Norse Symbols and Runes: A Complete Guide to Viking Age Iconography

Few cultural legacies of the ancient North have proven as durable, as widely copied, or as deeply misunderstood as the runic and symbolic tradition of the Norse and other Germanic peoples. From the carving on a Swedish runestone of the eleventh century to the tattoos of modern football fans, from the grimoires of medieval Icelandic magicians to the iconography of contemporary heavy metal, the visual language of Odin and his kin has traveled across more than a millennium of human history. This page gathers the principal elements of that tradition: the alphabets (futhark/futhorc) themselves, the meanings attached to individual signs, the great monuments that bear them, the magical practices that employed them, and the geometric and figurative emblems that emerged alongside or after them.

Runes were not, in the Viking Age, a curiosity or a relic. They were a writing system, a divinatory technology, a tool of magic, and a means of commemoration, ownership, and insult. To read a runestone is to enter a world in which the boundary between letter, sign, charm, and holy mark had not yet been drawn — the same way an early Christian crucifix could be a theological argument, a piece of jewelry, and an apotropaic ward all at once. Understanding this dual nature — script and sigil, alphabet and amulet — is the key to understanding everything that follows.

The Runic Tradition: Origins and Character

The runic alphabets used by the Germanic peoples are descended, like all European scripts, from a Mediterranean ancestor. Most scholars today accept that runes were ultimately adapted from one or more of the Latin alphabets of the first centuries CE, possibly with Etruscan mediation, and the earliest datable inscriptions cluster in the second and third centuries. The oldest substantial corpus, the Elder Futhark corpus, appears in material from the second century onwards, and by the time of the great migrations it was already established across much of Germania and southern Scandinavia.

What distinguishes the runes from the Latin alphabet is their visual logic. Each sign is built from a small number of straight strokes, almost always confined to a vertical stem, the stafr. This shape is not accidental: it is well suited to carving into wood, bone, antler, or stone with a knife, and it allows the writer to “draw” a rune on a flat surface without lifting the tool from the material. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem, preserved in the Codex Runicus tradition, famously identifies the first rune, fehu (wealth), with the image of a moving, fire-breathing animal — a hint that the letters were once thought of, in a quasi-mythic mode, as living things with personality and power.

The runes were also a sacred technology. Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda tells the famous story of Odin’s self-sacrifice on the world-tree Yggdrasil: the god hangs wind-tossed for nine nights, wounded by his own spear, in order to grasp the runes. “Then I was fertilized and became wise; I grew and took pleasure in my growth; from a word to me a word was seeking me; from a deed to me a deed was seeking me.” Whatever else this stanza of the Hávamál describes, it presents the runes as a divinely won wisdom, a prize of self-sacrifice, and a set of operations that one does (as much as one writes). The early medieval magician who carved a rune-stave into a piece of birch bark or a piece of bone was not just leaving a record; he was, in a real sense, speaking the rune into being.

Runes also display a strong tendency toward secrecy. Even in the Viking Age, runic writing was used for messages that were intended to be read but not by everyone: curses, love-charms, ownership tags on buried treasure, and memorial inscriptions. The “Egil’s rune” episode in the Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, in which the skald Egill carves a níðstöng (cursing pole) inscribed with a runic formula to humiliate King Eiríkr Bloodaxe and Queen Gunnhild, is a vivid literary picture of the rune as a weapon.

The Elder Futhark: 24 Runes, Three Ættir

The oldest runic alphabet to be fully reconstructed is the Elder Futhark, so called because its first six signs spell out f-u-þ-a-r-k, a name parallel to “alphabet” but derived from the first letter-names of the script. It contains 24 runes, divided by convention into three groups of eight called ættir (“families” or “eighths”). Each rune had a name, formed after the manner of the Latin alphabet, and each name carried a meaning that went beyond the simple sound-value of the sign. The Elder Futhark was in use from roughly the second century CE to about 800 CE, when it was gradually displaced by the shorter Younger Futhark in Scandinavia.

The First Ætt

Fehu (f) — Wealth, livestock, mobile property. The rune of material abundance, the seed of prosperity, and the force that moves things. In a divinatory context it often signals an initial gift, a windfall, or the need to guard what one has.

Uruz (u) — The aurochs, the great extinct wild ox of Europe. A rune of primal strength, raw health, and untamed force. It is connected to the wild, the masculine, and the slow formation of enduring power.

Þurisaz (þ) — The giant, the þurs of Old Norse. A rune of sharp, sudden, defensive force. It evokes the thorn, the spike, the steep cliff. In magic it is associated with cold, with the giants, and with the unspoken threat of a giant’s anger.

Ansuz (a) — The Aesir, the gods, divine speech and inspiration. Ansuz is the rune of Odin most directly, of poetic frenzy, of inherited wisdom, and of the spoken word that creates or commands. It is also the rune of breath, which in Old Norse thought carried the soul.

Raidō (r) — The ride, the journey, the wagon. A rune of rhythm, of ordered movement, of the right road at the right time. The Anglo-Saxon cognate is rad, preserved in the modern English word “road.”

Kenaz (k) — The torch, the beacon, the controlled flame. Kenaz is the rune of knowledge as illumination, of craft, of the fire that lets one work in the dark. It is associated with forge-work, with sexual passion, and with the light that reveals.

Gebo (g) — The gift. A rune of reciprocity, exchange, and balance. In the absence of money in many early contexts, gift-giving was economy, and a broken gift-cycle was a serious social rupture. The X-shape of the rune also evokes two hands clasping.

