Old Norse was the North Germanic language spoken across Scandinavia and the Norse settlements from roughly 800 to 1300 CE, preserved in runic inscriptions and later medieval manuscripts. The same people who carved runes into stone and bone also used them as a practical alphabet for daily communication, trade, and magic.
A man in eleventh-century Iceland did not “speak Viking.” He spoke Old Norse. And when he scratched symbols into a piece of wood to send a message, those symbols were runes — not a secret priestly script, but the ordinary writing system of his world.
What Was Old Norse, Exactly?
Old Norse belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic language family. It split from West Germanic (the ancestor of English and German) around the early centuries CE and developed into distinct dialects: Old West Norse (spoken in Norway, Iceland, and the Atlantic islands) and Old East Norse (spoken in Denmark and Sweden).
The language had three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), and a verb system that distinguished singular from plural but had largely lost the person distinctions that older Germanic languages kept. It sounded nothing like modern Scandinavian languages. A modern Icelander can read Old Norse texts with some effort, but a Dane or Swede cannot without training.
The oldest surviving Old Norse texts are runic inscriptions from the second century CE. The youngest are Icelandic sagas written in the Latin alphabet during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Between those two points, the language changed considerably.
The Runes: Not Magic, But Writing
The runic alphabet, called the futhark (named after its first six letters: f, u, þ, a, r, k), appeared in Scandinavia around the second century CE. The earliest form had 24 characters. By the Viking Age (roughly 750–1050 CE), that had been reduced to 16 characters in the Younger Futhark.
Runes were carved into wood, bone, metal, and stone. They were not primarily a magical script. They were the alphabet people used for everyday purposes: marking ownership, recording names, sending messages, and commemorating the dead. The thousands of surviving rune stones across Scandinavia are mostly memorials: “X raised this stone in memory of Y, his good son.”
That said, runes carried a secondary layer of meaning. The word rún itself meant “secret” or “whisper” in Old Norse. The god Odin is said to have discovered the runes by hanging himself on Yggdrasil, the world tree, pierced by his own spear, for nine nights — a story told in the Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”), a poem preserved in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius.
“I know that I hung on a windy tree / nine long nights, / wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, / myself to myself.”
The runes he found were not a gift from outside. They were a secret he earned through sacrifice. That story shaped how later practitioners understood the runes: as a system that could be used for divination and magic, but only by those who had done the work.
Old Norse had no single standard pronunciation. Dialect differences existed between regions and changed over time. But we can reconstruct the sound system with reasonable confidence from three sources: the spelling in runic inscriptions, the spelling in later Latin-alphabet manuscripts, and the rhymes and alliteration in skaldic poetry.
The language had a set of vowel sounds that included long and short versions of a, e, i, o, u, y, and the distinctive ǫ (a short open o, like the “o” in English “hot”) and œ (a long fronted o, like the “eu” in French “peur”). Consonants included the þ (thorn, the unvoiced “th” in English “thin”) and ð (eth, the voiced “th” in English “that”).
Stress fell on the first syllable of a word, as it still does in modern Scandinavian languages. That rhythmic pattern shaped the alliterative verse of the Eddas, where stressed syllables had to begin with the same sound.
A sample sentence: Ek heiti Gunnarr — “I am called Gunnar.” Pronounced roughly: “ek HAY-tee GUN-nar.”
What the Runes Actually Did
The practical uses of runes are well documented. A stick found in Bergen, Norway, from the thirteenth century reads: “Gyða says you are to come home.” Another reads: “I am sending you a gift of butter.” These are not incantations. They are grocery lists and love notes.
But the boundary between practical and magical was porous. A rune stone might say “X raised this stone in memory of Y” and then add a curse formula: “May he be a warlock who damages this stone.” A knife blade might carry the owner’s name and a protective symbol. A grave slab might include a prayer.
