipher.

And a Christian poet named Cynewulf signed four of his poems by hiding the runes of his own name inside the Old English verse, findable only by a reader who knew what the runes were called. He did this inside a meditation on the last judgement, where every rune of his name spells something that ends.

None of these people felt a contradiction. We are the ones who invented that.

What was lost and what remains

Runic writing in England faded through the tenth and eleventh centuries as Latin literacy spread, and the Norman conquest ended the practical tradition altogether by replacing the whole written culture of Old English.

The poem that tells us what the runes meant survives by the narrowest margin. The single manuscript that held it burned in a house fire in the eighteenth century. We have the text at all because a scholar had copied it out twenty six years before the fire.

So the tradition was interrupted rather than completed. It was still growing when history cut across it. What reaches us is a system that tried to name everything worth naming, bounded by wealth at its beginning and by the dark earth at its end, and turning always back toward the dawn.