Wunjō (w) — Joy, the fulfilled wish. The rune of harmony, of unbroken oaths, and of a banner that flies in favorable wind. Its shape is sometimes called the “flag” rune for the cross-on-pole form.

The Second Ætt

Hagalaz (h) — Hail, the falling pellet of ice. Hagalaz is the rune of disruption: weather, war, the unwelcome event that breaks the plans of the year. It is also, paradoxically, the seed of fertility — the early Germanic farmer knew that hailstones melted into the same water that fed the crop.

Naudiz (n) — Need, hardship, constraint, the friction-drill for kindling fire. Naudiz is the rune of compulsion, of the lesson learned only through difficulty, of the situation in which one has no choice but to do the right thing.

Isaz (i) — Ice. A rune of stillness, of patience, of the great frozen rivers of the north. It can mean the cold withdrawal from action or, in a positive light, the steady, unmoving ground on which to build.

Jera (j/y) — The year, the harvest, the cycle completed. Jera is shaped as two opposing halves joined at the middle: summer and winter, the two halves of the wheel. It promises that labor and patience will bear fruit.

Eihwaz (ï/e) — The yew, the long-lived and poisonous tree of the northern forests. Eihwaz is the rune of endurance, of the bow made from yew wood, of the boundary between life and death. Yew trees were traditionally planted in churchyards partly because of their pre-Christian associations with eternal life.

Perþ (p) — The pear tree, the fruit tree of uncertain identification (some scholars prefer “apple”). A rune of hidden things, of the secret sisterhood of fertility magic, of the chance discovery in the right place at the right time. Its shape in some traditions suggests the distaff.

Algiz (z) — The elk-sedge, the swan, the protective gesture with upraised arms. Algiz is the rune of defense, of sanctuary, of the hedge that fences the holy. It is the figure of the human standing between heaven and earth, palms out, wardingly.

Sōwilō (s) — The sun. The rune of solar power, of victory (the Old English cognate is sigel but the name is reconstructed as sōwilō from Proto-Germanic), of the wheel of the year. In Norse contexts it is associated with the goddess Sól and her daily ride across the sky.

The Third Ætt

Tīwaz (t) — The god Tyr, the sky-god of law and oath. The rune of justice, of the sword arm extended in judgment, of the warrior who fights not from rage but from duty. In the Hávamál it is the rune to be carved on a weapon for victory and on the palm of a woman in labor.

Berkanan (b) — The birch, the first tree to leaf in spring. A rune of purification, of new beginnings, of the mother-goddess, and of the bark that carries writing. Birches were used for rune-staves and for the ristning of love-magic.

Ehwaz (e) — The horse, the team of plow-beasts. A rune of partnership, of trust between rider and mount, of slow steady progress by two working as one. Its double chevron evokes the horse’s head.

Mannaz (m) — The human, mankind, the social being. Mannaz is the rune of hugr (mind) and of the human being as a creature of divine descent, an idea also found in the Völuspá — “from ask and embla Odin shaped the first man and woman.”

Laguz (l) — Water, the lake, the river, the sea. The rune of the unconscious, of the dream-logic that moves below the surface, of fertility and the flow of life. Snorri describes it as the rune by which the rivers, the sea, and the ale of poetry flow.

Ingwaz (ng) — The god Ing (a fertility deity identified by some scholars with Frey and by others with the Anglo-Saxon Ing). A rune of internal growth, of the seed that ripens underground before the shoot appears, of gestation and accumulated potential.

Dagaz (d) — The day, the dawn, the breakthrough. Shaped like two wedges opening outward, Dagaz is the rune of sudden illumination, of the moment the night turns, of the very pause between two states when the world is briefly neither.

Oþala (o) — The ancestral estate, the inherited field, the patrimony. The rune of the kin, the legal heir, the family holding. Its lozenge or diamond form evokes the division of land into fields and the protective fence around the homestead.

This set of 24 signs remained remarkably stable for roughly 600 years. While individual letter-shapes varied from region to region, and while some rune-masters experimented with minor innovations, the sequence and the order of the ættir are strikingly uniform across the entire Elder Futhark corpus — a fact that suggests a real, transmitted scribal tradition rather than mere local imitation.

Anglo-Saxon Futhorc: The Extended Runic Alphabet

When the Germanic migrations carried the runic script into England in the fifth and sixth centuries, the alphabet expanded to meet the demands of Old English phonology. The result was the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc (sometimes “Futhorc,” after its first six letters f-u-þ-o-r-c). The Futhorc eventually contained 28, 29, 30, or even 33 runes depending on period and dialect, with new signs added to represent sounds that had developed in the island dialects but not on the continent: ac (oak, the new “o” sound), æsc (ash), wynn (the “w” sound), þorn, ēð, īor, cweorð, stōp, yr, and so on.

The Anglo-Saxon rune poems — preserved in manuscripts such as the ninth- or tenth-century Codex Cotton Otho B.xI — are among the most important literary sources for the runic tradition. The Old English Rune Poem opens:

feoh byþ frofur fira gehwylcum / sceal þeah manna gehwylc miclun hyt dælan / gif he wile for drihtne domes hleotan.

(“Wealth is a comfort to all men; yet must every man distribute it freely, if he wishes to win praise before the Lord.”)

