Learning to Love Runes

Of all divination methods, I find the Runes the most vibrant and challenging. So it comes as a bit of a surprise when people tell me they just can’t get to grips with them, that their symbolism is too dry, too abstract, just too….. difficult.

I suspect the real problem is that nowadays we rely so much upon the written word that we’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to try and communicate without it. Of course letters and numbers are symbols in themselves; D-O-G is not a real dog, and the letters themselves look nothing like a dog, but their combination has been learned since childhood and taken for granted. Yet symbols can grant a freedom that letters deny us.

For example, years ago my family often went on holidays to places where few people spoke English. My father would take a phrase book and get hopelessly confused with pronunciation sometimes with hilarious results. My elderly and very deaf aunt, however, relied entirely on her own personal sign language and managed some very profound conversations with just about everyone she met.

The Runes are very much like that. If you rely on a book of interpretations you can become very confused, given that every book will offer different meanings and there are variations in the number and names of the Runes themselves. The ancient Rune Poems, which are our main primary source of information on rune interpretation, are deliberately obscure. Their meaning has to be teased out of a wealth of written images until we can settle upon something that truly speaks to us. However, if you first familiarise yourself with symbols generally (not just Runes), and learn their intricate shorthand, then the Runes will speak to you fluently and you will understand every word.

Runes are symbols, but not all symbols are Runes.  Not every zigzag mark or line is a rune. Strictly speaking the Runes are those signs used by the peoples of north and northwest Europe for the purposes of writing; their runic alphabet was called the futhark, named after its first six letters, Feoh, Ur, Thorn, Ansuz, Rad and Cen.  Depending on whether you adopt the Old English or Scandinavian systems, the futhark may contain between twenty four and thirty Runes. There are also ‘bindrunes’ a combination of two or more Runes rather like the modern monogram. These were often used for magical purposes.

Although originally Runes were used as a form of writing, they have also been used to convey a wealth of knowledge, secular and magical. Some of the Rune riddles in the tenth century Book of Exeter still defy translators to produce a widely acceptable solution. Perhaps that’s part of the magic of the Runes: that they constantly entice us to wrestle with them.

Sometimes a single glyph could represent an entire word. It would be like us using the letter ‘W’ to represent wealth, or ‘L’ to represent love. So an often complex meaning could be bound up in a single, powerful symbol. Many years ago, in her book, ‘The Mystical Qabbalah’, Dion Fortune wrote, ‘Symbols are to the mind what tools are to the hand, an extended application of its powers.’ Ideally, rune symbols should be allowed to get to work upon our minds and subconscious.  A book of interpretations, though useful in some ways, can sometimes work as a barrier to this.

Working with symbols can be the equivalent of a mental gymnasium. There is no real right or wrong, only what has meaning for you. Someone in one of my spell-writing workshops once asked me, ‘What is the correct symbol for love?’ I tried to explain that there is no correct symbol for anything; that symbols only work if they mean something to us and we believe in them. It’s true that some symbols are so fixed in our subconscious that they have become almost a second language but unless they have meaning to us they can be wildly misinterpreted.

For example on a treasure map ‘X marks the spot’, but in the Runes X is the symbol of Geofu, often associated with a gift, Christians associate X with Xmas, the national flag of Scotland has a white X on a blue background, while in school if you write a wrong answer it is marked with a X. Using just this one symbol as an example, some people might think that X therefore marked the ‘wrong’ spot on a treasure map while others might see a page of incorrect answers as showing the presence of hidden treasure!

Sometimes the meaning of symbols can vary dramatically according to time and place. The swastika was once a popular good luck charm, but now few people would consider wearing it. Yet the symbol itself hasn’t changed, only our perception of it.

Try making a list of fairly abstract words and concepts such as protection, balance, discord, harmony, chance, life, sleep, good health, enlightenment, passion, child/children, home, love, hope, dreams, healing etc. Then try to produce a simple, abstract symbol for each. Don’t draw a picture of a house to represent ‘home,’ instead see if you can strip the idea down to its barest essentials, a line or two, a dot, a squiggle. For example, regeneration might be written as just a dot with a straight horizontal line above it, representing a seed sleeping in the winter earth waiting to burst into life again.

You can spend a long time working through each symbol, writing it with first with only squiggles, then with only dots, or geometrical figures or straight lines. If you look at the runes you have probably already noticed that they are all arrangements of straight lines. Many scholars believe this is because straight lines would be much easier to incise than curves. Yet what about the wonderful Celtic and Pictish stone carvings with interlacing and scroll work? Or the spirals at Newgrange in ?  Elaborate stone carving was surely more difficult than carving wood, so why are the runes so simple?

My own instinctive feeling is that they were deliberately made simple in order to be decisive. When you cast them for divination purposes, the actual work is all done in the mind, not amongst the runes themselves. A simple shape allows your mind far more freedom than a complex one.

You can push these exercises in symbolism into other, less obvious areas. For example, songs can bring back very vivid memories. You could try shortening a song that has meaning for you to a single phrase, then just one word. Then try devising a symbol for that word. The final glyph will encapsulate all the meaning and memories of the original song in one private, powerful symbol.

Runes have been around for centuries, if not millennia, possibly as far back as the Bronze Age in Northern Europe, a good four or five thousand years. Tradition has it that they were a gift from the god Odin, who hung upside down for nine days and nights from the world tree before scooping them up and presenting them to mankind.

In ancient times very little could be achieved without the appropriate accompanying Rune, and the rūnewita or rune knower acted as a counsellor to kings and chieftains.  It was his job to divine the future using Runes and foretell what lay ahead. But Runes were not only used for divination; there were runes for every possible occasion, including birth, love and battle. There are also the intriguingly named ale-runes!  Runes could convey secret, coded messages or influence the weather, while an expert rune-caster could inflict mental torment upon his opponent with the judicious use of binding runes. This could be deflected only by possession of the appropriate amulet bearing what were called ‘loosening Runes’.

Once you begin to feel comfortable using symbols, you will be able to see new interpretations of everyday things. Some everyday symbols, such as the arrows in traffic signs can take on a whole new meaning when you realise that they also represent the warrior god Tyr, who is the protector and guide of difficult journeys.

Politicians and leaders may no longer employ their rūnewita (or if they do they’re keeping very quiet about it!) but the Runes themselves are just as powerful today as they were thousands of years ago. The amazing thing is that once you begin looking at them, and then looking for them in the world around you, the Runes will almost certainly come looking for you.