In 1865 a worker in a Danish bog pulled a bone comb from the peat. The comb was small, palm-sized, and carved with a line of angular characters. It read harja. The Vimose comb, as it came to be called, dates to around 160 CE. It is the oldest runic inscription we possess. It tells no story. It simply says one word. That is where we begin.
Runes are the characters of ancient Germanic alphabets used for writing, divination, and magic from the first century CE onward. The word rune itself means “secret” or “whisper,” and that mystery has never left them.
How Old Are the Runes, and Where Did They Come From?
The first runic inscriptions appear across Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and northern Germany in the Roman Iron Age. The Vimose comb is the earliest securely dated example, but a few others may be older: the Negau helmet inscription (perhaps second century BCE) and the Meldorf fibula (first century CE) are debated. Sources disagree on whether the runes came from the Latin alphabet, the North Italic scripts (Etruscan variants used by Alpine peoples), or a combination.
The strongest evidence points to contact with the Roman world. Germanic warriors served as auxiliaries in the Roman army and would have seen Latin writing. The runic letter shapes show clear parallels to Roman cursive letters: Fehu (F) resembles Latin F, Uruz (U) is Latin U, Ansuz (A) is Latin A. But the runes also include letters not in Latin, like Thurisaz (Þ) and Ingwaz (Ŋ). Whoever created them adapted an existing script to the sounds of a Germanic language and gave each letter a name.
The oldest runic system is the Elder Futhark, named after its first six letters: F, U, Th (a thorn), A, R, K. It has twenty-four characters, divided into three groups of eight called ættir (families). The ættir are not arbitrary; they reflect the order of the sacred calendar, a structure we still do not fully understand.
By the eight century the Elder script had evolved into the Younger Futhark in Scandinavia, which reduced the alphabet to sixteen letters to match sound changes in Old Norse. The Anglo-Saxons, who received runes from continental Germania, expanded theirs to as many as thirty-three characters to write Old English. That branch is called the Futhorc after its first six letters. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem, preserved in a tenth-century manuscript (Cotton Otho B.x, now damaged by fire) gives us the names and meanings of those thirty-three runes. The Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems, written down in the thirteenth century, do the same for the Younger Futhark.
That carving is the key. The runes were not just letters. They were acts. The cut into wood, bone, or metal changed the object. A staff with runes became a message, a curse, or a ward. The Old Norse verb rista means both “to carve” and “to write.” The writer was a carver.
What Did the Runes Mean? Symbolism and the Rune Poems
Each rune carried a name loaded with meaning. Fehu means “cattle” or “movable wealth.” Uruz is the wild aurochs, a beast of strength and endurance. Thurisaz is the giant or the thorn, a destructive or protective force. Ansuz is the god, likely Odin himself. The names embed a cosmology: wealth, danger, divinity, journey, gift, joy, hail, need, ice, harvest, year, yew, elk, sun, Tyr, birch, horse, man, water, fertility, and so on. The rune poems, though Christian-influenced, preserve these associations.
The poems are our primary source for the symbolic use of runes. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem says of Fehu: “Wealth is a comfort to any man / yet each must share it freely if he wishes for God’s praise.” The Icelandic rune poem says: “Wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen.” The same rune, two different cultural lenses. Neither poem is a divination manual, but they give the raw material for later magical interpretation.
The physical act of carving mattered. When the hero Egil Skallagrimsson in the Saga of the Donweavers (chapter 140) suspects a poisoned drink, he carves runes on the drinking horn, rubs them with blood, and the horn shatters. The runes themselves, cut into the horn and activated by blood, broke the container. That story is fiction, but it shows how the tradition understood runic power: the symbol inscribed into matter rearranged it.
How Were Runes Used in Practice?
Runes served three overlapping purposes: writing, memory, and magic. Everyday inscriptions are rare because wood rots. But we have thousands of runestones, mostly from the Viking age in Sweden, raised as memorials. The Jelling stones in Denmark (tenth century) tell of King Harald Bluetooth converting the Danes to Christianity. Those stones are public monuments.