This Christian frame is significant. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem, unlike the more secular Scandinavian rune poems, is suffused with biblical and patristic imagery. The rune sigel (sun) is described as “a comfort to seafarers when they sail over the ocean” but also as a marvel that the Almighty, “the holy God of heaven,” placed in the firmament. The rune þorn (thorn) is the worst of trees, “sharp and severe, gripping, grasping,” but also, by extension, an image of the sin that wounds the soul. The Christianization of the runic tradition is a key context for understanding the role of runes in late Anglo-Saxon England and in the early Christian North.

A handful of very early Anglo-Saxon runic objects — the Franks Casket (early eighth century), the Ruthwell Cross (seventh/eighth century), and the Kewl runic coffin (seventh century) — are monuments of European significance. The Ruthwell Cross, in particular, a stone cross in Dumfriesshire, bears a long runic inscription in Old English that paraphrases a passage of the Dream of the Rood, the earliest surviving example of the cross as a literary speaker in the English tradition. The cross is a Christian monument whose text is in runes — an astonishing visual testimony to the prestige and sacredness of the runic script well into the Christian period.

Younger Futhark: 16 Runes, Two Centuries of Standardization

Beginning in the late seventh or early eighth century, the Elder Futhark was replaced in Scandinavia by a shorter alphabet of only 16 signs, the Younger Futhark. The reduction was a long, gradual process: scribes dropped letter distinctions they no longer needed, and several runes were reassigned to represent multiple sounds. The resulting system was less precise phonemically — one rune, for example, had to cover both the “r” and the “z” sound — but it was simpler to learn and faster to carve.

The Younger Futhark is sometimes divided into two regional variants: the long-branch (or Danish) runes, with tall vertical strokes and small diagonal twigs, common in Denmark and southern Sweden; and the short-twig (or Swedish-Norwegian) runes, with their twigs running close to the stem, common in central Sweden and Norway. The two variants are mutually intelligible — they encode the same sounds — but their visual aesthetics differ noticeably. A third, transitional, variant is sometimes called the “Hälsinge Runes” or the “stave-runes” of central Sweden.

The Younger Futhark, with its 16 runes, came to dominate the Viking Age inscriptions. The great runestones of Sweden and Denmark — the Rök stone, the Jelling stones, the Karlevi stone, the Gripsholm stone, the Tullstorp Runestone, the Dynna stone — are all in this script. So are the small, portable inscriptions: rune-sticks (the so-called brytstickor or tally-sticks of medieval Bergen), rune-amulets, and the personal signatures of seafarers on loose pieces of bone.

The main rune names of the Younger Futhark are familiar from later Old Norse sources, and many of them are quoted by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda:

fe, úr, þurs, ás, reið, kaun, hagall, nauðr, ís, ár, sól, Týr, Bjarkan, maðr, lögr, ýr.

Each had a meaning: fe was wealth, ís was ice, Bjarkan was the birch-tree (the “B-rune”), and so on. These meanings were not just philological curiosities. They were actively used in medieval runic magic, in which the rune was considered to “be” its referent in some sense, so that carving the Bjarkan rune could draw the regenerative energy of the birch into the inscribed object.

Medieval Runes and the Late Futhark

In the late medieval period, beginning roughly in the thirteenth century, the Younger Futhark was itself expanded again in Scandinavia, particularly in Sweden and Norway, into a system known as the Latin-influenced Futhark or, more commonly, the medieval runes. By this period, scribes and rune-masters were fully aware of the Latin alphabet and were willing to use it as a model. They added dots and additional diacritics to distinguish sounds that the 16-rune system had collapsed together, and they developed cursive or crotched forms (the korta or “knot” runes) for writing on perishable surfaces. A famous example of a fully developed cursive runic script is the Codex Runicus (AM 28 8vo), a 1328 manuscript containing the Scandinavian Law of Scania entirely in runes.

By the late Middle Ages, runes had been relegated, in most contexts, to a specialist magical and divinatory technology. Few Scandinavian peasants were still using runes to write letters, and the elite had long since adopted the Latin alphabet. The grand runestone tradition was effectively over by the eleventh century, and what replaced it was a new and in some ways stranger use of the script: the runic charms and stave-formulas preserved in Icelandic grimoires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by which time the runes were being combined into complex compound figures called bind runes (two or more runes sharing strokes) and into geometric designs called galdrastafir (“magical staves”) of various types. This is also the period that produced the well-known Icelandic magical staves: the Vegvísir, the Ægishjálmur, the Huld mark, the þórshamar in simplified form, and many others.

These late medieval staves are usually not part of the runic alphabet proper, even though they use runes as components. They are a parallel symbolic vocabulary, and the proper study of them is more akin to the study of sigillum magic or the magic squares of late medieval Europe than to the study of Viking Age writing.

Runic Inscriptions and Runestones

The single most abundant body of runic material from the Viking Age is the corpus of runestones, monumental inscriptions carved in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark between roughly the ninth and the eleventh centuries. The Swedish runestone tradition is the richest: more than 2,500 such stones are known, with most concentrated in the provinces of Uppland and Södermanland. The Rök stone (Östergötland, c. 800-900 CE) is the most famous. Its nine lines of Younger Futhark bear a long, complex text that combines elegiac poetry, historical memory, and a defensive formula — the inscription itself is called upon to “stand” as a defense of the memory of the dead, just as the runic hero Varin stood beside his fallen king.

The runestones typically served as memorials. A typical formula runs:

“Raidō and Gunnarr raised this stone in memory of Hróarr, their father. May God help his soul.”

