Runes

There are twenty four of them in the Elder Futhark, the oldest of the runic alphabets, and every one of them has three things attached to it. A name, which is an ordinary word for an ordinary thing: cattle, hail, a torch, a birch tree, the sun. A sound, which is the letter it stood for when people wrote with it. And a picture, which is the thing the name points to, with everything that thing meant to people who lived close to the weather and the land. That picture is what I read.

What they are

I want to be plain about this before we go any further. The runes were an alphabet for several hundred years before anyone wrote down a system for reading them as an oracle, and the practice of drawing one rune for one meaning is a modern one. The Learning the Runes page gives you the whole story in one paragraph, and I would rather you had it than not.

I use them anyway, for the same reason I use the Celtic tree calendar. Twenty four clear pictures. Old words that have not worn smooth. And a way of asking a question that makes you sit still and look at one thing for a while. I think that is most of what any oracle is for. The rune hands you a picture and lets you notice which part of your own life the picture fits. Your future stays your own business.

How I use them

I keep the twenty four in a bag. When something is sitting on my mind I put the question into plain words, reach in without looking, and draw one.

Then I do the thing most people skip. I look at the picture before I look up the keyword. If I have drawn Hagalaz, I think about hail first, the sudden hammering on a tin roof that nobody can stop and that is over in ten minutes, before I think about the word disruption. If I have drawn Berkano I think about the birch, the first tree back after a fire, before I think about new beginnings. The keyword is the shorthand. The picture is the teaching.

Most days one rune is enough. When a matter has more than one side to it I draw three and lay them left to right, and I read them as the past, the present and the way things are heading, or as the matter itself, what stands in its way, and the way through. The How to Cast the Runes page covers both, and a larger cast on a cloth for the rare occasion that wants it.

A rune drawn upside down is read as its meaning blocked, delayed or turned against you. Eight of the twenty four look the same either way up and have no reversed reading, and the pages tell you which.

What a rune does

A rune describes the shape of a moment and how to stand in it. The decision about the job stays yours, and what someone else is thinking stays theirs. What the rune shows you is a picture, and if the picture is ice you will know that this is a time for standing still on a surface you are not sure of, and you can take that into the decision you were going to make anyway.

I treat every oracle this way, the tarot and the I Ching included. The cards and the hexagrams and the runes are all mirrors of a slightly different shape. You bring the face.

How this section is laid out

Learning the Runes is the place to begin. It covers where the runes come from, what a rune is, how the alphabet is arranged in three rows of eight, how a rune answers a question and how I read one.

The Elder Futhark walks through all twenty four letters in order, with the sound of each one and a line on its picture, and explains which runes can be read reversed and which cannot.

How to Cast the Runes is the practical page: making or buying a set, asking the question, the single rune, the three rune draw, the nine rune cast, reversed runes, and why there is no blank rune in my bag.

The Runes is the index. Every rune has its own page, and each page gives the picture, what the rune says when it comes up, its reversed reading, and where it sits beside the tarot and the trees.

Where to start

Read The Elder Futhark once, slowly, so the twenty four pictures have been through your head at least one time. Then get a set, or make one from twenty four flat stones and a marker pen, and draw a single rune with a real question behind it. Sit with the picture for a minute before you open the page.

You will learn more from your own first draw than from anything I can write about the runes in general. You will be your own teacher. All I will do is help you remember what you already know.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.

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