Magic was never separate from writing. The Codex Runicus (c. 1300), a manuscript written entirely in runes, contains a law code from Scania. Law and magic shared the same alphabet. The Galdrabók, a seventeenth-century Icelandic grimoire, mixes runic symbols, Christian prayers, and names of demons to heal sickness, cause love, or harm enemies. The runes appear as galdrastafir (magical staves), complex bind runes combining multiple letters into a single sigil. That book lives in our library, and it is not a comfortable read.
Divination with runes is attested from Roman times. The historian Tacitus, writing in 98 CE in Germania, describes Germanic priests carving symbols on slips of wood, casting them on a white cloth, and interpreting the pattern. Tacitus does not call the symbols runes, but the practice matches later descriptions. The modern “rune casting” using a set of stones or tiles goes back to this report. The Runic calendar, or primstave, a stick carved with runic day marks, was used in rural Sweden into the nineteenth century to track seasons and feast days.
That history explains why the fire mattered. The runes were used for everything between law and sorcery. They were not a secret script. They were the script. The Christianization of Scandinavia suppressed runic writing slowly; the last known runic inscription dates to the sixteenth century in Dalarna, Sweden.
A Note on Reconstructions
The early twentieth century saw a revival of runic obsession in German and Austrian occult circles. Guido von List, a Viennese journalist, developed the Armanen runes in 1908, a set of eighteen runes based on a supposed ancient secret tradition. List’s runes are historical invention, not ancient practice. Rudolf John Gorsleben and Karl Maria Wiligut added layers. These systems influenced Nazi symbolism and modern rune magic in neopaganism. We do not treat them as authentically historical. The real runes are the Elder Futhark, the Younger Futhark, and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, and we go to the rune poems and the archaeological record for their meanings.
How Do Runes Compare to Ogham?
Ogham, the Irish and British script used from the fourth century CE, has an uncanny structural parallel to runes. It is also an alphabet of carved lines, also used for magic and memorial, also conceptualized as a “tree alphabet” (each letter named after a tree). The similarity likely arises from parallel needs: a script for carving into wood and stone, developed in a culture that valued secrecy. There is no direct influence. But the comparison helps: both systems are alphabets that became occult tools long after their practical use faded.
Common Misconceptions About Runes
Runes were not exclusively Norse. They were used by all Germanic-speaking peoples from the Goths to the Anglo-Saxons to the Frisians. The Elder Futhark is not “the rune set”; there are three major historical sets and many local variants.
Runes were not primarily a divination system. They were a writing system used for everyday messages, legal documents, and poetry. Divination was one application among many, and the poetic sources for it are post-Christian. The modern “rune reading” you find in tarot shops is a reconstruction from nineteenth-century scholarship and twentieth-century occultism.
The idea that runes are “demon letters” or satanic symbols is a modern confusion tied to List’s appropriation and later media. The Christian Icelandic texts used runes freely. The Codex Runicus begins with a cross.
FAQ
Are runes just an alphabet or do they have inherent magical power?
They are a functional alphabet, but in their historical context the act of carving was believed to concentrate meaning and intent in the object. They were not powerless letters.
What is the difference between Elder and Younger Futhark?
The Elder Futhark has 24 runes and was used from the first to eighth centuries. The Younger Futhark has 16 runes and was used from the Viking age onward, adapted to Late Old Norse phonology.
Can I use runes for divination today?
Many do, using the poetic meanings as a basis. There is no historical manual for “rune casting” as a practice; you build your own system from the sources. The Tacitus account is the closest we have.
Are the runes in my “Viking” deck authentic?
If they follow the Elder Futhark of 24 characters, yes, the characters are authentic. If they follow Guido von List’s Armanen set (18 runes) or include invented symbols, they are modern creations.
Further Reading
For more on the parallel Irish script, see our guide on Ogham. For a broader view on how ancient alphabets shaped medieval magic, explore the Occult History hub. And for a practical rune study based on the primary sources, we offer Rune Magic in the Norse Tradition — a guide that sticks to the poems and the archaeology, not the inventions.