Such formulas combine a Latin-alphabet-derived (and eventually Christian) piety — “may God help his soul” — with a runic memorial technology, and they bear witness to the way in which the old writing system survived the conversion. The Jelling stones (raised by Harald Bluetooth and his family at Jelling in Jutland, c. 965 CE) are the most consequential example. The larger of the two bears the inscription:

“Haraldr konungr bað gørva kuml þau afti Gorm faður sinn, það er hans vann heiman, systur sinnar, ok markaði Danmǫrk alla ok Norveg ok dani gørva kristna.”

(“King Haraldr ordered these monuments made in memory of Gormr, his father, and in memory of his mother Þórví, the woman who was his, [the same king] who won all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.”)

This text is the single most cited piece of evidence for the Christianization of Denmark. It is a political claim — Haraldr’s dynastic right over the whole country — written in the only script the country had used for centuries, and it is also an act of conversion: the runestone, a pagan medium, is now a Christian one.

Runic inscriptions were not only on stones. They were on combs (love-charms), on brooches (ownership tags and ownership-disputes), on weapons (the inlaid names of the smith and the warrior), on coins (mints at York, Hedeby, and Kiev), on textile labels (baling tags that named the sack of furs, the bolt of silk), on mast-rings (calibrated marks that showed the depth of water for ship navigation), and on stones and boulders used as boundary markers. The Rök stone’s reference to a battle, the Karlevi stone’s reference to a Geatish chieftain slain in Denmark, and the Gripsholm stone’s reference to a Viking raid are not literary allusions: they are local historical records, with no parallel in the Christian Latin tradition of the period.

Runic Magic: Galdr, Seiðr, and the Spoken Rune

In Old Norse literature, the term galdr (a cognate of English “incantation” and likely of “yell” or “cry”) refers specifically to sung or chanted magic, of the kind practiced by völur (seeresses) and by gods. The Völuspá opens with the völva calling for silence among the holy beings, “I, of Odin born, of giants kin.” The galdr is the audible counterpart of the inscribed rune: the rune is the form of the charm on a surface; the galdr is the form of the charm in the air. Both are believed to enact, not merely to describe, the desired outcome.

A classic example is the Ægisdrekka charm, recorded in Þorgríms þáttr stangarhöggs. To prevent a hostile sorcerer from drinking, the magician goes to the doorway of a building and chants, while a companion cuts runes into a piece of bark or bone, which the magician holds:

“Þat stýri ek, þat stöðva ek, þat frelsa ek, undir oss K…”

(roughly: “I turn it aside, I stay it, I free it, under us [the runes]…”)

The full charm involves the carving of three runes, each said to refer to a different effect (turning the spell, stopping it, freeing the people inside from harm). This kind of complex, runic-and-oral magic is the ancestor of the Icelandic staves of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which similar verbal formulas are combined with elaborate geometric figures.

Seiðr is a more general term for Norse magic of a divinatory and fate-shaping kind, traditionally associated with the Vanir gods — most notably with Freya — and with socially marginal practitioners. Snorri describes seiðr as a kind of working by which “one shapes the future,” and he associates it with both the völva and with Odin himself, who learned the art from Freya. Seiðr involved both ecstatic trance (in some sources, the practitioner fell into a sleeplike state and was believed to travel) and the carving of runes onto a seiðstafr (a seiðr-stave) over which the practitioner sang.

A separate tradition is that of the níðstöng (cursing pole). Egill Skalla-Grímrsson’s níðstöng in the saga is a pole carved with a horse’s head (or, in some texts, topped with the body of a freshly killed horse or human), inscribed with runic curses, and erected in a place where the targeted person would see it. The idea is that the cursing is realized at the moment the curse is observed. Modern parallels include voodoo-style target-effigies, though the runic cursing pole is a specifically Norse form of binding magic.

Bind Runes and Combined Inscriptions

A bind rune is two or more runes joined by a shared vertical stem, producing a single compound sign. The most common reason for binding runes was economy of space: many runic inscriptions on portable objects are too short to allow a separate rune for each letter, and the scribe would save strokes by binding two adjacent letters together. Examples from the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages are abundant: the word Raidō on a Swedish memorial stone is sometimes written as a single compound of the R and the U runes; the runic word for “Thor” (Þórr) is sometimes written as a bind of Þ and O; and the abbreviation “man” can be written as a bind of M, A, and N.

A different kind of compound, the cipher rune or staveless rune (sometimes called a tvímadr or “double-man” when the doubled rune is a maðr), was used in later medieval Scandinavia to write runes on small or rounded surfaces. The stave of each letter is replaced by a single diagonal line, and the twigs are written as small marks around it. The resulting script is harder to read but more compact, and it was used in such late medieval manuscripts as the previously mentioned Codex Runicus.

In magical practice, the bind rune acquired a separate significance: two or more forces, each represented by its rune, were thought to combine into a single more powerful force. The famous “kal rune” of the late Icelandic grimoire tradition — a compound of kaun (ulcer/wound) and laguz (water), often with additional elements — is an example. It was believed to be particularly effective for baneful purposes. Modern revivalists (often outside the academic mainstream) have built elaborate systems of bind-rune magic on the model of these medieval sources, but most scholars of the Viking Age would caution that the runic binds of the medieval grimoires are not straightforwardly continuous with the practical binds of the Viking Age scribes.