The runes themselves had names that carried meaning. The first rune, fehu, meant “cattle” or “wealth.” The second, uruz, meant “aurochs” (a wild ox). The third, þurisaz, meant “giant.” These names were not arbitrary. They anchored the rune in a web of associations that a literate person would recognize.
By the late Viking Age, the 16-character Younger Futhark had developed into regional variants: the long-branch runes (used in Denmark) and the short-twig runes (used in Sweden and Norway). The short-twig forms were simpler, faster to carve, and probably used for everyday writing on wood. The long-branch forms were more ornate and appeared on formal monuments.
The most important literary sources for Old Norse are the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda.
The Poetic Edda is a collection of anonymous poems preserved in the Codex Regius, a manuscript written around 1270 CE but containing material composed centuries earlier. It includes the Völuspá (“The Seeress’s Prophecy”), which describes the creation and destruction of the world, and the Hávamál, which gives practical and ethical advice.
The Prose Edda was written by the Icelandic chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson around 1220 CE. Snorri was a Christian, but he wrote the Edda as a handbook for poets who needed to understand the old myths and kennings (metaphorical compound words) to compose traditional verse. Without his work, much of Norse mythology would be lost.
The Icelandic sagas, Egil’s Saga, Njál’s Saga, Laxdæla Saga, were written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They are prose narratives set in the Viking Age, and they preserve a wealth of information about daily life, law, honor, and speech. The characters in the sagas speak in a style that feels direct and understated. A man does not say “I am very angry.” He says “This will not end well.”
Old Norse and Runes in Modern Practice
The modern occult revival of runes began in the nineteenth century with German and Austrian esotericists who combined the Younger Futhark with ideas from the Armanen system developed by Guido von List (1848–1919). List’s 18-rune Armanen futhark was not historically accurate, but it influenced later Germanic neopaganism and runic magic.
Contemporary rune readers and practitioners of seidr (a form of Norse shamanic practice) draw on both the historical record and later esoteric traditions. The most common approach uses the 24-rune Elder Futhark for divination, even though that alphabet was largely replaced by the Younger Futhark before the Viking Age. This is a modern choice, not a medieval one.
The distinction matters. If you are reading runes for yourself or others, you are participating in a tradition that is about 150 years old, not 1,500 years old. That does not make it invalid. But it does mean you should know the difference between what the Vikings did and what modern practitioners have built on top of it.
Common Misconceptions
“Runes were only used for magic.” No. They were an alphabet for everyday writing. The magical use was secondary.
“The Elder Futhark was the Viking rune set.” No. The Vikings used the 16-character Younger Futhark. The Elder Futhark was older and had fallen out of common use by the Viking Age.
“Old Norse is the same as Old Icelandic.” Not exactly. Old Icelandic is a dialect of Old West Norse. Most surviving Old Norse literature was written in Iceland, so the two terms are often used interchangeably, but they are not identical.
“You can learn to speak Old Norse fluently.” You can learn to read it. You can learn to pronounce it. But no one knows exactly how it sounded in all its regional and temporal variations. Reconstructed pronunciation is an educated guess.
FAQ
Did Vikings write in runes or the Latin alphabet? Both. Runes were the native script. The Latin alphabet came with Christianity and was used for manuscripts from the eleventh century onward.
How many runes are in the Viking Age futhark? Sixteen. The Younger Futhark had 16 characters, not the 24 of the Elder Futhark.
Can modern Scandinavians understand Old Norse? Icelanders can read it with some difficulty. Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians cannot without study.
Were runes used for divination in the Viking Age? The evidence is thin. Tacitus describes Germanic tribes casting lots with marked sticks in the first century CE, but the connection to runes is speculative. The modern practice of rune divination is largely a twentieth-century development.
Related Guides
Old Norse and its runic alphabet are one branch of a larger family of magical alphabets used in Western esotericism. For the specific meanings and uses of each rune, see our rune glossary. And for a deeper look at how the runes were used in medieval magic and later occult revival, read The Runes in Practice.