Major Norse Symbols

The visual vocabulary of the Norse-speaking peoples is rich and varied, and the symbols that have come down to us include both written runes and purely geometric or figurative emblems. Some of the best known of these emblems are discussed below.

The Valknut (Three Interlocked Triangles)

The valknut — Old Norse for “knot of the slain,” if Snorri’s etymology in the Prose Edda is correct — is a symbol of three interlocked triangles, sometimes drawn with a single line, sometimes with three. It appears on several well-known objects, most famously on the Stora Hammars stones (Gotland, eighth/ninth century), the Tängelgårda stone (also Gotland), the Lärbro stones (Gotland), and the Oseberg ship burial (Norway, ninth century). In the most common reading, the valknut is associated with Odin and the slain warriors in Valhalla, though the original meaning of the symbol is not recorded. The modern association with death, the slain, and the “warrior afterlife” is the most common reading in popular literature, and it is the one reproduced in most contemporary tattoos and emblems.

Mjolnir (Thor’s Hammer)

The Mjolnir is the hammer of Thor, forged by the dwarves Sindri and Brokkr, that returns to the god’s hand when thrown, levels mountains, and is used to hallow weddings and funerals. The literary evidence is supported by an extraordinary body of archaeological material: well over a hundred Viking-Age and medieval Scandinavian pendants in the form of a hammer, found in graves and hoards from Iceland to Poland, from England to Russia. The hammer pendants are roughly contemporary with Christian cross pendants of similar form, and they are often interpreted as a visible profession of allegiance to the old gods in the face of the new faith.

The Mjolnir symbol was widely used in life and in death. It appears on runestones as a substitute for the cross in inscriptions by people who did not wish to identify as Christian. It appears on tokens struck by a bishop of western Sweden in the eleventh century to mock the heathen symbol. And it appears carved on a number of standing stones in Scandinavia as a stand-alone motif, sometimes paired with an inscription of the name of the deceased.

The Helm of Awe (Ægishjálmur)

The Ægishjálmur, or Helm of Awe, is a complex figure of eight staves radiating from a central point, crossed by two pairs of lines. It appears primarily in late Icelandic grimoires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the Galdrabók and similar manuscript collections), and the most famous literary use is in the Völsunga saga, where the dragon Fafnir wears the helm of awe as a spell of terror against all living things. In the grimoires, the helm is recommended for use in warfare, in intimidation, and in the protection of treasure. Modern Asatru and other Heathen groups have adopted the symbol and use it widely, though the more skeptical scholarly view is that the figure is a late, post-medieval magical artifact with no continuous tradition to the Viking Age.

The Vegvisir (Runic Compass)

The Vegvísir, “way-shower” or “sign-post,” is a stave of eight arms radiating from a center, each arm ending in a different runic-like ornament. It is recorded in the Huld Manuscript (Iceland, compiled in 1860 by Geir Vigfússon from older sources) as a stave to be drawn in blood on the forehead of a person who has lost his way: “the bearer of this sign shall never be lost, even in the worst weather, on a strange road, or in the dark.” Like the Ægishjálmur, the Vegvísir is best understood as a product of late Icelandic magical folklore rather than as a Viking Age artifact, but the symbol has been enthusiastically adopted by modern Heathen, Asatru, and general North-Atlantic communities.

The Web of Wyrd (Wyrd Urdarbrunnr)

The Web of Wyrd is a modern emblem constructed from the nine runes of the second and third Elder Futhark ættir, drawn as a grid of three by three (so that the nine staves of the Hagalaz, Naudiz, Isaz, Jera, Eihwaz, Perþ, Algiz, Sōwilō, and Tīwaz run in three rows and three columns), with the diagonal lines of the runes continuing across the grid to form a continuous interconnected web. The symbol was devised in the twentieth century and is not attested in any Viking Age or medieval Scandinavian source. The idea behind it is that the nine runes of the last two ættir represent the Norns (Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld) and the nine worlds of Norse cosmology, and that the web of the Wyrd is the structure of fate. Despite the absence of a direct historical source, the symbol has become one of the most popular in contemporary Heathen use.

The Yggdrasil Emblem

Several modern designs represent Yggdrasil as a stylised ash tree, with a deep root structure, three principal roots, and the various animals of the tree (Nidhogg the dragon, Ratatoskr the squirrel, an eagle at the top, four stags browsing the leaves) arranged around it. The designs vary in accuracy (the most faithful attempt to include the nine worlds, the wells, and the Norns) and the emblem has become a favourite of modern North European, Icelandic, and Heathen iconography.

The Troll Cross

The Troll Cross is a small, circular, bent-iron amulet of recent Scandinavian folk use, traditionally hung on a string around the neck of a child or animal to ward off trolls, elves, and other hidden beings. Its design — a small disc of iron with an ovoid cutout and four hooks at the cardinal points — is associated with the folklore of Småland, southern Sweden, and the figure is reproduced today as an Asatru emblem. Like the Vegvísir, however, the Troll Cross is a product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century folk practice, not a Viking Age one.

The Sun Cross and the Swastika

The Sun Cross, a cross of equal arms inscribed in a circle, is one of the oldest religious symbols in Europe, attested at Scandinavian rock-art sites such as Tanum in Bohuslän, Sweden, in Bronze Age and early Iron Age petroglyphs. It is associated with solar cosmology and with the great wheel of the year. The swastika (a fylfot, the angled cross with bent arms) is similarly ancient: a “thunder-mark” or “fire-drill cross” in the Bronze Age rock art of Scandinavia, and a common motif in Iron Age metalwork and textile art. From at least the Iron Age the swastika was associated with Thor and with the fire of the smith. The nineteenth-century use of the symbol by the National Socialists in Germany was a deliberate borrowing from a much older, and very different, religious vocabulary, and most modern Heathens make a careful distinction between the ancient “thunder-mark” and the politically charged twentieth-century use.

Runes, Symbols, and Modern Use

A great deal of contemporary interest in runic and Norse symbols is recreational and decorative. The world-wide tattoo and jewelry industry has, since the late twentieth century, produced millions of items bearing the valknut, the Mjolnir, the Algiz rune, the Sōwilō rune, the Web of Wyrd, and the Vegvísir. The quality of these reproductions varies widely: some are careful copies of actual historical artifacts, others are “neo-runic” designs that have no direct equivalent in the historical record. As a general rule, the closer a contemporary symbol is to an actual Viking Age or medieval object, the better its claim to historical continuity.

The modern Heathen religions (Asatru, Heathenry, Theodism, Vanatrú, and other contemporary movements) also use the runic and symbolic vocabulary extensively. Runes are a focus of study and meditation; galdr is practiced as a contemplative art; and the major emblems (the valknut, Mjolnir, the Web of Wyrd) are used in weddings, blóts (seasonal offerings), and other ceremonies. A broader account of the modern Heathen revival is given in Norse Mythology in Modern Culture.

For the academic study of runic inscriptions, the key reference works include the Danish Rundata database, the Swedish Rundata project (now the Uppsala Runic Inscriptions Online), the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (de Gruyter, second edition), and the standard work on the Elder Futhark by Tineke Looijenga, Runes Around the North Sea c. AD 150-700. The principal works of reference for the Old Norse traditions of runic magic are the Galdrabók (Icelandic, c. 1600), the Íslensk galdrabók and Galdra-skræða, and Stephen Flower’s Runes and Magic (1997) and similar scholarly studies.

Rune Poems and the Literary Tradition

The meaning of the runes as transmitted by Old Norse and Old English sources is preserved in a group of short, formulaic poems known collectively as the rune poems. The Old English Rune Poem (ninth-tenth century, in the Cotton Otho B.xI manuscript, lost in the Cotton library fire of 1731 but preserved in copies) gives three or four lines of alliterative verse for each of the 29 runes of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc. The Norwegian Rune Poem (in eddic-style verse, preserved in a fragmentary manuscript of the thirteenth century) gives similar verses for the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark. The Icelandic Rune Poem (in the Codex Wormianus of the Prose Edda) follows the same pattern. Together these three rune poems form the backbone of our literary knowledge of runic meanings, and they have been the single most important source for the modern revival of runic divination.

The rune poems are not, strictly speaking, instructions for using runes. They are, rather, mnemonic-cum-encyclopedic verses. A typical stanza is dense, alliterative, and full of kennings. The Anglo-Saxon þorn stanza, for example, says that the thorn is “very sharp” and “evil for any man who touches it” — and then notes that it is “unmerciful, a great peril to those who sit among the brambles” — and ends with the famous ambiguous line that has been variously emended: in some readings, “the joy of the wild goose” (a bird that builds its nest in thorn-bushes, beyond the reach of foxes); in others, “the joy of the warrior who, when walking through the woods, holds it in his hand.” The very ambiguity of the stanza is characteristic: rune poems are designed to call up images, not to give a single fixed meaning.

The Norwegian Rune Poem is less biblical in tone. Its verse for fe (wealth) opens:

Fjøðr kváða, / hverr er fæðisk af ǫnnur / vargr gleypir þá; / veit ek at hón er varmr of borðit. (“Plume they called it, each one growing from another; the wolf gulps it; I know it is warm from the broth.”)

This stanza is a complex image: the fjøðr is a feather (plume), but it is also the dust in flour, the foam in the ale, the down of the eider, the thin film on the warm broth — wealth, in this view, is everywhere, the natural product of all life, and the rune of wealth is the rune of the natural cycle.

The runic poets also developed an extended literary form: the rune catalogue, in which the völva or other speaker names a rune, defines it, and uses it as a springboard to wider mythological reflection. The most famous rune catalogue in Old Norse literature is the so-called Rúnatal or “List of Runes” in the Hávamál, the poem attributed to Odin himself. The Rúnatal enumerates runes “for victory” and runes “for the woman whose arms enfold me” and “runes of counsel, of mind-runes, of memory-runes, of speech-runes, of brand-runes, of hand-runes, of wave-runes, of limb-runes, of blood-runes,” and so on. While the Rúnatal does not specify the visual form of any of the named rune-types, the catalogue has been enormously influential on later magical practice.

Runic Numerals and Tallying

Runes were not only letters. The same alphabet could be used as a system of numerals, with each rune carrying an assigned numerical value. In the Elder Futhark the assignment was positional by ætt: fehu = 1, uruz = 2, thurisaz = 3, and so on, through the three ættir up to 24. In the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, a similar scheme was used, with the longer alphabet extending the count. In the Younger Futhark, the same scheme continued, but because of the reduced alphabet the assignment had to be repeated: rune 1 = 1, rune 9 = 9, rune 10 = 10, rune 11 = 11, and so on. The system was used on a number of small objects — for example, on the curved spindle-sticks found at Bryggen in Bergen, on which a rune was notched into the wood to record a numerical value.

The “rune-stick” practice survives in modified form in the use of kerf (a stick on which a number of notches are cut) and ris (a tally), both of which are well-attested in medieval Scandinavian legal and fiscal sources. A kerf held by a steward might record a day’s milk deliveries, the number of skeins of yarn spun by a weaver, or the number of nails owed by a smith. The stick was then split lengthwise: the steward kept one half, the worker the other, and the two halves could be brought back together to verify the count. This practical “rune” (in the broader sense of “memorable mark”) is the ancestor of the medieval English “tally stick,” and through that, of the older form of the word “tally” in the modern sense.

Cryptography and Coded Runic Inscriptions

A small but fascinating sub-corpus of runic inscriptions is written in a deliberately obscured script. Sometimes the runic letters are reversed (vendelrunes or “back-runes”), sometimes they are written boustrophedon (alternating left-to-right and right-to-left, in the manner of archaic Greek), sometimes they are hidden inside other words (acrostic, in which the first rune of each line spells a secret message), and sometimes they are written in a personal code known only to a few individuals. The famous cursing-stick of Källby (Västergötland, Sweden), for example, contains a sequence of staves that has not yet been fully decoded, despite a century of scholarly effort. The most plausible interpretation is that the message was encrypted for the eyes of a single recipient — perhaps the curse itself was thought to be more effective for being unintelligible to onlookers.

A related phenomenon is the monogrammatic rune in which two or more runes are overlaid rather than bound into a single compound. The result is a hidden rune within a rune: a code within a code. Such figures appear in several medieval Norwegian love-charms, in which the “outer” message is a relatively innocuous request to a lover, and the “inner” message (visible only on close inspection of the overlapping staves) is a more aggressive magical command.

Runic Monuments by Region

Although the runestone is often thought of as a uniformly Swedish phenomenon, runic monuments are in fact distributed across the Norse-speaking world, with very different regional characteristics.

In Sweden the runestone tradition is overwhelmingly monumental and memorial. Most of the 2,500+ known runestones stand alone as private memorials; a few form part of a bridge (a so-called brosten, “bridge-stone”) or a wall. The greatest concentration is in the Mälaren valley (Uppland and Södermanland), and the stones often quote the standard memorial formula: “X and Y raised this stone in memory of Z, their father.” Many bear an additional Christian prayer. A few are exceptional in form: the Gripsholm stone bears one of the longest Viking-Age inscriptions and shows a great serpent entwined around a cross-like form (the Urnes style); the Turinge stone of Södermanland, raised in memory of a mother, is shaped like an early Christian cross; and the Rök stone of Östergötland stands alone for the literary complexity of its text.

In Denmark the runestone tradition is older, more diverse, and in some places more Christian. The Jelling stones are the most important: a pair raised by Haraldr Bluetooth and his family in the 960s, with one bearing the formula cited earlier. Other notable Danish runestones include the Ravnunge-Tue stones of Sjælland, the Sønder Vissing stone of Jutland (a memorial to a mother, raised in 970 by her son King Haraldr), and the Läborg stone of Jutland, a memorial to a father, raised in the 980s by a man whose niece is named in the inscription — a rare Viking-Age example of a niece being named as a primary mourner.

In Norway the runestone tradition is the least monumental but the most variegated. About 70-80 runestones are known, and many are smaller and less well-preserved than their Swedish counterparts. The most famous Norwegian runestone is the Kuli stone (c. 1000-1100, Østfold), which bears an Old Norse poem, “Toke the skald raised the stone … the lord of the Vikings, the lord of the sea, a lord of the people, an avenger of men, the viking, the fletcher,” and which gives a vivid picture of the late Viking chieftain. There are also a small but interesting group of runestones from the Faroes and the Shetlands, all of which bear memorial formulas in Younger Futhark.

In Iceland the runestone tradition is the smallest, but it includes some of the most important early inscriptions. The oldest of these is a “rimstone” or grid-patterned inscription in Mosfell, raised in memory of a missionary, which has been dated to the late eleventh century. There is also a small but interesting group of “mound-stones” raised in the early settlement period.

In the British Isles the runestone tradition is found in the form of the so-called Manx runestones (about 30 in total, on the Isle of Man), which are mostly late Norse (tenth-eleventh century) memorials of Viking settlers. They typically use the standard memorial formula, often in the local variant of Old Norse and with some local adaptation of the script. The Maeshowe runic inscriptions (Orkney, c. 1150) are an entirely different phenomenon: they were carved inside the Neolithic chambered tomb of Maeshowe by twelfth-century Norwegian crusaders (the “Jorsalafarer,” or “Jerusalem-farers”) on their way to or from the Holy Land. The runic graffiti inside Maeshowe include references to the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, the kissing of the cross in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the storming of the tomb in which the Vikings sheltered during a winter storm.

In the Kievan Rus’ and the Baltic the runestone tradition is absent, but runic-style symbols are found on some hoards and amulets. The runic ættir and the maðr rune are the basis of a well-attested early medieval Scandinavian amulet tradition in which a piece of antler or bone was inscribed with a short runic text and a more elaborate geometric figure, and then worn on a string.

Calendars: The Primstav

A separate use of the runic tradition is the primstav (a Norwegian “first-staff”), a notched wooden staff used to reckon the Christian calendar year and the seasonal round. The primstav is a Norse parallel to the medieval “clog almanac” of the British Isles. The year (from Christmas to Christmas) is divided into 52 weeks, and the 13 movable feasts of the church year (Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and the like) are noted as special cuts in the wood, with the 12 days of Christmas, the 40 days of Lent, the 50 days of Eastertide, and so on, marked by additional symbols. The first day of each month is marked by a single cut. Saints’ days are noted by crosses.

The primstav also records the older, pre-Christian festivals: the distingsblot (a February fair at Uppsala), the sigrblot (a spring sacrifice for victory in war), the midvinterblot (a winter sacrifice in January), and the various harvest festivals. The most elaborate primstav tradition is from the Norwegian and Swedish mountain valleys, where the staff was a personal, inherited implement. Some Norwegian primstaves have been preserved from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The basic form is older, however: the Rök and Karlevi stones both record events by referring to seasonal markers (vetrnætr = “winter nights,” sumar = “summer,” haust = “autumn”), and the runestones record dates by the same kind of “year-counting” by winter rather than by the Latin calendar.

Runes in Modern Divination and Meditation

The use of runes as a divination system is, in its modern form, largely a development of the twentieth century, drawing on older sources but reorganized to fit the modern tarot-and-I-Ching model. The principal figures in the modern revival are the German occultist Rudolf John Gorsleben (author of Die Runen and founder, with Lanz von Liebenfels, of the Runen-Gilde in 1908), the Austrian Karl Hans Welz, the American Ralph Blum (whose Book of Runes of 1982 was a major commercial success), and the British Stephen Flowers (formerly the prolific occultist “Edred Thorsson”), whose Runes and Magic (1997), Northern Magic and Rune-Talismans (1998), and At the Well of Wyrd (1988) have become standard references for modern practitioners.

The modern divination system typically uses 24 Elder Futhark rune-tiles drawn at random from a bag (or a comparable method). Each tile is then read for its individual meaning, in light of the position in which it is drawn and the runes that surround it. The position is often described as “drawn upright” (positive aspect) or “drawn reversed” (negative aspect), although the older runic evidence does not support a strict upright/reversed division. The interpretation depends on the cumulative meaning of the runes, the question asked, the time of year, and the state of the diviner.

The academic view of modern runic divination is mixed. On the one hand, modern practitioners have developed a rich and consistent interpretive system, and the use of runes as a focus of meditation or ritual is a perfectly legitimate form of religious and contemplative practice. On the other hand, there is no evidence that the original runic tradition included divination in the modern sense, and many of the techniques used today are reconstructions based on later medieval sources and on the personal intuition of twentieth-century occultists. The use of runes for divination, therefore, is best understood as a modern practice drawing on a deep, ancient tradition, not as a survival of the original Viking Age technique.

The Prose Edda and After

The single most important literary source for the meaning of the runes in the medieval North is the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (c. 1179-1241), composed around 1220 in Iceland. Snorri devoted a substantial section of the work, the Skáldskaparmál, to a discussion of the meanings of the runes and the kennings derived from them. He also provided a list of “how it should be called” for the various runes (Hvernig kalla skal), which is one of the principal sources for the Old Norse rune-names.

The Prose Edda also contains the famous Hávamál in full, including the Rúnatal, and Snorri’s framework for the mythology of the runes is the model used by most later Icelandic and Scandinavian writers. By the seventeenth century, however, the galdrastafir tradition had moved far beyond Snorri’s account, and a number of grimoires — the Galdrabók (Iceland, c. 1600), the Íslensk galdrabók, the Galdra-skræða, the Lækningakver — collected a much wider range of magical figures, many of them combined with Christian and post-Christian elements (the names of saints, of Jesus, of the Virgin Mary) and with the older pagan material. The study of this body of late medieval magical material is a key sub-discipline of runic studies, and it is the source of most of the “magical staves” reproduced in popular culture today.

A particular feature of the late medieval grimoires is the use of letter substitutions in which the rune of one letter is replaced by another for a magical purpose. The most famous example is the laun-stafur (“secret-letter”) tradition, in which a runic sign (sometimes a “blank rune” or a “cipher rune” with no particular sound-value) is used to encode a hidden meaning within an otherwise normal-looking inscription. The use of laun-stafir is described in several sagas, most notably the Gísla saga Súrssonar, in which Gísli carves a runic curse on a tree that eventually leads to the death of his sworn brother.

Continuity and Revival

The interest in runes and Norse symbols that has characterized European culture since the eighteenth century is documented in a series of works that bridge the gap between the medieval and modern traditions. The first is the great Hervarar saga (preserved in manuscripts of the seventeenth century but based on older material), which contains a long passage on the magical uses of runes and is one of the principal sources for the medieval galdr tradition. The second is the Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555) of Olaus Magnus, a Swedish Catholic exile, which contains a long discussion of Norse runic practice and which was widely read across Europe. The third is the Runen-Gilde of the early twentieth century, founded in Vienna, which was the first modern occultist organization dedicated to runic study. The fourth is the modern Asatru and Heathen movement, which has adopted runes and runic symbolism as central religious images.

Each of these phases has built on the earlier tradition, and each has introduced new elements. The result is a complex, layered history in which a Viking Age runestone, a medieval Icelandic grimoire, a nineteenth-century folk-amulet, and a modern Heathen wedding vow are all part of a single, continuous but constantly evolving cultural tradition. The study of that tradition — what the runes meant, what they were for, what they are used for now — is the subject of runology in its broadest sense.